MADness #34- Bernie Mac!

It’s Monday! That means another step on our excruciatingly slow creep through my work at MAD magazine! This week we have a look at MAD‘s parody of “The Bernie Mac Show”, written by MAD editor David Shayne and first appearing in MAD #447, November 2004. I still have the pencil roughs of this one.

This was one of those show I had never seen any episodes of, and it was WAY before streaming and on-demand was a thing, so I had to set me DVR (THAT was a thing then) to record some episodes to do my research. Fortunately it had been on a few seasons, so I got a DVD set of a whole season… and yes, I wrote that off on my taxes.

Bernie Mac (RIP) was pretty fun to draw. Very expressive face and big, buggy eyes that were great to exaggerate.

This show had a couple of trademark features that we incorporated into the parody. One was moments when Bernie would break the fourth wall and directly address the audience, always referring to them as “America”. The other was these pop up captions, usually using arrows, in a yellow handwritten font. The art department threw temporary ones of these in the layouts, but told me not to worry about their placement because they would be redoing them using a font that looked more like the one on the shaw, and work around the art in the final. So I pretended they were not there when I did the roughs. Segments of the show were also introduced with “title cards”, which we poked some fun at as well.

This was the first time I ever illustrated a David Shayne TV or movie parody script, but maybe that’s because this was David’s first parody (although he’d written many other features before this one)! He later wrote the “Desperate Housewives” and “My Name is Earl” TV spoofs, both illustrated by Mort Drucker. David would write several more prodies before the end of the New York MAD era, and I’d draw a few of his later ones.

I thought the Whitney Houston cameo was a bit brutal for MAD, although this parody was done during the height of the “Being Bobby Brown” reality show on Bravo. The show really painted her in an unflattering light, and her shocking weight loss and appearance was all over the entertainment world news. In retrospect, it seems like “punching down” ridiculing a person struggling with drug addiction, but at the time she seemed to be milking the notoriety for profit, and that kind of left the door open for being called out on it. No one knew how bad it would get for her or how she’d die seven or so years later. Then she seemed like another big celebrity who was letting the fame and excess get out of control.

Bernie Mac’s death just four years after we did this was a great loss to the comedy world, IMO. I thought he was very funny and I enjoyed watching this show, as well as his other work.

Toon in again next week, when we take a look at what is still among my favorite TV show parodies I’ve worked on!