Bernie Mac
what his brand of comedy meant to our collective psyche
2008-08-11
By Ronda Racha Penrice

Bernie Mac wasn’t what Hollywood had in mind and he knew it. Instead of accepting their limited view of him, he called them out on it. He dared them to take him as he was and the result was “The Bernie Mac Show.”

Conceptually, the show was atypical of sitcoms in general and Black sitcoms specifically. Instead of pure comedy, there was also a sobering dose of real life. Ripped from Mac’s standup comedy routine, “The Bernie Mac Show” starred Bernie Mac as himself, a successful comedian, who, along with his wife, takes in his crack-addicted sister’s three kids. Crack may have been a frequent topic in rap songs and television news broadcasts but rarely did its collateral damage make it onto the small screen and into our living rooms. Mac used his fame to shed light on what so many families, many of them far less financially stable than him, had been doing unnoticed outside of the Black community: picking up the pieces of drug-addicted relatives the best way they knew how. Although there was indeed comedy in his approach to parenting and his lifestyle in general, the bigger picture was certainly that he, like so many others, was simply doing the best he could.

And Mac was never one to proclaim that he had all the answers. To underscore the communal nature of his undertaking, his audience was an active part of the show. There was no live audience though. Mac spoke directly into the camera often, drawing his viewing audience into the dilemma at hand, be it teaching his nephew Jordan how to fight or imparting wisdom about honoring those you love while they are living. Rhetorically, he sought the counsel, approval and sometimes forgiveness of his viewing audience. He wasn’t afraid to let us know that he, too, fell short many times but that never stopped him from moving forward and improving.

So unlike many other sitcoms, “The Bernie Mac Show” had a real-life feel. Shooting the show as if it were a 30-minute film instead of a television sitcom greatly helped in achieving that effect. That was intentional. When “The Bernie Mac Show” aired for the first time on FOX on November 13, 2001, these distinctions were quite clear. They weren’t coincidental, by any means. “I didn’t want to come into America’s living room,” he told Charlie Rose on “The Charlie Rose Show” on May 23, 2002. “I wanted America to come into mine . . . .I didn’t want to lose my voice.”

It’s that voice that created his success, a success deeply rooted in the Black community. From entertaining his family to taking to the streets of his native Chicago before connecting on HBO’s groundbreaking “Def Comedy Jam” in 1992, Bernie Mac had a reputation for telling it like ‘it t-i- is.’ As a touring member of the “Kings of Comedy,” which launched in 1997 on its way to grossing a record-breaking $37 million targeting Black audiences, Mac’s popularity greatly expanded. While he would later star in more mainstream films, most notably Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve, in time, “The Bernie Mac Show” may prove to be one of his most enduring legacies.

“I had this show for 44 years,” he told Rose. “This show was really like a part of my life. A lot of my material and stuff, it comes from my past, it comes from my upbringing, it comes from my surroundings, my pain, the loss of my parents, family and stuff like that and I bring that to the stage. I try to find humor in the most mid-opportune times.”

If there is any humor in Bernie Mac, born Bernard Jeffrey McCullough on October 5, 1957, passing at the age of 50, it’s to be found in the legacy of comedy he leaves behind. “You've got to make people respect you,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2007. “Respect is bigger than dollars and cents." Ultimately, it’s the difference between being good enough and being great. And Bernie Mac chose to be great.

Bernie Mac's Legacy Guest Book 

Veteran freelance writer and self-diagnosed television junkie Ronda Racha Penrice is the author of African American History For Dummies, which includes a chapter on Film/TV.