I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (34 page)

If you’re not sure if you’re being bullied, refer to this chart:

Bullies,
real
bullies, do serve a purpose. They teach you what’s socially acceptable, that there are certain things that you can and can’t do in society lest you suffer unwanted consequences. And if you
did
those certain things again, then you had to fight to defend
your position. That’s life! People may not like it, but sometimes you have to stand up for yourself against someone bigger than you. Having had to fight for my food as a kid means I’m prepared to fight for my values as an adult.

It’s the bullies who prepare you for dealing with adversity. If you’ve never been emotionally or verbally abused, how will you be prepared for marriage? How are you going to be ready for a relationship,
any
type of relationship? I’m talking about life, I’m talking about a job, I’m talking about traveling and interacting with people. It’s not always going to be smiling and nodding. There’s a lot of stuff I wish wouldn’t happen—but it
does
. Everybody ain’t always going to like you—but nobody can take your lunch away unless you let them.

It’s not just the bullies that are being taken away. It’s anything that’s an affront to our kids’ self-esteem. Kids
shouldn’t
have self-esteem in the same way that grown-ups do! If they were smart, they wouldn’t need school. If they were tough, they wouldn’t need their parents protecting them. If they knew shit, they could get a job. But of course kids are
none
of these things. Even the sting of a dodgeball is something that children these days don’t have to handle. But if you tell a kid he can’t handle getting hit by a ball, then guess what? He won’t be able to handle getting hit by a ball!

Little boys are being charged with sexual harassment for kissing little girls on the cheek. I’m not so old that I don’t remember that kids at an early age are the
same size
. In fact, the girls hit puberty
first
and they get taller
first
. Is that little girl going to be cry “sexual harassment” every time she is denigrated at work? That may be
legal
, but it sure as shit won’t be the way for her to break the glass ceiling.

Our kids’ food has all sorts of warning labels on it. It feels like
any day now, someone will come out and ask for the surgeon general to slap a sticker on a can of Dr. Pepper. We have allergies to gluten and shellfish and dairy and God knows what else. Meanwhile, the children of the rest of the world are allergic to
hunger
.

How is this focus on protecting our children’s delicate sensibilities going to play out in the future? “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is now a thing of the past. The boys and girls of today, gay and straight, are going to become the men and women of tomorrow, gay and straight. What happens if we’re at war, a war on our shores like in a Pearl Harbor situation?
Everyone
is going to be fighting then. How are kids who fear a
rubber ball
being flung at them going to handle
bullets
intended to kill them? Will kisses lead to our surrender, or gluten grenades? It sounds absurd, but that’s only because we’re
preaching
absurdity.

If only Uncle Sam could see us now. We’d tell him that rolling up his sleeves is a sign of aggression. We’d ask him not to point, because that singles people out and makes them nervous. We wouldn’t care what
he
wants, because what our kids
like
to hear has become more important than what they
need
to hear. I bet Uncle Sam would look at how fat, soft, and ignorant we’ve become—and how loud, obnoxious, and delusional. Then he’d shake his head, bitch-slap us with his striped hat, and tell us, “
I want you to shut the fuck up
.”

N
O
matter where I go and no matter what I do, someone will always come along and ask me about Bernie Mac. There are people who don’t care for Steve’s books or who think Cedric ain’t that entertaining. As for me, I obviously have my share of haters. But I’ve never met anybody who didn’t like Bernie Mac. He managed to be loved and in your face at the same time. I’ve never seen anybody else who could do that.

The first time I ever played with Bernie was a daytime gig at the Music Hall in Detroit. Comedy was so hot then that we could do a show at 2:00 p.m., 4:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m., and 9:00 p.m. Even on a Sunday, we could do that many shows and fill two thousand seats at each set. It was
crazy
. We were just kids and neither of us knew
anything, and we both thought this was the most spectacular thing that had ever happened.

Soon after we met, we went on a Schlitz malt liquor tour where we hit different cities on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. It was me, Bernie, and whatever new comic was in the city we happened to be in that night. One thing about Bernie was that he wore these colors that no one else would ever wear or ever think of wearing. He was a really dark dude, and he was so
proud
to be wearing gators with a lime-green or pink suit. Me and my team would always be waiting around to see him get off the elevator, just to see what he was going to have on. I didn’t get how he even had the vocabulary to describe some of those colors to the tailors. Who was even making these fabrics? It was chartreuse and fuchsia and vermillion, the kind of words they use to trip up spelling-bee contestants.

Every night after our show, we stopped at the roughest liquor store so Bernie could get pork skins, a little thing of hot sauce, and MGD.
Every fucking night
. And every fucking night, we would talk and talk and talk. Bernie always had a mantra about how he would walk alone, and it started to shape the way I would later look at things comedically.

