Parenting & Family Quote by Bill Cosby

A clean one-liner with a dirty aftertaste, Cosby’s joke works by staging a collision between civic virtue and private taboo. “Sex education” arrives wearing the respectable suit of public policy: sensible, preventive, modern. Then he swivels to “homework” and lets the euphemism do the heavy lifting. In school, homework is harmless repetition; in the sexual register, it becomes practice. The laugh comes from that sudden reframing, from hearing an adult institution’s bureaucratic language expose what everyone is pretending not to picture.

The intent is less to argue against sex ed than to needle the audience’s discomfort with admitting what sex education is actually about: bodies, desire, behavior. By granting that sex ed “may be a good idea,” he performs reasonableness, then undercuts it with a parental anxiety that’s half-protective, half-prurient. The subtext is a familiar American compromise: we’ll endorse information in principle, so long as it doesn’t look like encouragement in practice. Kids can learn the facts, but don’t let the learning travel home.

Context matters. For decades, sex ed has been a proxy war over morality, teen pregnancy, and who gets to set the rules: parents, schools, churches, the state. Cosby’s line rides that tension, offering audiences a release valve: you can support “education” while still winking at the fear that talking about sex invites it. The joke lands because it names the hypocrisy without sermonizing, packaging cultural panic as a tidy punchline.