In a long alleyway in Red Hook, Brooklyn, not far from the East River, Tracy Morgan sat on a director’s chair, his feet dangling high off the ground. He was surrounded by a languid swarm of crew members, who brought him water, fussed over the orange jumpsuit that was his costume for the day, and kept him shaded from the sun. Morgan has a plush love seat for a nose and a protrusive mouth that tugs the rest of his face forward, but his eyes are the key to his knack for physical comedy—he controls their focus with gonzo precision. Sometimes he looks upward and grins, mimicking the innocent gaze of a child; at other times, he tucks in his chin and offers a stare that lands about a yard beyond the ostensible object of his attention. Now he looked restless.
It was a September scorcher, cloudless at noon, and Morgan was working himself into a muddled but intense emotional state—jokey, sentimental, triumphant, pissed—in order to film a climactic scene from the second-season finale of his TBS sitcom, “The Last O.G.” (Season 2 premièred in April.) Morgan plays Tray Barker, a man who has returned to his old neighborhood in Brooklyn after fifteen years in prison on a drug charge. Just before his arrest, Tray unknowingly impregnated his girlfriend, Shay, played by Tiffany Haddish, best known for the torrent of ribaldry that she brought to the movie “Girls Trip.” With Tray out of her life, Shay became a successful designer and married a white man, with whom she is raising Tray’s twins. In the first season, Tray, desperate to earn a place in his children’s lives, takes a job at a Starbucks-like coffee shop, one of many signs of local gentrification. In the second season, he tries to launch a business venture that draws on his experience and also suits the neighborhood’s changing demographics: a prison-themed food truck.
Morgan, who was born in the Bronx and brought up mainly in Brooklyn, got his first big break in 1996, when he was cast on “Saturday Night Live,” where he went on to spend seven seasons. Ten years later, Tina Fey, a former colleague at “S.N.L.,” wrote a part for him on “30 Rock,” a backstage sitcom set at an “S.N.L.”-style sketch show called “T.G.S.” Morgan tends to play characters who, like him, speak in energetic, irreproducible rhythms, jumping from one topic to the next along logical grooves that are not always apparent to his interlocutors. “The Last O.G.” is a comedy, but it often plays the heaviness of its material straight, and the finale of Season 2 required Morgan to summon all the calamity, regret, and striving that had characterized Tray’s life thus far. He pumped himself up by speaking Tray’s inner truths, and his own, aloud, to whoever happened to be listening. “Everything I went through,” he said. “All that time, all that work!”
Morgan’s voice is thick and textured, almost syrupy on longer syllables, with an old-school black Brooklyn accent. He erodes consonants, turns simple vowels into unpredictable diphthongs, and takes each new sentence as an opportunity for rococo improvisation. “What are we here?” he asked a crew member, who had no clue what he was talking about until Morgan fixed his lips to form a word that clearly started with the letter “F.” “Oh, a family,” the crew member said.
Morgan called more people over, asking variations of the same question and looking over at me each time he got the answer he wanted. “Everybody came over here and said ‘family,’ ” he told me, when he was satisfied with the survey. “I ain’t tell them to say that!” Morgan is proud of the collaborative tone that he has fostered on set. “I’m Tracy Morgan, I know that, but I love you,” he told me at one point, explaining, I think, his democratic approach. “When ‘The Last O.G.’ appeared, you said, ‘What is this?’ ” he continued. “And now you’re here, writing about it. That’s how different it is. This is not a show about the community. This is a show starring the community.” Then, pointing at me with one of his short, solid arms: “Print that!”
Given the show’s affection for Morgan’s Brooklyn, and certain biographical overlaps between character and actor—Morgan grew up mostly in housing projects, and he sold crack for a brief time in his teens before he started doing standup—a viewer might deduce that Tray is Morgan, barely disguised. “I don’t think he’s acting,” the rapper and actor Method Man, who has a part in Season 2, told me. Method Man’s character, Green Eyes, is based on an old friend of Morgan’s. The series’ head writer, Saladin Patterson, who was a writer and a producer on “The Bernie Mac Show,” “Psych,” and “The Big Bang Theory,” told me that, when he was working on the narrative arc of “The Last O.G.,” Morgan “would just call and share stories about people from his real-life past,” because he wanted Patterson “to sprinkle those people, those characters, those relationships throughout.” Method Man said, of Morgan, “This is his life. He’s just living.”
On “S.N.L.,” Morgan was best known for goofy, high-concept characters—most famously Brian Fellow, a vain and vaguely effeminate naturalist who engaged in intense, one-sided feuds with the animals that appeared on his daytime TV show. But, since then, he has usually played fictionalized versions of himself. First, starting in 2003, there was the short-lived NBC sitcom “The Tracy Morgan Show,” based loosely on Morgan’s life and his standup routines. Then, there was “30 Rock,” on which Morgan played an immensely popular and benignly out-to-lunch comedian named Tracy Jordan, whose arrival at “T.G.S.” was a kind of cataclysm. Morgan was riveting in the part, which fixed a popular perception of him that he has alternately relished and chafed under ever since. “30 Rock” ended its run in 2013, but people still call out the name Tracy Jordan when they see Morgan on the street.
