America Behind the Color Line (44 page)

LARRY WILMORE
The Bonus

I became a writer kind of by accident. I was doing stand-up comedy. I always wanted to be a comedian when I was younger. And you just have to write because you need an act. So I would write, but I never considered myself a writer. I studied theater in school, and I studied playwriting and the classics. But still I didn’t think it was something that I was doing, even though I was doing it all the time. And the more I did—the more I wrote—the more ideas I got that really didn’t fit into stand-up, that were either movie ideas or sketch ideas or more about depicting a character, and I just thought I needed to go further with it and do more.

A lot of it is being in the right position to do things. I always felt if I had the opportunity to do it, why not try to do something different and original? I remember someone asked me once, “Larry, how come there’s no black Seinfeld?” and I said, “Because you haven’t written it yet!” I said, “Write it! You know, let’s do it. I’ll do it with you!”

When I was developing the pilot for
The Bernie Mac Show,
there were a couple of things I was looking for. I wanted to use Bernie as he really is—a successful comedian—and I wanted him to be unapologetic about his success. I didn’t want him to be a fish out of water, like, I’m black and I’m rich, but somehow I don’t believe I should be here, so I’m gonna act like it’s not for me. Like Fresh Prince, maybe—him, not the family. Or even his family. We didn’t buy them as authentic in some ways—maybe the mom. In some ways, they weren’t comfortable with their identity and their social situation. But we were supposed to look up to them; they were comic foils for Will Smith, who was the real deal in our eyes. Fundamentally, I wanted to do something a little different, like Bernie should be our role model—he’s comfortable being rich; he’s unapologetic. “This is my shit—don’t touch it!” That’s his point of view. “I earned it and I deserve it. And I’m comfortable with it.” Bernie and I were, like, we don’t have to apologize for any of this stuff. I deserve to be here—get yours! Join me! House comin’ up for sale next door. Move on in! And it really is Bernie’s point of view too: Be proud of what you have and work hard for it. It’s the work ethic. That’s Bernie’s parents’ generation.

It’s that ethic, and it’s something that has lost a little bit. Not completely, because I think those things go in cycles too, and I think a lot of young kids have a lot of that ethic now, which is great. We don’t have to live for somebody else. We can do it ourselves, which is the most powerful thing in the world, as far as I’m concerned. But some of it got kind of lost, and that’s part of Bernie’s humor too and part of Chris Rock’s too. What is that joke he did where he said, “I take care of my kids!” “Niggers, you’re supposed to take care of your kids! What are you bragging for?” “I put food on the table!” “You are supposed to put food on the table! What are you boastin’ about it for?” It’s that kind of thing, where Bernie and I consciously wanted the show to be un-apologetic about his standing. And it is. He belongs in that neighborhood. The fact that the kids are the kids of a drug addict, that’s about, this is family. It’s about emotion. In fact, Bernie is in the same class with them; he just has a different checkbook. He hasn’t changed classes at all, he’s just changed addresses. But he’s very successful and very comfortable.

I’m from Los Angeles. To me, Los Angeles is so diverse I don’t view the show in terms of black and white. It’s almost like Bernie and the rest of the world, and everybody makes up that. So here you’re gonna see Asian, you’re gonna see Hispanic, you’re gonna see white. You’re gonna see all kinds of things because that’s what Los Angeles is. It’s never really been black or white. If the show took place in the South, it’d probably be more black characters than white characters. But I always wanted to show people more as they really are than as stock characters on TV. So you’re not gonna see the white guy coming in like on
The Jeffersons
with “Well, Mr. J.,” or being a real stiff or that kind of thing. They’re just people. The conflict, the tension in the story, would be about how they’re gonna interact and how they’re gonna react to what happens, or how Bernie relates to them, and that type of thing.

I wrote the pilot at a time when I just wanted to do something different. I wanted to make a statement. I’d been inspired by a lot of people who had come before, people who have always taken a chance and a risk, like Sidney Poitier. They just honored him with the Academy Award. He was one of my early heroes. He was out there by himself, doing it. I remember watching Sammy Davis, Jr., as a kid. Flip Wilson was the first guy to have a variety show that worked. I’ve been inspired by a lot of people who went out on their own and did things—just did them. And that’s what I wanted to do with
The Bernie Mac Show
.