At the time, I don’t think that I really knew how to express myself as an individual. I just knew how to be
funny
. Bernie taught me about being a man and speaking the truth as I saw it. He really started to guide me as a performer. After a couple of tours, Bernie decided that he was going to go out on his own. It wasn’t that he didn’t love me and I didn’t love him; it was that he wanted to do his own thing. We went our separate ways, but we stayed close. Then in March of 1990, I was performing at the Apollo. I was waiting backstage for Sinbad to introduce me. “Whatever you do,” Sinbad said, “don’t tell them you’re from L.A.”

“Fuck that,” I replied. “You tell them that I’m from L.A.”

As night follows day, he told the crowd that I was from L.A.—and they practically booed me off the stage. I remember that night so well because it happened to be the night that Robin Harris died. “Well,” somebody said to me, “now Bernie’s going to get his shot.” At the time, I had no idea what that meant. But they must have been referring to the fact that Robin and Bernie had so many similarities. It was kind of a natural evolution between the two, and I think Bernie took things somewhere that even Robin wouldn’t have been able to. I’m not talking from a talent perspective, but just from a personality perspective.

I don’t remember who had said that to me, but that person was wrong. Bernie didn’t really get a shot after Robin died. It took ten years after Robin passed for
The Kings of Comedy
film to come along. Bernie and I got even closer in the interim, and now Steve and Cedric were in the mix as well.

When I joined the Kings of Comedy tour in 1997, they had already done one leg with just the other three guys. The idea of a movie was not something on our minds at all. Besides, I had gotten my TV series and was doing pretty well for myself. The guy who started the whole tour, Walter Latham, had a very effective and very old-school marketing strategy for us. He went to black radio stations, black newspapers, beauty shops, barber shops, and black message boards. It was a very similar approach to the way Tyler Perry made his name soon after. Walter invited a very specific group, and the people whom he invited came—and they came in droves. It immediately became really big, and we started playing arenas without having to do any mainstream press at all.

After a while, it was just on fire. When we were playing Chicago’s United Center, we came close to selling it out in just a couple of days. Then they put up a second show, and by the time it was all said and done we ended up playing the United Center four times. We played Houston four times; we played D.C. multiple times.

The crowds that came were virtually all black, and they were all very
proud
. They’d get dressed in their best and they’d spend their money gladly. It was really one of the few and first times when black art was being created for a black audience. It wasn’t like the Harlem Renaissance, a brief period when the white intelligentsia realized these colored people had something to say (which is why Langston Hughes wryly referred to the period as “when Harlem was in vogue”). It wasn’t like Motown, which crossed color barriers and brought the youth of our nation together through music. Us four comics knew something was happening. We didn’t really discuss it in depth; it was so above and beyond that we really didn’t need to.

We didn’t set out to say, “We’re going to make this so that only we get it.” But that kind of happened as a consequence of our backgrounds. Steve and Cedric were on the WB, and I was on ABC. On our series, we had to tell jokes that we were sure that
everybody
got. We had to
speak
a certain way on network television. When Bernie and I had been on a tour previously, we drew a lot of white people—and a lot of those white people said they couldn’t understand him or that I talked too fast. Crowds had complained that Steve shouted, or that Ced played music they didn’t get.

Now we had
none
of those concerns. We could write for people that looked like us, purely from one side of the room. It was a narrow, small perspective that was
universal
to those eighteen thousand people in the crowd. It was
liberating
. We were the writers,
directors, producers, and editors of our own individual segments. Obviously many people mainly came to see Bernie or whoever their favorite of us was. But the show flowed and everybody had a great time. In the end the four of us would come out and take a bow, and they would just
erupt
.

I remember talking to Bernie at one point, and I said this must have been what the Negro leagues were like. The few white people who came did so in groups, but it was never an ominous environment for them. They were welcomed just like everybody else. It was a time for laughter, not for animus. I’m not an overly spiritual cat, no doubt about it, but on that tour there was a spirit that seemed light and whimsical. Things seemed
human
and
approachable
. I just wanted to hold that spirit forever—at the same time knowing full well that it would never happen.

We made our way across the U.S., getting off of planes like we were rock stars. Wherever we played, everybody had their own nice dressing room. We had a caterer there with a white chef’s coat on, asking us when we wanted to eat. Whatever we wanted, we got. We’d have steak, shrimp, and lobster. We had the best food, wine, liquor, and great cigars. Tailors would come to the shows and we all got tailor-made suits. We always stayed at the Ritz-Carlton hotels. After a while, the Ritz-Carlton people would know what I wanted. I didn’t have to say anything. No matter what city I found myself in, I had warm peanut butter cookies, milk, and a drawn bath waiting for me. The whole experience was just fucking amazing. I couldn’t believe it.