Behind the scenes with cool comic in courthouse

Throughout his trial, Bill Cosby was confident that he would get a hung jury.

After all, the prosecution needed to convince all 12 jurors, but his side only needs to sway a single holdout, Cosby would wryly note.

“All I need is one,” the comedian reminded those around him during breaks in the proceedings — two weeks of testimony and deliberations in one of the most high-profile sex-assault cases in years. And as deliberations dragged on, stretching eventually into their 50th hour, those odds became a mantra. “I only need one, man,” he’d say. At the start of each break, court deputies and Cosby’s defense team would escort the 79-yearold comic away from the courtroom and the milling press, through the halls of Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas in Norristown, Pa.

The deputies would take him to a small, third-floor conference room.

“My dressing room,” Cosby called it. The courtroom itself ? “My stage,” he’d quip to those inside, including a freelance reporter working for The Post.

Then, as two deputies stood guard outside, Cosby would spend the break predicting if not an outright acquittal, at least a mistrial.

“Steele wants me badly; he ran on getting me,” Cosby said at one point of the prosecutor, Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele. “But he doesn’t have a case.” That’s why, Cosby said, he turned down the DA’s offer of a no-jail deal that would have required him to wear a monitoring bracelet and register as a sex offender.

A prosecution spokesman denied there was ever any offer, but Cosby insists there was.

“They offered me a deal,” Cosby said during one break. “They want me to wear this bracelet around my ankle,” he said. “They want me to say I’m a sex offender.” Why did he decline? “I’m innocent,” he said. “But most important, me and [wife] Camille went to South Africa to visit Nelson Mandela,” Cosby said, referring to the antiapartheid revolutionary who spent 27 years in prison, became South Africa’s president and passed away in 2013.

“Mandela was free, but we met him at Robben Island where he was held prisoner all of those years,” Cosby said.

“I sat in that cell where he lived all those years. I saw those conditions. I heard what he ate and what he had to deal with.

“So, if they send me to that place, then that’s what they will do and I will have to go there.”

Sometimes, in his “dressing room,” Cosby would appear to meditate, throwing back his head and closing his eyes.

Often, he would speak about his family.

“When you have grandchildren, man, I’m telling you, you lose your wife,” he joked. “You lose her, man,” he said, nearly ready to launch into a stand-up bit as if he was back in front of an adoring crowd on the Sunset Strip.

“Listen, one of my grandchildren, you know, my wife has become her tutor. My wife can’t stay away from the grandchild. One of the things Camille does is she tutors the girl and then, after she’s learned, Camille has her teach her [back],” he continued.

He was quick to shift gears, try out new material.

“The kids, my kids, they don’t realize that I grew up in the ghetto,” said the Philadelphiaborn Cosby.

“They think I’ve always lived in a big house. So, one day, I’m driving and I take them where I grew up . . . and they don’t believe me.”

Camille was a rare presence at the courthouse but was often on the phone with her husband.

“They joke all of the time. She calls him Billy,” Cosby’s spokesman Andrew Wyatt said at one point, to which Cosby answered, “She can call me whatever she wants. She’s the B-O-S-S.”

Not once did he grip about the lack of support from fellow boldfaced names.

“They are concerned about their careers,” he said.

“I’m not asking, I’m not begging for anyone to come. I’m not begging for anyone to call.”

Wyatt maintained the “dressing room”-style atmosphere by announcing visitors.

“Mr. Cosby, we have . . . ,” Wyatt would say, and Cosby would greet them.

At his most optimistic — and he was often very optimistic — Cosby would talk of performing again.

And why not? “The Cosby Show” had been the most successful TV program of the 1980s. In 2003 — a decade before dozens of women began to come forward to accuse him of drugging and abusing then — Advertising Age wrote that only the pope had a higher public-approval index.

He wants to be that guy again, making an audience laugh, instead of cringe.

“I can’t wait to get back out there, because I have a lot to say. There’s still so much to be said,” he’d say.

“It’s in the bones,” he’d continue. “In the blood.”

As deliberations continued to drag, he’d muse again on what turned out to be a great hunch.

“Only need one,” he’d say. “And if it’s just one, I hope that one holds on.”