Comedian Gina Yashere

Gina Yashere will be headlining at The Gotham Comedy Club New York City on July 23 & 24th, and the Improv Melrose, Los Angeles on the 29th July- Get your tickets!!

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Just hours after Shannon Price decided to pull the plug and end Gary Coleman’s life — the actor’s ex-wife was already smiling and posing for photos.

The photos seen here were taken on May 29 — just one day after Gary died. The woman smiling with Shannon is Sheila Erickson — an agent who worked with both Shannon and Gary.

The photos were taken around the same time she sat down with a camera crew and did an interview about Gary’s death.

Apparently Shannon wanted to do the interview “to get her side of the story out” — amongst speculation that she may have killed Gary.

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1. Gary Coleman Dead at 42
2. Gary Coleman Dead at 42

PROVO, Utah – Gary Coleman, the adorable, pint-sized child star of the smash 1970s TV sitcom “Diff’rent Strokes” who spent the rest of his life struggling on Hollywood’s D-list, died Friday after suffering a brain hemorrhage. He was 42.

Coleman was taken off life support and died with family and friends at his side, Utah Valley Regional Medical Center spokeswoman Janet Frank said.

He suffered the brain hemorrhage Wednesday at his Santaquin home, 55 miles south of Salt Lake City. Frank said Coleman was hospitalized because of “an accident” at the home, but she said she had no details on what the accident was.

Coleman’s family, in a statement read by his brother-in-law, Shawn Price, said “information surrounding his passing will be released shortly.”

Best remembered for “Diff’rent Strokes” character Arnold Jackson and his “Whatchu talkin’ ’bout?” catchphrase, Coleman chafed at his permanent association with the show but also tried to capitalize on it through reality shows and other TV appearances. His adult life was marked with legal, financial and health troubles, suicide attempts and even a 2003 run for California governor.

“I want to escape that legacy of Arnold Jackson,” he told The New York Times during his gubernatorial run. “I’m someone more. It would be nice if the world thought of me as something more.”

A statement from the family said he was conscious and lucid until midday Thursday, when his condition worsened and he slipped into unconsciousness. Coleman was then placed on life support.

“It’s unfortunate. It’s a sad day,” said Todd Bridges, who played Coleman’s older brother, Willis, on “Diff’rent Strokes.”

“Diff’rent Strokes” debuted on NBC in 1978 and drew most of its laughs from Coleman, then a tiny 10-year-old with sparkling eyes and perfect comic timing.

He played the younger of two African-American brothers adopted by a wealthy white man. Race and class relations became topics on the show as much as the typical trials of growing up.

“He was the reason we were such a big hit,” co-star Charlotte Rae, who played the family’s housekeeper on the show, said in an e-mail. “He was the centerpiece and we all surrounded him. He was absolutely enchanting, adorable, funny and filled with joy which he spread around to millions of people all over the world.”

Coleman’s family thanked fans for their continued support.

“Thousands of emails have poured into the hospital. This is so comforting to the family to know how beloved he still is,” Price said.

“Diff’rent Strokes” lasted six seasons on NBC and two on ABC; it lives on thanks to DVDs and YouTube. But its equally enduring legacy became the troubles in adulthood of its former child stars.

In 1989, Bridges was acquitted of attempted murder in the shooting of a drug dealer. The then 24-year-old Bridges testified he became depressed and turned to drugs after “Diff’rent Strokes” was canceled.

Dana Plato, who played the boys’ white, teenage sister, pleaded guilty in 1991 to a robbery charge. She died in 1999 of an overdose of painkiller and muscle relaxer. The medical examiner’s office ruled the death a suicide.

“It’s sad that I’m the last kid alive from the show,” Bridges said.

Coleman was born Feb. 8, 1968, in Zion, Ill., near Chicago.

Coleman’s short stature added to his child-star charm but stemmed from a serious health problem, kidney failure. He got his first of at least two transplants at age 5 and required dialysis. Even as an adult, his height reached only 4 feet 8 inches.

In a 1979 Los Angeles Times profile, his mother, Sue Coleman, said he had always been a ham. He acted in some commercials before he was signed by T.A.T., the production company that created “Diff’rent Strokes.”

After “Diff’rent Strokes” was canceled, Coleman continued to get credits for TV guest shots and other small roles over the years, but he never regained more than a shadow of his old popularity. At one point he worked as a security guard.

Coleman played upon his child-star image as he tried to resurrect his entertainment career in recent years, appearing on late-night shows and “The Surreal Life,” a VH1 show devoted to fading celebrities.

