I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (35 page)

As much love as we gave those crowds, that’s how much love they gave us back. If anything, it was magnified a thousandfold. Sometimes, when I stood next to the speakers onstage, the noise vibrated inside my head. But when I made a Chicago audience laugh
one night, the pitch was so loud that it went through my skull and hurt my teeth. A few minutes later, it happened again. I was scared to tell my last joke. I thought that if I did it again, they were going to fucking blow my head off. Part of me honestly worried that the crowd would laugh me to death.

I don’t think
any
four kings, whether
actual
royalty or self-proclaimed like us, ever shared such a sense of respect for one another. None of us ever went over on time, and nobody stole anybody’s jokes. The audience was responding to seeing four men who had an affinity not only for the craft, not only for the crowd, but for each other. There was no sense of competition or sizing each other up. No one ever argued about their turn. I defy anyone to take a tour across this country with four black artists for three years and not have one fight break out. It
never
happened, and I think that was just part of the bonus.

The closest we ever came to an altercation was during a leg in Texas. I was sleeping in my hotel room, and I was very high. Suddenly, I heard the door open. “Hey, who’s there?” I yelled out.

“My bad,” the intruder yelled back.

“Partner, you’re in the wrong room.”

“I
said
, ‘My bad,’
partner
!”

“Man,” I said, “you better get the fuck out of my room!”

“Who the fuck you talking to?”

I grabbed my pistol, threw on a robe, walked out of the room. There was Bernie Mac, standing there with
his
pistol drawn. “Nigga!” I yelled, as we both burst out laughing. But that was
it
.

After every show, we four would have to sign merchandise. It would take hours, literally
hours
, because people would buy booklets, pictures, T-shirts, cups, hats, whatever. If they bought it, we had to sign it. We would take pictures with them with big smiles on
our faces. It was crazy, but it was
spectacular
. After the show was done, we would take a private jet and go to the next thing.

At the same time, we were still getting close to
zero
media attention except from black sources. The thing is,
not a single fuck was given
. We were the best comics in the country; what did we care if CBS said so or not? Why would we possibly care what they thought of us? We didn’t need them. I suppose if we wanted to sell movies and we wanted to do television shows, then we’d need that mainstream validation. But for us, those things weren’t even thought about. It wasn’t even something I was really aware of.

During the tour, I stopped in Charlotte to shoot an HBO special called
Going Home
. But unbeknownst to me, a movie was exactly what was on Walter’s mind. Some people from MTV had come out when we were playing Madison Square Garden, and Walter brokered a deal with them to do a film. I was touring with the material that was in my special, but if we were going to do a movie, I’d need an all-new set. It takes a
very
long time to write a lot of material, and I had shot my wad with HBO. This was no joking matter. It was
murder
. I had to write a fresh thirty minutes in a few short months for a movie that
Spike Lee
had now signed on to direct.

The movie, in its own way, did capture a part of that tour’s spirit forever. I think
The Original Kings of Comedy
took on a life of its own after the theatrical release. That’s when people
besides
black people went out and bought the tape or the DVD so they could watch it in the privacy of their own homes. I don’t know how many people have seen it that way. We were like FUBU’s campaign of being “for us, by us.” We were the first and might have been the only time some viewers went out of their way to experience black culture, something made without regard for any other audience whatsoever.

The reason that movie resonates so much, and has spawned so
many knockoffs, is that it’s authentic and it’s organic. It’s kind of like how Jewish people eat Chinese food at Christmastime. That got started because the Chinese restaurants were the only fucking places that were open. Yet after time, it became a tradition born out of a shared experience and out of a shared necessity. It took on a life of its own. There was a need; the need was met; the need became celebrated.

Obviously, it was the most transcendent kind of experience for myself, as I’m sure it was for Steve, Ced, and Bernie—and as I’m sure it would be for
any
comedian. Yet there’s a
before
and there’s an
after
. You understand what those moments feel like
now
. It girds you up to know that if you’ve been there, then you can get there again. The whole process profoundly changed me. The idea of just trying to be funny without it having some level of import had been repulsive to me, and it
still
is. I thought comedy in general—and hoped my comedy in particular—had the power to change people’s minds. So to have the power to make arenas erupt with laughter made me feel as if my conviction was coming to some sort of fruition.

I have a tattoo that says,
THERE’S NOTHING FUNNY ABOUT A CLOWN IN THE DARK
. I never wanted to be that. I was always trying to find a way to say the things that I felt were important, needed to be said, and had some relevance. I used to want to make people laugh so hard that they changed their perspective. That was my constant mindset, and I would always be agonizing after the show. It was me in the back, drinking and talking shit, lamenting what I had done and what I hadn’t done, and what jokes I should or shouldn’t tell.

Bernie and I would just hang out in the dressing room for hours, talking and smoking cigars. When I told him what was going
through my mind, he just shook his head at me. “Man,” he said, “you need to give yourself a break. This shit ain’t that important. Just be who you are. Some people will get it, some people won’t, and that’ll be it.” Spike Lee said the same thing, that I was too hard on myself. And neither man is exactly a softie.

