As Graduation Speaker at Carnegie Mellon, Bill Cosby Makes Fun of Nerds

When you think of nerds, you most likely don't think of Bill Cosby. The legendary comedian has spent years making fun of anyone and everyone and Sunday was no different as Bill Cosby gave the keynote address at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Mr. Cosby began his speech in merciless teasing of the school's geeky population, saying that nerds can't even "stand in a room and look human."

As a Carnegie Mellon graduate, I know all too well what Bill's talking about. Not that I'm a nerd (of course not - those spreadsheets that I made up for my home purchase and wedding were just "tools" - that's all). But I knew nerds during my time at Carnegie Mellon. People who competed over who could spend the most time in the campus computer cluster, spending countless Saturday nights playing who-knows-what computer game or writing code just for the fun of it. People who walked in circles around a tree, over and over again (ok, that's probably not nerdy, just weird). Yes, I knew people who not only watched Star Trek, but lived for it.

Carnegie Mellon students are not just nerds, they are also on the cutting edge of all things nerdy. Email was just getting big when I went to Carnegie Mellon in the early 1990's. However, in 1993, one of my classmates had an "email beeper" so that he could be buzzed whenever a new message came in. This guy wasn't anyone special - he was just ahead of his time, like so many of my classmates were.

With that said, Mr. Cosby's speech to Carnegie Mellon's "nerds" was right on the mark. Students were treated to a "free" fifteen-minute show that ranged in a variety of topics (I say "free" because annual tuition for Carnegie Mellon is now above $33,000, so the show wasn't free by any means). Mr. Cosby told the geeks to be proud of being a nerd since it means that they "continued past where non-nerds stopped. That's not nerdy. I think it's very, very brave -- considering how many friends you lost. But, look at how many friends you gained."