His role as a car-washing plantation slave in the 2008 conservative political satire “An American Carol” was cut from the final print. The actor also appeared in last year’s “Midgets vs. Mascots,” a film that pits little people against mascots in a series of silly contests for a chance to win $1 million. Coleman met with producers of the film earlier this year to ask them to remove a brief scene of frontal nudity that he says he didn’t authorize.

Coleman was among 135 candidates who ran in California’s bizarre 2003 recall election to replace then-Gov. Gray Davis, whom voters ousted in favor of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Coleman came in eighth place with 12,488 votes, or 0.2 percent, just behind Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt.

Running for office gave him a chance to show another side of himself, he told The Associated Press at the time.

“This is really interesting and cool, and I’ve been enjoying the heck out of it because I get to be intelligent, which is something I don’t get to do very often,” he said.

Coleman’s health problems went beyond kidney failure. Last fall, he had heart surgery complicated by pneumonia, said his Utah attorney Randy Kester. In February, he suffered a seizure on the set of “The Insider.”

Legal disputes also dogged him. In 1989, when Coleman was 21, his mother filed a court request trying to gain control of her son’s $6 million fortune, saying he was incapable of handling his affairs. He said the move “obviously stems from her frustration at not being able to control my life.”

In a 1993 television interview, he said he had twice tried to kill himself by overdosing on pills.

He moved to Utah in fall 2005, and according to a tally in early 2010, officers were called to assist or intervene with Coleman more than 20 times in the following years. They included a call where Coleman said he had taken dozens of Oxycontin pills and “wanted to die.”

Some of the disputes involved his wife, Shannon Price, whom he met on the set of the 2006 comedy “Church Ball” and married in 2007.

In September 2008, a dustup with a fan at a Utah bowling alley led Coleman to plead no contest to disorderly conduct. The fan filed a lawsuit claiming that the actor punched him and ran into him with his truck; the suit was settled out of court.

In February — on his 42nd birthday — he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor criminal mischief charge related to an April 2009 domestic violence incident at his home.

Coleman remained estranged from his parents, Sue and Willie Coleman, who said they learned about his hospitalization and death from media reports.

Sue Coleman said she wanted to reconcile and had been patiently waiting for her son to be ready.

“One of the things that I had prayed for was that nothing like this would happen before we could sit with Gary and Shannon and say, ‘We’re here and we love you,’” Sue Coleman said. “We just didn’t want to push him.”

She would not discuss the cause of the estrangement.

___

Associated Press Writer Doug Alden, AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen and AP Movie Writer Christy Lemire contributed to this story.

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Comedian Dernie Mac

Prominent actor and comedian Bernie Mac, famous for his role in the casino heist caper film “Ocean’s Eleven” died Saturday at age 50. Mac was equally famous for his television sitcom “The Bernie Mac Show”, for which he gained a prestigious Peabody Award.

“Mac passed away this morning from complications due to pneumonia in a Chicago area hospital,” announced his publicist, Danica Smith, in a statement from Los Angeles.

The comedian suffered from sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease that produces tiny lumps of cells in the body’s organs, but had said the condition went into remission in 2005. He recently was hospitalized and treated for pneumonia, which his publicist said was not related to the disease.

Recently, Mac’s brand of comedy caught him flack when he was heckled during a surprise appearance at a July fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate and fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama.

Toward the end of a 10-minute standup routine, Mac joked about menopause, sexual infidelity and promiscuity, and used occasional crude language. The performance earned him a rebuke from Obama’s campaign.

But despite controversy or difficulties, in his words, Mac was always a performer.

“Wherever I am, I have to play,” he said in 2002. “I have to put on a good show.”

Mac worked his way to Hollywood success from an impoverished upbringing on Chicago’s South Side. He began doing standup as a child, and his film career started with a small role as a club doorman in the Damon Wayans comedy “Mo’ Money” in 1992. In 1996, he appeared in the Spike Lee drama “Get on the Bus.”

He was one of “The Original Kings of Comedy” in the 2000 documentary of that title that brought a new generation of black standup comedy stars to a wider audience.

“The majority of his core fan base will remember that when they paid their money to see Bernie Mac … he gave them their money’s worth,” Steve Harvey, one of his co-stars in “Original Kings,” told CNN on Saturday.

Mac went on to star in the hugely popular “Ocean’s Eleven” franchise with Brad Pitt and George Clooney.

Comedian Carl Reiner, who also appeared in “Ocean’s Eleven” and its two sequels, said Saturday he was “in utter shock” because he thought Mac was improving. “He was just so alive. I can’t believe he’s gone,” he said.