In June, 2014, Morgan was in a limo bus on the New Jersey Turnpike, headed home after a standup date in Delaware, with several other comedians—including one of Morgan’s best and oldest friends, James McNair, better known by his stage name, Jimmy Mack—when a Walmart tractor trailer slammed into the vehicle. McNair, who was sixty-two, died in the crash; Morgan fell into a coma that lasted for eight days. When he awoke, he had to relearn how to walk and talk. He sued Walmart, and the company settled. The terms are confidential, but Morgan has said that he now has enough money that he no longer needs to work. Even so, he has, if anything, become more ambitious.
“Tracy was primed for a comeback,” the actor and filmmaker Jordan Peele, who is an executive producer on “The Last O.G.,” told me. During his rehab, Morgan watched a lot of Peele’s sketch-comedy series “Key & Peele,” and after he recovered he met with Peele, who, at the time, was working on his directorial début, “Get Out.” Morgan and Peele came up with the premise for “The Last O.G.,” and began developing it for FX, which passed, before TBS picked it up. Although Tray’s return to civilian life has echoes of Morgan’s return to show business after the highway crash, the character can be better understood as a counterfactual exercise: Tray is who Morgan might have been, given a bad—or, given the details of Morgan’s fairly tumultuous life, a worse—break.
Morgan often speaks in maxims. When I asked him whether he was nervous about the new season of the show, he said, “I don’t feel pressure—I apply pressure.” He envisages a long future for “The Last O.G.” in syndication, he told me. “I want Nick at Nite,” he said. “Keep all the trophies! I want Nick at Nite. I want my grandkids to see this.” Somewhere near the middle of the word “grandkids”—which he had protracted into a lengthy and lavishly vowelled production—he began to cry. The tears fell freely; Morgan didn’t wipe them away.
“Any more questions?” he asked. We’d been talking for maybe ten minutes. “Or are you caught up in the rapture? Soaking it all in?”
By the time the sun had dried the lines of moisture from his face, Morgan was shouting out to another crew member about his recent diet: “I told you—I been on some flounder shit for the past four days!”
When I had Morgan’s attention again, I asked whether he followed any method in his acting. The trick is to “rest your soul,” he said. “You wanna know how it is to act? Rest your soul!”
He’d insisted, earlier, that I accept a bottle of water from one of his assistants (“Stay hydrated,” he’d said, gesturing toward the sun), and that I accept some help in cooling down. (“Put some ice on his neck,” he’d told somebody. Then, to me, as the ice was applied: “Now tell me that shit don’t feel good.”) He looked at me as if he were ready to offer more assistance, this time of a spiritual kind.
“You know how to rest your soul?” he asked. I didn’t, and I told him so. “Take a breath,” he said. “You know how to relax? Or did you forget?” I had. “Sure you did. Relax. If you’re around me, relax.” Now he looked more deeply into my eyes, despite my effort to break the stare.
“Look at me. Relax.”
Then, diagnostically, and a bit impatiently, he said, “The problem with you? You don’t know how to keep it simple.” We’d known each other for not quite half an hour. He wasn’t wrong. “You complicate your fucking life—with things.” He said the word “things” with ascetic disdain. “Stop doing that.”
He called out to another crew member, this time to bring over his wireless speaker. He pressed a button on his phone, and “Human Nature,” by Michael Jackson, came flooding out. “Wanna hear me sing?” he asked. He began yowling along, tacking his versions of Jackson’s famous grunts and falsettos into the space between each phrase: “If they say why, why, tell ’em that it’s human nature! Why, why does he do me that way?”
“The Last O.G.” employs, then contravenes, the familiar beats of a family sitcom. In an early episode, Tray shows up at the fancy private school that his son and his daughter, Shazad and Amira, attend, and takes them to the housing project where he and Shay grew up. “Me and your mother had a proper Brooklyn love story,” he says, before telling them about the time Shay threw a brick through a police car’s windshield to prove her love for him. (“And then she turned around and said, ‘Fuck the police, Tray,’ ” he recalls.) “I think it’s time for me to take y’all back to where y’all come from,” he says. He leads the kids to a cemetery and points to a grassy spot. “That’s where me and your mother made you,” he says. “I can’t believe you all had sex in a cemetery,” Amira replies. “Let me tell you something, Amira,” Tray says. “The cemetery is like the ghetto itself, full of sadness and death. But it’s also full of life.”
