Television: Make Room For Mac Daddy

Bernie Mac dared America to give him a sitcom. Now he's spicing up the life-with-father format

On the list of celebrities most folks would look to for child-rearing advice, Bernie Mac would seem to come a few places above Joan Crawford but quite a few pages below Bill Cosby. During a stand-up routine in the movie The Original Kings of Comedy, the 44-year-old comedian laid out his idea of discipline: whack a kid with a hammer. "You grown enough to talk back," he ranted. "You grown enough to get f___ed up."

The self-described "aggressive" comic--a dynamic ball of anger whose act is loaded with four-and 12-letter epithets--also used to joke that the networks would be scared to...

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