Larry Wilmore Says ‘Bernie Mac Show’ Was His Attempt at a Black ‘Seinfeld’

The origin of The Bernie Mac Show grew out of a question that a friend posed to comic and writer Larry Wilmore: “Larry, how come there’s no Black Seinfeld?”

Wilmore told Bill Maher on the Club Random podcast that he first pointed the finger at his pal. “I said, ‘Cause you have written it yet.’ And then I went, ‘Oh shit, I haven’t written it yet.’”

Wilmore’s friend wasn’t talking about a Black comic starring in a sitcom featuring wacky neighbors and neurotic friends specifically. “What she meant was, a Black show that’s considered smart and not just funny,” he said. “White shows were considered — the good white shows, there was a lot of dreck — but a show like Seinfeld was not just funny. It was considered smart. And Black shows never had that ‘considered smart’ element too.”

“Bernie Mac broke through with that,” Wilmore says about The Bernie Mac Show. “It was considered smart.”

Maher didn’t take much convincing. “I have to say Bernie Mac was just a genius performer,” he gushed. “He really was the Black Jack Benny to me. He was just so understated. And it worked so well. He was a minimalist, with just a few words and a look.”

That “less is more” quality allowed Mac to sneak in jokes other comics couldn’t, explained Wilmore. “He could say the most offensive things and get away with it. Like he said, ‘I believe you should be able to hit a child in the stomach or the throat,’” he laughed. “Or the throat? I mean, who says you should be able to hit a kid in the throat?”

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While Wilmore’s scripts aimed for smart comedy, he was also flexible enough to let Mac do his thing. “I always said, Bernie, this is just the script. If you wanna change this, then do it,” Wilmore said. “But we talked about the content of it, you know. If we both knew what the scene was about, you can change the words. He would do the lines too. But he had such a great sense of what the scene was. So our conversations were very short.”

Why was it so important for Wilmore to create a Black Seinfeld? “Part of my career was fighting the conception that Blacks couldn’t be as good as writers as whites,” he told Maher. “So a white writer could be on a Black show, but a Black writer could never be on a white show. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to create TV shows, so I could open up those opportunities.”