Reiner told KNX-AM in Los Angeles that other comics had talked to the audience as Mac did on “The Bernie Mac Show,” but “he took it to a new level.”

“It was such a popular show because of his bigger-than-life persona,” Reiner said.

His turn with Ashton Kutcher in 2005′s “Guess Who” topped the box office. It was a comedy remake of the classic Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn drama “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” — with Mac as the black dad who’s shocked that his daughter is marrying a white man.

Mac also had starring roles in “Bad Santa,” “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” and “Transformers.”

The comedian drew critical and popular acclaim with his Fox television series “The Bernie Mac Show,” which aired more than 100 episodes from 2001 to 2006.

The series about a man’s adventures raising his sister’s three children, won a Peabody Award in 2002. At the time, judges wrote they chose the sitcom for transcending “race and class while lifting viewers with laughter, compassion — and cool.”

In real life, he was very much like his character on that series, his daughter, Je’niece Childress, told The Associated Press on Saturday.

“He was the king of his household,” Childress said in Chicago, describing Mac as “a loving grandfather” to her daughter, his only grandchild.

“The Bernie Mac Show” garnered Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for Mac.

“But television handcuffs you, man,” he said in a 2001 Associated Press interview. “Now everyone telling me what I CAN’T do, what I CAN say, what I SHOULD do, and asking, `Are blacks gonna be mad at you? Are whites gonna accept you?’”

He also was nominated for a Grammy award for best comedy album in 2001 along with his “The Original Kings of Comedy” co-stars, Harvey, D.L. Hughley and Cedric The Entertainer.

Chicago music producer Carolyn Albritton said she was Bernie Mac’s first manager, having met him in 1991 at Chicago’s Cotton Club where she hosted an open-mike night.

“From very early on I thought he was destined for success,” Albritton said Saturday. “He never lost track of where he came from, and he’d often use real life experiences, his family, his friends, in his routine. After he made it, he stayed a very humble man. His family was the most important thing in the world to him.”

In 2007, Mac told David Letterman on CBS’ “Late Show” that he planned to retire soon.

“I’m going to still do my producing, my films, but I want to enjoy my life a little bit,” Mac told Letterman. “I missed a lot of things, you know. I was a street performer for two years. I went into clubs in 1977.”

Mac was born Bernard Jeffrey McCullough on Oct. 5, 1957, in Chicago. He grew up on the city’s South Side, living with his mother and grandparents. His grandfather was the deacon of a Baptist church.

In his 2004 memoir, “Maybe You Never Cry Again,” Mac wrote about having a poor childhood — eating bologna for dinner — and a strict, no-nonsense upbringing.

“I came from a place where there wasn’t a lot of joy,” Mac told the AP in 2001. “I decided to try to make other people laugh when there wasn’t a lot of things to laugh about.”

Mac’s mother died of cancer when he was 16. In his book, Mac said she was a support for him and told him he would surprise everyone when he grew up.

“Woman believed in me,” he wrote. “She believed in me long before I believed.”

source

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Here in the Time of Rock, wherein Christopher Julius Rock III rules again as he has ruled before, but only more so — international sweep! colossal forums! better transportation! — promptness counts for much. “There’s no such thing as early,” Rock himself will tell you, just as his late heroic father often impressed upon him under threat of belt strap. “There’s on time and late. I’m always on time.” Unsurprisingly, then, he has made it a point to be on time for his Time, which is a very good thing for a dire populace that suddenly seeks racial clarity with historic fervor (no mortal, of course, sifts matters of class and skin divide with sharper acuity than Rock, who is black but sometimes employs the term “a fine mocha” because he is just that precise.) Moreover, he concedes that seizing this seismic American Moment is probably a very good thing for himself as well, what with his nobly intended film career in chronic flux and no particularly daring roles to entice: “Eh, you know, so you read a couple of scripts, and it was like, naahhh — hit the road, hit the road. Plus, it’s the election year. It was like, come on, man! This is the time! Black guy runnin’ for president against a woman — it’s tailor-made for me.” Because he is a listener first and foremost, the sharp clarion call of a nation — and also that of his savvy accountants — could not escape his attention. And so, for months now, he has begun dispensing fresh salient insight across the continent and also across the ocean, forcing jaws to plummet and beliefs to jangle in his fiery wake. From town to town, at carefully plotted stopovers (with some tickets scalped for hundreds of dollars apiece), his itinerant wisdom has echoed not unlike rolling thunder, depending on the acoustics provided.

