Bernie Mac has died way too early. He had Sarcoidosis, an autoimmune disorder that can scar the lungs. The coroner’s office noted his death was ‘natural,’ which seems like such a wrong word for death in one so young. He’d been hospitalized for pneumonia on August 1, 2008.
Mr. Mac grew up on the South Side of Chicago. From having lived there in the 60’s, I can tell you South Side had three layers:
–the brick two-story homes of the Utilities, Road and Water operations workers that Boss Daley had given jobs to for life (in return, in part, for the workers being block and neighborhood captains and such other);
–What were sometimes called the Projects, tall buildings of cubicles that ought to have been called ‘the wastelands,’ where lived children and many mothers and sometimes fathers, who were trying to raise their kids up, but could not afford housing without state and fed’s supplementations;
–and poor people who were the shoe repairmen, pressers of trousers, low level factory workers who ran through long spates of lay-off after lay-off, waitresses, short order cooks, maids, housecleaners, laundry takers-inners, and people who had no jobs… they lived in tiny one-story houses or duplexes with the back porch often boarded over to make a second bedroom.
The last is the layer Bernie Mac came from. He was raised by his mother, Mary, who died when he was sixteen. Bernie Mac was an orphan who made his way in the world.
And his comedy reflected the envy and longing and love of the layers of Black people on his home turf… he loved nothing more than to make fun of arrogance and haughtiness, and had a sharp eye for the facial expressions and gestures of humans ‘acting up,’ being angry, steamrollering, trying to be terminally cool, messed up, happy, telling lies, trying to fake it, broken. He mimed those gestures perfectly. He was a ‘body’ comedian therefore, not only a spoken word comedian.
Bernie Mac was born in Chi town and one of his last gigs was there too. Bernie Mac was invited to introduce Senator Obama at a Chicago Fundraiser last month in July. Mac jokingly said he didn’t understand why Obama wanted to run for President, and just to add some humor to our nation, you know, to counter ‘the dirty politics,’ Obama must deal with, Bernie also offered himself as Obama’s running mate.
“Being a president is tough ’cause you’re not just running the country. You got to run your family too,” Mac said. “Having a black First Lady is different. You are (as the man) still going to have to do the dishes and the laundry and all that … ‘You got to pick up the kids. You didn’t pick up the kids!!!?’ *&#^ ”
Toward the end of his 10-minute standup routine, Mac joked about menopause, sexual infidelity and promiscuity, and used occasional crude language.
An outraged attendee at the fund raiser heckled Mac and told him to step down off the stage because of what the attendee considered Mac’s crude jokes
In what must have been a kind of whiplash for Bernie Mac, when Obama came onstage, he thanked “my great friend, one of the kings of comedy, Bernie Mac.”… but later, in a note passed to reporters, Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki, said Obama told Mac that he does not condone Mac’s statements and believes what was said was inappropriate.
As the Chi-Trib puts the final fillip on coverage of the fundraiser-Mac dust-up: “Later, Obama attended a second fundraiser.”
Bernie Mac, began climbing on the porch stoop and practicing standup as a child. To many of us, that says it all. Regardless of whose opinion where and when since then, Bernard Jeffrey McCullough was sent with a great gift, what we call ‘the shine’… the ability to move the hearts, minds and souls of others. There’s this thing about giftedness… though it may bring pain to engage with great thunder and wind of such gifts, it hurts more not to bring them through. Bernie delivered.
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CODA
He was in the Spike Lee film “Get on the Bus,” and played in the film “Oceans Eleven.”
Bernie Mac was one of “The Original Kings of Comedy,” a documentary that was widely shown and had the unusual (for that time) effect of allowing persons of many races to see the talents of comedians who normally would be out of the line of sight, that is, only in small clubs across the world.
“The Bernie Mac Show,” was a series about a man raising his sister’s three children. It aired 100 episodes between 2001 -2006.It won a Peabody Award. The Chicago Trib reports: “At the time, judges wrote they chose the sitcom for transcending “race and class while lifting viewers with laughter, compassion — and cool.”
“But television handcuffs you, man,” Mac said in a 2001 Associated Press interview. “Now everyone telling me what I CAN’T do, what I CAN say, what I SHOULD do, and asking, `Are blacks gonna be mad at you? Are whites gonna accept you?'”
In 2007, Mac told David Letterman on CBS’ “Late Show” that he planned to retire soon. “I’m going to still do my producing, my films, but I want to enjoy my life a little bit,” Mac told Letterman. “I missed a lot of things, you know.
Bernie Mac leaves a wife, a daughter, a grandchild.
Let there be a part of heaven
where cussing is just considered ornamentation
and all souls are judged by their great hearts.
dr.e