Make Room For Mac Daddy

By James Poniewozik Sunday, Oct. 28, 2001
    • 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 give him a sitcom like his more cuddly Kings co-star Steve Harvey. Well, that joke's over. With The Bernie Mac Show (Fox, Wednesdays starting Nov. 14, 9p.m. E.T.), Mac is about to become America's most provocative and (trust us) strangely likeable TV "dad."

    Mac plays a successful, childless comedian in Los Angeles (named Bernie Mac, natch) who takes in his sister's three kids because she's on drugs and about to lose them to the state. Bewildered but determined to do the right thing, he turns out to be a soft touch, if gruff. Driving the kids home from the airport, he breaks the ice by asking, "Anybody want a big-ass doughnut?" Later, he walks them through his spacious house, ticking off items they're not allowed to touch. "Don't get me wrong," he says. "This is our home. But this is my house."

    According to Mac (born Bernard McCullough), the story is loosely based on an incident in his own life. But Mac stresses that the TV Bernie Mac, like the onstage Bernie Mac, is a character. "I'm more reserved," he says. "He's the cat who everybody's got in their family, who they're always trying to shut up. Bernie Mac ain't trying to be politically correct."

    In real life, Mac is a family man who brags about his grown daughter's graduate studies in psychology and her upcoming wedding, unironically uses "doggone" as an expletive and still lives in his hometown, Chicago. But after decades in stand-up (he did monologues at church banquets as a kid), he found success when raunchy comic turned sitcom star Redd Foxx encouraged him to make his act more dangerous. "He said, 'Young man, you're funny,'" Mac recalls. "'But your problem is, you don't want to be funny. You want to be liked.'"

    Like Chris Rock's, Mac's R-rated stage act is laced with a conservatism--he wants parents to be parents and kids to be kids--that actually makes him a perfect choice for a family sitcom. And the series' creator, Larry Wilmore (The PJs), has retained Mac's stand-up voice, but fleshed it out with strong supporting characters, especially the kids, who convey their rough history without falling into ghetto stereotypes. In the pilot, Bernie's nephew Jordan (Jeremy Suarez) shows the stress of the move by repeatedly wetting himself. The story line could have just been a set-up for easy potty jokes; instead, it underscores the real emotional stakes for the uprooted kids. It also brings out a fatherly side in Bernie that Mac--who has more range than many a comic who has taken on sitcom parenthood--makes believable without getting sappy.

    The show also works because, in context, Bernie's outlandish threats--"I'm'a bust your head till the white meat shows"--are as innocuous as Jackie Gleason (another influence of Mac's) yelling, "To the moon, Alice!" Still, Mac acknowledges he will probably take heat for them. He even offers viewers a defense: "When I say I want to kill those kids, you know what I mean...Bernie Mac just say what you want to say but can't." If his show stays this funny and true, we're glad to let him.