Films Celebrate Bernie Mac and All Jokes Aside Comedy Club Mac Man Entertainment Bernie Mac in " 'I Ain't Scared of You': A Tribute to Bernie Mac." Comedy Central serves up a lazy tribute to Bernie Mac on Sunday night at 10: a lot of people saying how great he was without providing any details or depth. But that film does inadvertently act as a sort of appetizer for another, much better one later in the week on Showtime about the Chicago comedy club where Mac and many other black comics honed their skills. Showtime Raymond Lambert, seated at left, interviewing Carlos Mencia for "Phunny Business: A Black Comedy." The Comedy Central offering, by Robert Small, is called " "I Ain't Scared of You": A Tribute to Bernie Mac," a title that invokes a memorable appearance by Mac on "Def Comedy Jam" in the early 1990s. The back story of that defining moment - Mac was reacting to the audience's booing of the previous comic - is among the film's most interesting parts. Much of the rest consists of encomiums from people who worked with Mac, who died in 2008 at 50. The immediate cause was pneumonia, but he suffered from sarcoidosis, a disease in which tiny clumps of abnormal tissue form in certain organs. These are generally little more than sound bites, which makes for frustrating viewing. When Steven Soderbergh, who directed Mac in "Ocean's Eleven" and several sequels, says, "I really found him to be much more skilled as an actor than I would have anticipated," you're left waiting in vain for specifics. Mac was born in Chicago and developed his stand-up abilities there. One club where he appeared, All Jokes Aside, is the subject of its own tribute, "Phunny Business: A Black Comedy," Thursday at 8:30 p.m. on Showtime. This spunky film isn't content with mere plaudits; it is full of history and context and has a sense of humor befitting its subject matter. All Jokes Aside, founded in 1991, was unusual in that it was black-owned, booked mostly black comics and catered to a black audience. "Phunny Business," wittily directed by John Davies, focuses on one of the club's founders, Raymond C. Lambert, who admits that he didn't know much about the comedy business at first. "I naïvely thought that comedians were easy to work with," he says in the film. Mr. Lambert is also a writer and producer of the film, but "Phunny Business" goes beyond puffery and actually pokes a fair amount of fun at him. The club gave early exposure to names that are now familiar, like D. L. Hughley, Jamie Foxx and Dave Chappelle, and alumni are happy to tweak Mr. Lambert for things like imposing fines on comics who ran over their allotted time. The club had prosperous years in the mid-"90s, but by 1998 the stand-up boom was past, bigger-name comics were moving on to theaters, and All Jokes Aside closed. Mr. Lambert tried to reopen but found out just how formidable Chicago's political and racial obstacles could be. Mr. Davies's film is likely to make viewers of any race nostalgic for the club's prime years. The scene there was high-energy and extremely well dressed. The comic Lavell Crawford recalls all the furs worn by women in the audience: "You'd see chinchillas, you'd see some beavers, you'd see some foxes. You'd think you were on Animal Planet. Though the Comedy Central tribute makes no mention of All Jokes Aside, "Phunny Business" name checks Mac, making him sound like a main reason for the club's success. "It's as simple as this," Mr. Lambert says. No Bernie Mac, no All Jokes Aside.