Bill Cosby is one of the most successful comedians of the last 20 years. In an age of vulgar comedy about sex and bowel movements, Cosby is still revered for his universal humor about daily life and family.

Now, Cosby is speaking out against the culture of black communities in the inner city — a popular culture that he sees as being made up of vulgarity, which glorifies sex, drugs and bling bling to overwhelming proportions.

Actually, this message may be as universal as his comedy. Although it is needed most desperately in urban black communities, it is something the entire country should heed.

Cosby’s words against the gangsta culture of the inner city are long overdue. He didn’t hold any punches when he unloaded on the kids who “laugh and giggle and are going nowhere.” The best words to describe it is airing others’ dirty laundry.

While Jesse Jackson and his ilk have placed black failure solely at the lap of whites, Cosby now shifts blame to the black culture, calling it general irresponsibility. Is it any wonder that some didn’t take his message well?

For too long, leaders of the black community have been fixated on what has been done to them and not on what they can do. This has led to a culture that once produced jazz (one of the most significant cultural contributions of America) metamorphizing into the one that produces Nelly. That’s enough to get anyone’s blood boiling.

But Cosby’s anger is deeper because of his frustration at blacks wasting opportunities won at terrible cost by the leaders of the past. It makes more sense for blacks to feel a responsibility to succeed given the price their ancestors paid for their freedoms than for them to take those freedoms for granted.

But are the terrible dropout rates and high rates of incarceration among blacks really due to a failure of black culture in the inner city and not a white culture of suppression?

The New York Times reported in June about how black academics at Harvard made the observation that the majority of black students at the university were immigrants or children of immigrants.

This suggests that many poor blacks that could succeed as some do are losing opportunities to immigrants because of motivation, not racist policies.

The fact that children of immigrants are included disputes the idea that immigrants succeed because they aren’t exposed to white racist culture like their American counterparts are. What is truly amazing is that blacks from the inner city still succeed despite the violence, drugs and bling bling. Just imagine how many would succeed if their culture wasn’t dominated by morons like Nelly.

But everyone knows Nelly, right? There are plenty of suburbanite kids who dig his awesome beats. I mean, to the tic-toc y’all. Indeed, many in the ‘burbs have taken to this culture of vulgarity. Is it any surprise when they fail?

How many small-town white kids in Iowa have been displaced by harder working immigrants from abroad at Iowa State? And suburbanites have their own whine line in teen angst.

Aww … teen angst, the peculiar phenomenon where kids who have it better than 99 percent of everyone bemoan the fact that they don’t have it as good as the other 1 percent. Those kids are just as deserving of a kick in the pants as any.

It is clear that blacks aren’t the only ones wasting opportunities. The effort to save the seemingly dying American culture needs to come from everyone.

A wise hockey player once said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”