I saw the
Cosby
reunion show, and it made me remember what was really funny about it. I think
The Bernie Mac Show
and
The Cosby Show
are the left hand–right hand. They’re both big crossover shows. They’re different, but I think the way they’re the same is more significant.
The Cosby Show
traces back to Bill Cosby’s stand-up act, which is ironic because I started with Bernie’s stand-up act. In that act it was about parenting, just how hard it is. It’s such a universal thing, and how he feels like he wants to kill those kids.

There’s a line Cosby has: “I brought you into this world, boy, and I can take you right out of it.” It’s what all of our parents said, not just black parents. Everybody feels that way. That was the universal appeal that
The Cosby Show
had too. It was: I’m your father, I’m gonna tell you what to do, and you’re gonna do it. I think that’s what people responded to more than anything else. Plus the star power of Bill Cosby was huge and I think was underestimated at the time. And sitcoms were dead.
The Cosby Show
came around when sitcoms weren’t doing anything, and it just skyrocketed through the roof. It was so fresh, and when you look at the pilot, it still feels fresh. So in that way we’re very similar. Bernie talks about how hard it is to raise these kids, even though they’re not his kids, and that’s what makes it a little more contemporary. They’re brought in because of a drug problem, which is completely different from Cosby, but it’s the exact same attitude. “Boy, I will bust your head”—I mean, he’s frustrated, and that’s the thing that everybody responds to, is that frustration as a parent.

What’s also coupled on top of that, which is a little different these days, is how political correctness plays a part in parenting, which is a lot different than in Cosby’s day. Cosby probably could whup one of those kids on TV and we would have thought nothing of it. But today Bernie can barely talk about it and we’d get in trouble. And stylistically is where the shows are really different.
Cosby
was a very traditional show in front of an audience, with a multicamera format. I wanted to tell stories in a different way; that was one of the goals of the show. I wanted us to be drawn in to who Bernie is as a person, and I couldn’t do that in front of an audience. If I put Bernie in front of an audience, I’d be competing with the Bernie Mac in
The Original Kings of Comedy
—the one who’s up there saying “you mother” and all that stuff. I didn’t want to compete with that. I wanted to show America the Bernie Mac who I talked to and I met.

I went to Chicago and talked to Bernie personally, talked about his childhood, heard the kind of guy he is. I wanted to introduce that person to America, Bernard Jeffrey McCullough instead of Bernie Mac. And I knew that with the single-camera format I could introduce that person. I could tell stories that are a little quieter, that have some drama in them but not always a joke. Sometimes, when he talks to us directly, we can see things played out. It feels like we’re eavesdropping on the action, instead of the action being presented to us. We had an episode where he was just getting the kids out to school, and it was like we had hidden cameras set up because there was no plot. He just had to get the kids out of the house, but it was very engaging because we saw his struggle the whole time. Those are the kinds of stories I really like to tell.

When I pitched this show three years ago, they said I was crazy. They thought I was too hard; they thought I was too blue; they thought the audience wasn’t ready. I pitched it to ABC and they didn’t even buy a script—they weren’t interested at all. And I’m pitchin’ it with Bernie Mac sittin’ right there. I mean, at the least, you want Bernie Mac on your network, surely? But they wanted an old, traditional sitcom.

Fox believed in the show immediately and bought it right in the room, in fact. They were excited about it from the beginning. What they weren’t sure about was the style of it. They weren’t quite sure it was gonna work because it was so different. But believe it or not, they always did believe in Bernie, and thought he was a huge star and thought the idea of the show was a really good idea. I give Fox credit for going out of their way first most of the time. Whenever you see something different, it’s usually on Fox. They did
In Living Color
. They did shows like
The Simpsons
. They’ve always taken creative chances.

