I grew up on Cosby's comedy. I had the audio cassette of "Very Funny Fellow" and watched his special "Himself" hundreds of times. As a parent, many of the lines from that special stick with me after all these years. I even read his book "Childhood" as a kid, and found it endearing and entertaining as a window into life as a black man in those days. Fascinating stuff, really.

As a consumer of so much of his work, I do my best to take his shadow side for what it was. When we look back on success in pop culture, we see may dark things crawling out of the shadows as we learn more and more about mental health and the price of success.

Can we isolate the artist from the art?