Claire Huxtable and Elvin — The Cosby Show
It’s a mother’s job to be hard on her daughter’s boyfriends, but the boyfriends shouldn’t make it so easy for them. In Claire Huxtable’s case, her daughter, Sandra, brought home a real dud. Elvin always seemed to have good intentions, but Claire doesn’t suffer fools very easily, and Elvin is a giant fool. He performed as a constant foil for Claire, and she spent the majority of their time onscreen rolling her eyes and sighing exasperatedly.
You can put your finger on the exact moment when Elvin fell into the Claire doghouse, and it’s featured above. In this moment, when Elvin suggests that Claire “serves” Cliff, he cements his place as forever not being good enough for her daughter. In a feminist moment that still resonates with modern TV watchers, Claire sets Elvin straight about how things work in their house. She also makes it extremely clear that she thinks Elvin is a huge dummy.
As you well know, and as I’ve said before, mother-in-laws are supposed to give their sons-in-law a hard time, and Claire and Elvin’s dynamic seems a lot more typical than the murderous Gemma. Although Elvin tightened his son-in-law game up slightly, he never really recovered from this encounter. It clouded the rest of their relationship, and Elvin couldn’t ever seem to climb out from under it.