Like most comics, I see the world from a slightly different angle. I thought pointing shit out would lead to … 
something
. But it
doesn’t
. When a commentator says that America is a lazy country, the backlash is violent and it is immediate. Yet we
are
a lazy country. We don’t get fat from being
active
. Our school systems don’t fucking fall apart from being
active
. We are so fragile as a society that the truth angers us because the comments strike a nerve.

It’s like how fat people get mad if you call them fat. But they
are
fat. Dumb people get mad if you call them dumb. But they
are
dumb. In both those instances a person can do something about it
if
he accepts the reality of the situation. From an outsider’s perspective, never forcing people to question their reality is the greatest disservice ever. If somebody’s breath is bad and you don’t tell them, their breath is always fucking bad. If they got a booger in their nose and you don’t tell them, they’re going to keep a booger in their nose. That’s the way it goes.

I used to think that it was comedy that could force people to change their reality, and I learned over my career that it couldn’t. I remember trying to do episodes of
The Hughleys
and jokes on tour that I thought were important. But most people just kind of want to laugh. They don’t want to think or they don’t want to care. If they
do
want to think, they only want to think what
they
want to think. If they
do
want to care, they only want to care about what
they
want to care about. Comedy might not be able to change minds—but it can certainly expose truths and knock down fallacies. Once I make
a joke about something, whether onstage, on TV, or in this book, whoever hears me can’t claim ignorance. They can’t say they didn’t know better. They might still feel the same way, but now their actions are informed. They have to face the truth behind their deeds, or at least the truth as I see it.

The idea that comedy can change minds has long since been dead with me. It’s been many years since we deaded that one. Yet during
The Kings of Comedy
, that’s really what I believed, and in some ways that’s really what was moving me. So when I watch the DVD and see myself with that twinkle in my eye, that conviction that all these jokes were going to make a big difference, it’s like seeing a kid who still believes in Santa Claus. On the one hand, you know he’s an ignorant dumbass who’s going to have to learn the truth eventually. On the other hand, damned if his silly earnestness doesn’t make you smile just a little bit.

Sometimes it’s easy for me to forget that it’s good to be earnest, and that cynicism isn’t always the way. When we were shooting
The Kings of Comedy
, Bernie joked that a dude who looked like him and was as dark as him would never get a TV show. America would not watch someone like that on their screens. Bernie really believed that was the case. People would say that they couldn’t understand him, that he bugged his eyes and he talked too fast.

Fortunately, cynical Bernie was proven wrong. He
did
get a show. He also got a lot of movies, like
Bad Santa
and
Ocean’s Eleven
and
Twelve
. Things were happening for him career-wise. But things ended up happening for him health-wise, too—and those weren’t the good types of things.

Bernie was always a big and strong dude. I heard he was sick,
but it didn’t really register with my image of him. It was in 2005, when he came on to do my show
Weekends at the D.L
., that I first noticed something was wrong. He was on oxygen and would take air during the commercial breaks. It seemed real weird to me. I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I just never associated Bernie with any sort of weakness or vulnerability, and he never looked like anything was wrong. Partly that’s because Bernie didn’t have another gear. He didn’t know how to be anything else. He was consistent; he seemed perpetual.

In 2008, Bernie was hired to host an Obama fundraiser. He told a joke that he had told many times over many years. “My little nephew,” Bernie said, “came to me and asked, ‘Uncle, what’s the difference between a hypothetical question and a realistic question?’ I said, ‘Go upstairs and ask your mother if she’d make love to the mailman for fifty thousand dollars.’ The boy came back and said his mom told him that she would. So I said, ‘Go ask your sister if she’d make love to the mailman for fifty thousand dollars.’ The boy came back and said that she would, too. ‘Then
hypothetically
we have a hundred thousand dollars, but
realistically
we are living with a couple of sluts.’ ”

Everyone was being so protective of Obama that there was a mini-backlash over that joke. When CNN stuck a mike in my face and asked me about it, I just laughed it off. “That’s the Mac man,” I told them.

A while later I heard that Bernie’s health was deteriorating.
He’s going to understand that I’m doing what I gotta do
, I thought,
just like he’s doing what he gotta do
. I was in the middle of a run in Las Vegas at the time. After the run, I promised myself that I would go visit him and see how he was doing.

At about four or five o’clock in the morning, I got a call telling
me that Bernie had died. This was the second time I had heard that; rumors of his death had circulated a few months earlier. In the back of my mind I hoped that this was another bit of false gossip—but some part of me knew that it wasn’t. I turned on the news and saw them walk up to Steve for some comment. That’s when I knew it was true.

I was out of it all day, and then I went back home to Los Angeles. It just seemed surreal to me that Bernie was gone. I packed for his funeral—and I packed for my upcoming gig in Tempe, Arizona. That’s how fucked up comedy is. I had to find time in my schedule for the funeral of one of my dearest friends.