The question people should be asking is, how come NBC doesn’t have a show like that on? I don’t know the answers, but I think that’s the right question. If someone asks me how many black writers I have, or whether I have black writers, I’m not offended by the question. We had a really small staff last year, of about five writers. Three were black, so we had a majority black staff. And if you count me, that’s four. I was the main writer, supervising the script, and I wrote the pilot. I wrote it at a time when I felt like I had nothing to lose, and I was kind of fed up with a lot of stuff on television. We try to keep it real here. But they should be asking
Friends
that question, not me! They should call those people up and ask. Ask Seinfeld, how many black writers did you have?

Bernie Mac says things as a character that other people think and want to say. We might have these liberal white people say, he shouldn’t say that. But everybody thinks it.

Bernie Mac is a comedian who happens to be black. And I feel that black is the bonus. Because it means that Bernie views the world through a very comic-centered point of view. And it has some of the best parts of classic comedy, where there’s some tragedy underneath it all, or some sadness. That’s where we empathize with him. We know he came from a hard life, like the sister situation and all that, but we know he’s gonna make us laugh, and that’s why we love him. The bonus is that Bernie’s life has been colored from his cultural perspective, and those are the things he can share with the audience that may not be familiar with his perspective. What he’s doing is from a point of view that is very familiar emotionally, but it’s in the context of a black lifestyle, which I think is fantastic. I’m really proud of that, as opposed to the black being first and the experience being second, which to me is a little more superficial.

I think when the show was being put together, I was reacting to different ways of representing black people on sitcoms before this program. Especially in the last ten years, it seemed to me that a lot of black sitcoms just became kind of the same thing. They were more, I think, about hip-hop, more than it was black. Like, you had to, in fact, have a codebook to know what people were saying half the time. And that was considered the real thing. In some ways—and I shouldn’t generalize—but many seemed to be marginalized by a certain style, and a certain type of put-down humor that was very much the same. It was who could put down who the best. I saw that as a bit negative and I wanted to get away from that. Also, I wanted to do characters that were just more real, more three-dimensional, and had more depth to them—real relationships between a husband and wife or father and kids, that sort of thing. Because I have a theater background, I’m just more interested in that type of thing anyway.

So there was a very conscious decision to work against not so much racial stereotypes as against television stereotypes. You know, what are the stock characters in television? Let’s get ’em out! In fact, one of the reasons why Bernie talks to the audience, there’s a stock character in television called the best friend, and this is a friend who comes over and you tell the exposition to. You know, they sit down and you say, so yeah, my wife’s gonna leave me, and oh, man! I’m gonna get canned at my job, and all that stuff. I said, that is a stock character! I said, let’s get rid of that character. What if we made America that character? So Bernie talks to the camera. He tells us, these kids are doin’ this to me and they’re doin’ that and they’re doin’ that. We’re that stock character now, so we don’t need that character in the show. I figured, the people on the show can just be who they are. Bernie will tell us the information we need to know, when we need to know it. The hope was that it would pull us in, invite people in. You never know if it’s gonna work, but luckily it did.

We have a pretty wide demographic. Culturally, the show reaches across racial lines, both black and white. My goal was to represent the generational tensions of a family, not the generational tensions of a black man. On the other hand, I love the fact that it’s from a black perspective and that it’s seasoned with that underneath it, because to me that’s what gives it the richness and the texture. And it’s funny—it reaches across generational lines, which I’m really the most proud of. Old people love our show. We get white-haired Jewish women from Palm Beach talking about it as well as young urban kids, and the black audience is really huge. What I love about the feeling from the black audience is that there’s a sense of pride about the show, which is great. People are proud to say, oh, yeah,
The Bernie Mac Show,
yeah! That’s nice; it’s a nice feeling. And yet, just from the mainstream audience too, they really respond to the fact that it is different and that it has the universal theme about parenting and how hard it is. People really love to laugh at Bernie too—he’s so relatable. When he puts the weight of the world on his shoulders, that’s the funniest thing—“America, you know what I’m talking about . . . y’all wanna beat those kids too.” I channel Bernie. That’s how I write. I just try to think like him.