… fast food restaurant manager. He briefly spent his days telling jokes and doing impressions on the El trains, but despite a daily take that he estimates at $400, he gave it up “because I felt like a bum.”
At the end of a long day’s work, he would go to a comedy club, write his name on the board and wait for his turn to come. For years, it either wouldn’t come at all or wouldn’t come until there were two people left in the building – “Me and the janitor.”
No matter how many people were left in the audience, Mac would get on stage and do his routine. The hard work literally paid off in 1990, when he won $3,000 in a local comedy contest. At the time, he was working as a sales rep for Wonder Bread, but the more popular he became on the club circuit, the less he wanted to push bread to pay the bills.
On the day before Thanksgiving, his thoughts were consumed by the three standing ovations he’d received the night before. He dumped his entire load of bread at only five stores – “They had bread in the frozen food department, that’s how much bread I gave them all” – called his boss and quit.
“I’ve created Bernie Mac,” he says, “the guy who’ll go out and say any g- damn thing. So when the people wrote (about the Original Kings movie), ‘Bernie Mac was hard, Bernie Mac was blue, Bernie Mac was raunchy,’ I didn’t get angry, I didn’t get upset. Because I knew it was another side of Bernie that you all just had no idea of knowing.
“When I put the mic away, I’m done with that guy. That guy that you’re talking to now is not the guy on stage. It takes me 15 minutes to get into that guy. It takes me 30 minutes to let go, because he’s so agressive, he’s so non-stop. Bernie Mac is relentless. That’s one thing I like about him. He’s not PC. He doesn’t care what you think. He’s going out there to please that audience.”
As ones closest to him say, “We know he’s in heaven now making even the angels laugh.”
For more on the Bernie Mac Foundation for Sarcoidosis, visit here.
Bernie Mac: The King Of Smiles was originally published on blackdoctor.org
