"We've dropped the ball," Mac continues. "One thing we had [when we were kids] was respect for our elders. No matter what we did, we respected our elders, and we told the truth." (In fact, Mae recently turned down an invitation to dinner at the White House because he said he wasn't raised to be a good liar, even to the President.)

It's his brutal honesty that has turned his sitcom, The Bernie Mac Show, into one of the biggest hits on television. Watched by more than 10 million viewers each week, the show follows the joys and pains of Mac and his executive wife (Kellita Smith), who are thrust into parenthood when they take custody of his drug-addicted sister's three kids: Bryanna (Dee Dee Davis), Jordan (Jeremy Suarez) and Vanessa (Camille Winbush).

The flip side of legendary family man Bill Cosby, who made television history as an accommodating father who was always in control of his family, Mac (whose real name is Bernard Jeffery McCullough) represents the evolution of the loving but frustrated father. To Mac, parenting is warfare. It's adult versus kid, old versus young, wise versus naive. Who wins the battle many times boils down to who's the craziest, who scares whom into capitulation, who waves the white flag first. "When I say I want to kill kids, you know what I mean. I don't have to explain," he says. "I just say what [fathers] want to say, but can't. That's all right. I'm the bad guy. I'll be the bad guy."

Praised for transcending race and class, the show is based on the six years Mac raised his nieces and nephews in real life, as well as the experience of a family friend who did the same. The show has been picked up for another season. He says the parental wisdom that forms the basis of the show's plot each week actually comes from his upbringing on Chicago's South Side, where he was raised by a hard-nosed single mother and straight-talking grandmother. "What you're seeing on TV is my grandma," he says. "I just say what she told me, except I do it in a comedic form."

Mac says he got whippings every day when he was growing up. He was disciplined not so much for being disrespectful, but for doing crazy things to get laughs. "Sometimes I got two or three in one day," he says. "I got whipped so much that I became immune to the pain. I could take the pain. I did things for laughs. It didn't matter at what price--I wanted to make you laugh."

He says it wasn't until his mother, Mary, died from breast cancer when he was in high school, and his grandmother, Lorraine, took a more active role in raising him, that he became serious about anything. It was during that time that he and his two brothers lived in a house with a dozen or so other relatives. Instead of letting his situation destroy him, Mac excelled. "After my mother died, my grades came up. I got myself together mentally. I was more serious, more dedicated," he says. "My grandmother was always in my ear. She would always ask me about my day. And she always made me look at her in her eyes. At the time, I thought she was hard and cold. My grandma was a fan of the truth. She just told it like it was. I could always go to her with anything. The two most powerful people in my life weren't men. They were women--my grandmother and my mother. My grandmother taught me more than anybody in my life. Grandmothers like that no longer exist.

"Grandmothers now are 34, and got more drama than their grandkids," he adds jokingly.

Mac has been married for 25 years to his wife Rhonda McCullough, whom he met in high school. He was only 19 when he married Rhonda shortly after she became pregnant. His commitment to her, then and now, makes good on a promise that he made to himself that he would not grow up to be like his father, who, he says, visited him only sporadically as a child. "As soon as I found out she was pregnant, I went over to her house and asked her to marry me," he says. "I used to look out the window for my old man. The one thing that my father taught me, that he doesn't even know that he taught me, was that I didn't want to be like him."

Once married, the young couple, with daughter Je'Niece in tow, bounced around from place to place, sometimes living with her mother, other times living with his grandmother, who was on public assistance. During the early years of his marriage, times were tough. With no steady job (He has been everything from a hot dog vender to a school bus driver to a bread delivery man), Mac took to performing in local comedy clubs for extra cash. He had always been the life of any gathering. So much so, that he figured, if he kept at it, he could make a decent living making people laugh. "I had faith," he says. "My faith was so strong. I never felt we were poor. We always did things together. I always brought special treats home to my family when I had the money. My wife worried a lot. But I never worried. I knew things would work out."

And work out they did. Having performed standup at grungy comedy clubs for decades, Mac got his first big break when he became somewhat of a regular on HBO'S Def Comedy Jam in the '80s. That led to small roles in numerous small-budget movies like Friday, House Party 3, Players Club and Booty Call, as well as a co-starring role in The Kings of Comedy, which grossed nearly $40 million.

But perhaps his biggest break came when he was offered the part as a blackjack-dealing ex-con in the movie Ocean's Eleven. With a cast that included Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Julia Roberts, Mac, by far the novice of the group, became a household name to a whole new set of people.

The movie was a huge success, but caused a riff in his relationship with his Kings of Comedy co-star Steve Harvey. As the story goes, someone representing Harvey called Ocean's Eleven director Steven Soderbergh to push for Harvey to get the part over Mac. "The Hollywood game that we are in, it's a cold game," he says of the person who tried to convince Soderbergh that Harvey was more popular and a better actor. "And the sad thing about it is all of us are doing well, so I don't really see the problem. It didn't bother me because I see the big picture. When they told me about it, what could I do? I'm not going to sling mud. I'm not a rapper. I tell jokes. I try to make people laugh. I'm not going to sling mud. Steve and anybody else can say whatever they want to say. Ain't nobody got no control over me. I have the control."

Mac says it wasn't until he was 28 that he gained that control in his life. It was then when he came to the realization that "there wasn't anything for me out there. I had the best right here at home." He recommitted himself to his wife and made a vow to his daughter. "My biggest fear was that I would not be able to send my daughter to school. I really wanted to send her to school," he says. "I think I would have been a failure if I had not been able to send her to school. That's when I matured. I stopped running the streets. A lot of cats I was hanging with, I stopped hanging out with them. I always knew everybody--the gangbangers, the hustlers, the players. I was always cool with everybody. But it wasn't until then that I really began to focus on family life."