Bernie Mac: In his own words

"I love making people happy," he (Bernie Mac) says. "That's what got me in this business."

One Sunday night when he was four or five, Mac found his mother crying in front of the television. She refused to explain the cause of her tears, and before her young son could press any further, Bill Cosby came onto "The Ed Sullivan Show" and started doing a routine about snakes in the bathroom.

"And my mother started laughing and crying at the same time," he says now, the story so frequently told that he could probably do it in his sleep. "And when I saw my mother laugh, I started laughing, and I wiped her face and said, "Mom, that's what I'm gonna be. I'm gonna be a comedian, so you never have to cry again."

He did his first comedy routines in his childhood bedroom, using an empty shoe polish bottle as a microphone and keeping his brothers awake with corny jokes and impressions. His mother and one of his brothers died within a year of each other, both while Mac was a teenager, and he can recite the details of his mother's fatal battle with breast cancer with the same passion and precision he uses on stage.

"My comedy comes from pain," he says. "I can't stand to see someone hurting."

Bernie Mac: In his own words / By Alan Sepinwall / The Star-Ledger