Who You with, Bernie Mac?

Who You with, Bernie Mac? by Roxanne McDonald

In so many Bernie Mac Show episodes, Mac comes to the rescue of the kids. This he has been doing all his life.

In one especially endearing show, Bernie Mac has inadvertently taught Jordan to use stand-up humor to get through a nerve-wracking public performance (Jordan freezes during a spelling bee). When Jordan of course misunderstands the lesson and decides to go the comedy route, the kid bombs. Rather than express disappointment (to America, in that grumpy way he has that makes him Bernie Mac, comic genius) and leave it at that, Bernie Mac appears on stage and starts his own routine, picking up with where the first humiliated now relieved Jordan leaves off.

This is exemplary of the man in real life. In 1970s Chicago, after his single parent Mary died of cancer (when Mac was 16), Mac began doing shows for fellow students and kids in the rough and tumble neighborhood.

After these free-for-alls, a stint at the Regal Theatre, and through a series of odd jobs as bread delivery representative, furniture mover, and UPS agent, Mac went professional, starting at the age of 19 and struggling through years of virtual un-recognition (reportedly because he “refused to change his name”?)

But by the early nineties, when he was featured in, co-starred in, or appeared in such films as Mo’ Money (his debut, 1992), Who’s the Man? (1993), House Party 3 (1994) and The Walking Dead (1995), Bernie Mac was gaining status as a serious comic.

In 1995, Bernie Mac made the crossover from serious to seriously funny, doing an HBO special titled “Midnight Mac,” then playing Pastor Clever to Chris Tucker’s Smokey in Friday (1995). As IMDB declares, these latter performances got Mac a cult following, one which has trailed him closely through

comic roles in Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus (1996), Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood (1996), on “Moesha” (1996- ), in How to Be a Player (1997), Life (1999), in The Original Kings of Comedy (2000), What’s the Worst That Could Happen? (2001), and a straighter role in Ocean’s Eleven (2001).
Also in 2001, the one who refused to change his name, his image, or his comedy, brought us “The Bernie Mac Show,” expressing and showing that who he was and who he was with has not changed.

And because in that sit-com that still runs four to six nights a week he is still the comically grousing, comically self-absorbed and persecuted parent…who brings a sensitive moment to each of the comic vignettes, he is still with us in humor as we are still with him in heart.

Bernie Can Mac on Me Anytime

Bernie Can Mac on Me Anytime by Roxanne McDonald

Considering the genres and subgenres of comedy, we can acknowledge what a comedic talent Bernie Mac is.

Maybe you have never thought about it in technical terms; maybe you don’t want to dissect the little creative entertainment you enjoy each week. But after coming round, finally, to the greatness of The Bernie Mac Show and trying to figure out just what it is that is so laugh-out-loud funny, I have decided to investigate further.

For me, effective comedy is that which makes me laugh when no one else is in the room. You know, some comedy works so well because it rides the wave of collective laughter—and we laugh more or harder because other people are laughing, which makes us do the same. But with comics like Bernie Mac, I find myself guffawing, chuckling, and giggling consistently…despite how it is one o’clock in the morning and despite how I have no one else to nudge share laughs with, or feed off of.

In this respect, I often get all thoughtful after a series of laughs while watching Bernie Mac. I wonder what it is exactly that makes his material work so well that I go ballistic if the show isn’t on. (On Friday nights, for instance, it is pre-empted by—bleck—sports.) I try to characterize Bernie Mac’s style, for instance, and figure out which category of humor he fits in:

there’s Black Comedy, though not that which is performed by Black comedians/ comediennes, necessarily. Black comedy is of the sick, dark, mechanistic type that is so rife with irony, so uncomfortably disturbing that you can’t help but respond with quizzical or shocked laughter. Pulp Fiction, for instance, or Reservoir Dogs (one of the most uniquely violent films, I think)—or almost any of Tarantino’s work—is darkly humorous.

In the scene in Pulp Fiction where Travolta’s character is sitting in the front seat and aiming a gun at the captured kid in the back seat is exemplary: Travolta holds the gun in a kind of leaning on the back of the front bench seat fashion. As the driver, Travolta’s partner, Samuel L. Jackson, hits a pothole, the gun goes off and blows the kid’s head off. Everyone in the theatre laughed. Well, I suppose almost everyone.

(Another of my favorite Tarantino moments is in Reservoir Dogs, wherein a bunch of the most malicious, malevolent thugs are lined up in front of the syndicate [or whatever] boss, who is assigning them codenames that are colors—Mr. Blue, Mr. White, Mr. Pink. Steve Buscemi’s character has been assigned the name Mr. Pink, and just before the boss gets ready to go into how they will rip off and destroy, etc. etc.. Buscemi flips out about having to be Pink! Classic.)

Bernie Mac just barely touches on dark comedy: he makes us laugh when he talks about torturing his adopted nephew and nieces, for instance. But Mac isn’t singularly of the dark comedy genre….

In the next subtype, the comedian/comedienne creates a character, or persona, building on and getting laughs through a stereotype, or caricature—whom he/she plays. Roseanne created one of the funniest and most popular characters of all TV time by basing it in large part on her original, early years as a mother in a low-income tax bracket with the problems and number of kids and working class hubby that all are developed so brilliantly for Roseanne.
Bernie Mac is kind of like this type of comic, though he has added other dimensions that I am guessing are not part of any real life stuff (though comedy works at one level on that which is true and which in the material is exaggerated, drawn out). Then again, I have never had the pleasure of seeing older Bernie Mac material, wherein I have imagined him adopting that pissed off parent persona.

Then there’s improv (improvisational) comedy, wherein off-the-cuff, extemporaneous stuff works because it is just that—unplanned, unscripted–and catches you off guard. I am doubtful that too much is improvisational on The Bernie Mac Show, unless the producers, writers, directors, and Bernie let some things get through because they accidentally worked in rehearsal.

Then again, if you are patient, and stay with the show through the rolling of the credits, you will get a treat of Bernie fumbling his lines, being funny as the person and not the character, etc.—a.k.a. doing bloopers not included in the context of the actual episode.

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