For instance: “Bush has fucked up so bad,” he will posit to any and all congregants in braying loops of oratory, “that he’s made it hard for a white man to run for president. ‘Gimme anything but another white man, please! Black man, white woman, giraffe, anything!’ A white man’s had that job for hundreds of years — and one guy fucked it up for all of ya!” And: “Each candidate tells you how humble they are. No, you’re not humble! Do you know how big your ego has to be to say you wanna be president of the United States? Do you know how much Puff Daddy juice you have to drink? How many Kanye injections you have to take?” And: “I actually think America is ready for a woman president. But does it have to be that woman? . . . She’s gonna work in the office where her husband got blow jobs?! There ain’t enough redecorating in the world she can do to change that! . . . There’s one thing Hillary Clinton’s better at than everybody else, and one thing only — and that’s forgiveness! Hillary Clinton is the greatest forgiver in the history of the world. Even Jesus knows: ‘You really good at fo’giveness. I mean, I talk the talk, but you walk the walk!’ ” And: “Barack Obama — he’s a black man with two black names! Barack. Obama. He doesn’t let his blackness sneak up on you. As soon as you hear Barack Obama you wonder, ‘Does he have a spear?’ . . . He’s so cool, too, man. I don’t think he realizes he’s a black candidate! When you’re the only black guy doing something, people expect you to take it up a notch. If you’re the only black playing basketball with a bunch of white guys — they expect you to dunk! . . . Barack has a handicap the other candidates don’t have: Barack Obama has a black wife. And I don’t think a black woman can be first lady of the United States. Yeah, I said it! A black woman can be president, no problem. First lady? Can’t do it. You know why? Because a black woman cannot play the background of a relationship. Just imagine telling your black wife that you’re president? ‘Honey, I did it! I won! I’m the president.’ ‘No, we the president! And I want my girlfriends in the Cabinet! I want Kiki to be secretary of state! She can fight!’ ”

These, of course, are mere droplets from ninety-plus minutes of Never Before Heard meticulously honed societal meanderings — topics ad infinitum traversing war, politics, pharmaceuticals, Roger Clemens, real estate, ejaculation, love, fatness, energy crisis, Anna Nicole Smith, gender discord, women gone missing, debt, careerism, entertainment gossip, SAT scores, gayness, racial correctness (“Now they’re trying to get rid of the word nigger, my beloved nigger. . . .”), Britney Spears and beyond — sprung from the ever-swirling Rock reservoir of dyspepsia, which has been damming up since the airing of his fourth HBO concert special, Never Scared, in 2004. “After I tape a special, I go to sleep for three years,” says Rock, meaning all material amassed for the broadcast is forever purged and discarded on-camera, so that the new can begin percolating while the universe dependably roils forth. And what would roil and erupt during this latest respite has awoken Rock to a world all but screaming out for his interpretive prowess. “I think there was kind of a new hunger for him,” notes trusted confidant Jerry Seinfeld. “Like the Wheel of Fortune, there’s this wheel of culture that turns around and around, and it sometimes lines up with a person at a certain point in their work. You can just feel it, and it’s always exciting to watch happen. Chris has been there before, and now it seems to be his moment all over again, you know?” Or as Rock’s friend Bill Stephney, the revered Public Enemy music impresario, puts it, “The times compel him, and he processes it as only he can. His mind and eyes should be donated to science. He doesn’t really know the gravity of his own power. It’s sort of like the Olympics with him: Every handful of years, there’s a Chris Rock moment. And we just happen to be in that hot zone, which has maybe never been hotter.”

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The upcoming film, which tells the story of the legendary boxer’s life, will take a look at Tyson’s life accomplishments including the infamous ear biting match between him and rival Evander Holyfield.

No dates have been announced yet, so be sure to keep checking www.blackcomedynews.com for more updates!

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She explains her midlife joy: “I’m experiencing something so different and liberating. Everybody says 40 is the new 20. But I don’t want it to be the new 20. Everything is so better now. At 20, sexually, you don’t know what you’re doing. You look for it, you find it, you lose it a few times.”

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In the spirit of Black History Month, Madame Tussauds Las Vegas has chosen to honor Oscar-winning actor and performer, Jamie Foxx, with an official unveiling of his life-like wax statue.

The unveiling kicks off Madame Tussauds Black History month-long celebration exhibit where the new Foxx replica will join other notable African-American figures including Muhammad Ali, Louis Armstrong, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Oprah Winfrey. Each famous wax figure featured in the attraction will be accompanied by a biography highlighting each of the figures’ contributions to American history.

Jamie Foxx is the first African-American in history to receive two Oscar nominations in the same year for two of his films, Collateral and Ray.

Foxx took part in a two-hour private sitting enabling Tussauds Studio artists to create the highly-detailed $300,000 wax reproduction.

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