How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(31)
Bernie Mac also wanted to explore familial desperation and loss of innocence, not in the hope of reinforcing safety or taking anyone away from the edge, but in order to bring himself to the edge with us. Mac’s fifteen-minute performance in The Original Kings of Comedy takes us from his inability to take care of his crack-addicted sister’s children, to a nephew who makes fun of his mentally challenged bus driver, to the varied black uses of the word “motherfucker.” Though Mac’s performance, like Harris’s BeBe skit, relies on a slanted critique of single mothering, the performance is technically still the best comedic stage performance I’ve seen in my lifetime.
Though few will admit it, black comedy and black comedians laid the groundwork for what would become the contemporary hip-hop emcee. Successful emcees are able to boast, confess, and critique just as efficiently as our most accomplished black comedians. The mic is their heartbeat and, like Rakim, many successful comedians are known for literally slamming the mic down when the show is over “to make sure it’s broke.”
Bernie Mac broke many mics and solidified himself as our very last “we” comedian. And as quiet as it’s kept, we’ve only had three successful “we” comedians in the last thirty years: Richard Pryor, Robin Harris, and Bernie Mac. All three of these comedians seemed joyful in being there with us (which is different than being there in front of us), and though each had his own kind of cool, if at any point a heckler had interrupted his show with “Damn, Bernie (or Richard or Robin), that’s some sad-ass shit you talking about,” all three would have replied, “You gotdamn right,” with a pointed frown on his face, “cuz I’m a sad motherfucker, you black summamabitch…” And everyone in the joint, including the heckler, would have known that Bernie was saying, “I love you, too.”
In 2001, Mac was the only King of Comedy without a television show. By 2002, Mac had parlayed that great fifteen minutes into his own show on Fox. “Had I gone to another major network,” he said, “I would have had to battle with them every day to get my point of view across. And I didn’t feel like battling about my culture.”
His culture. Our home.
Mac was reluctant to go the route of TV because he saw how it managed to water down and make caricatures of comedians like Don Rickles and Richard Pryor. Uncompromising, blue-black, bug-eyed uncles with deep Chicago twangs and a deeper love for black folks don’t get networks shows, much less single-camera network shows with no laugh tracks. Bernie Mac’s show was as meta as it was soulful and resilient.
Anticipating the question of how black comedians keep the edge and contour of their stand-up on network television, Bernie Mac starred as “Bernie Mac” on The Bernie Mac Show. And he had to. Can you imagine Mac trying to cram all of the jagged wonder he embodied on stage into some cardboard comic caricature?
Bernie Mac’s TV show explored family values without prescribing family values. Like George Burns and Dobie Gillis before him, Mac’s use of the confessional address to the audience within the show brought America into his house without any unexplained synthesizing of his voice. And when that voice was synthesized, “America” and Mac knew it, and we were left to critique America’s consumption and/or misunderstanding of the synthetic Bernie Mac, just as we were able to critique Mac’s troubled character. The show forced us to look at race, think about class, and feel gender through the lens of postmodernity, new black celebrity, new black money, new black parenting, and old-school black communal values. The show gave us a rare model of how these intersections can be navigated while producing meaningful, cutting-edge provocative art.
Around the third season of the show, we could tell something wasn’t right with Bernie. His eyes didn’t look right. His hair looked like it was just haphazardly placed on the top of his head. And though he still had killer comic timing, the reverberation was much less frantic and exciting. Mac still felt like our uncle, but our uncle had gotten sick. And on August 9, 2008, Uncle Bernie Mac died from complications of pneumonia.
Before he died, Bernie Mac modeled honesty. And really, that should be one of the goals of any artist. Mac stood there with us on the edge of the world suffering from physical, emotional, familial, and psychic afflictions. He showed us that we suffered together, and though we didn’t have the will or the platform to say it that he had, he heard us and replied, “I love you, too.”
Bernie Mac was the blackest, baddest, most loving genius uncle summamabitch to walk across this country’s stage. And no matter how big he got, he always looked happy to be here with us. We loved you, Bernie Mac, for all of this and a whole lot more. You reminded us that we were never alone, and that we owed each other honest, joyful explorations of our past and present pain.
Bernie Mac once said, “A lot of my material, it comes from my pain, the loss of my parents, my family. I try to find humor in the most inopportune times. That’s what keeps us alive, keeps us decent people, keeps us connected no matter what. That’s comedy, man. That’s comedy.”
Thank you for your character, Bernard McCullough. Thank you for your pain.
III.
Prior to September 13, 1996, neither I nor anyone I knew in Jackson, Mississippi, looked up to Tupac Amaru Shakur. We heard Tupac’s debut verse on Digital Underground’s “Same Song” at Lerthon’s house and thought he rhymed like a kid who wanted to be down. We eventually watched Tupac in Juice on Stacey’s VCR and thought he was a watered-down O-Dog from Menace. We listened to Tupac’s stacked vocals and were convinced he lacked the vocal gravity and lyrical imagination of Chuck D and KRS-One, or the mesmerizing psychological affliction of Scarface and Ice Cube.