The scene is one instance of the show’s directly borrowing from Morgan’s own life. In “I Am the New Black,” a memoir he published in 2009, he describes how his father, Jimmy—a musician and a Vietnam veteran who split with Morgan’s mother, Alice, when Morgan was six years old—took him for a walk through East New York, in Brooklyn, when Morgan was a teen-ager. Jimmy took Tracy to the metal bleachers by the side of the field at a local high school:
Morgan adds, “My dad taught me how to tell a story.”
Morgan was born in 1968, and he spent much of his childhood in the Tompkins Houses, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Jimmy and Alice grew up in the Tompkins Houses, too, and knew each other as kids. Alice was from a family of strict Jehovah’s Witnesses. After they got together, Jimmy served multiple tours in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner, and he returned hooked on heroin. Two years later, Alice discovered her oldest son, Jim, playing with a needle he’d found on the floor, and asked Jimmy to leave. He ended up moving to the Bronx.
“I Am the New Black” is raunchy and funny, but it is also sometimes startlingly dark; its overriding theme is trauma, though Morgan never uses that word. His brother Jim contracted spinal meningitis as a toddler, and lost the use of his legs. (Jim’s childhood nickname was Reality.) When Morgan was eight, he writes, a fourteen-year-old babysitter, whom he doesn’t name, had “real sex” with him and with Jim. “I don’t think that girl molested us,” Morgan says now. “She was just inquisitive. She was a good person.” In the memoir, he describes crying afterward, and explains that the girl “gave me a stack of Oreo cookies to keep me quiet. It wasn’t the only time it happened either,” he writes. “Damn. Memories.”
Morgan started having sex with some frequency at the age of twelve, and says that he has been obsessed with sex ever since. (One of his favorite ways to warm up a standup crowd is to shout—less as braggadocio than as a matter of inevitable, shrugged-at fact—that he’s “going to get somebody pregnant tonight.” ) Alice had three more kids after Jim and Tracy, and she struggled to raise the five of them alone. At thirteen, Morgan left home, determined to live with his dad. For two nights, he says, he slept in subway cars, riding between Brooklyn and the South Bronx, unsure how his father would react if he appeared. He showed up at his father’s doorstep “smelling like ass,” he writes. “Just a confused teenage son who’d left his mother’s home two hours away in Coney Island with no plan.” Morgan lived with his father for the next two years. His mother kept him in school in Brooklyn, so he spent hours commuting each day. Eventually, there was a custody hearing. Morgan describes the judge, “this old white man,” inviting him and two of his younger siblings, Paris and Asia, into his chambers, and asking them which parent they wanted to live with. They said that they wanted to live with their dad. When the judge informed the parents of his verdict, Alice “yelled that they were taking her babies away, and she cried like I’d never seen her do before or since,” Morgan writes. Later, he and his mother stopped speaking, and they went years without seeing each other. In the memoir, he writes, “Everything I’ve done in my career is because I wanted my mother’s love.”
Morgan reads the audio version of “I Am the New Black,” and he ad-libs and elaborates throughout, veering into extemporaneous rumination on his experiences. At one point, he says, almost casually, “Another devastating day in my life was when I learned my father had AIDS.” Jimmy died when Morgan was nineteen years old. (His father’s brother-in-law Alvin, who played football in college and was Morgan’s childhood sports idol, also died of AIDS.) By then, many of Morgan’s friends had entered the drug trade, and he decided to try his hand at it, too. Among his haunts was the old Yankee Stadium, where he scalped tickets and sold cocaine and souvenirs. On a spring day in 1987, as the Yankees played the Minnesota Twins, Morgan saw “this bomb-ass chick on a pay phone,” he writes. He tells a friend, “I could pull her like a hamstring.” He struck up a conversation with the woman, whose name was Sabina, and they soon became an item. She was four years older than Morgan, and had two young children, Malcolm and Benji. They moved in together, had another child, Tracy, Jr., and married a few years later. Morgan eventually adopted Sabina’s kids and raised them as his own.
He had already started to question his drug dealing: he was so bad at it, he writes, that he had to work fast-food jobs at the same time to keep money in his pocket. Eventually, after two of his friends and fellow-dealers were shot and killed, he gave it up for good. Morgan, who had always been able to make people laugh, was urged by friends to try standup. When he told Sabina he was going to do it, she said, “I’ve got you, but you’ve got to keep at this no matter how hard it gets.” (Morgan and Sabina divorced in 2009.)
“I got funny to survive,” Morgan writes. And, indeed, the rhythm of his life seems to be this: macabre lows followed quickly by the kind of triumph that feels like a joke. He explained himself similarly to me. “Three things kept us”—poor black people—“from killing ourselves: jokes, music, and fucking,” he said. “Why you think I became a comedian? I got funny ’cause it kept my mind away from being poor. Those hunger pains hurt, so I got funny. I’m hungry funny. That’s what separated me from a lot of motherfuckers in my generation. That hunger.”
In November, Morgan celebrated his fiftieth birthday with a standup show at the Beacon Theatre, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The show was part of the annual New York Comedy Festival. For Morgan, it was the culmination of a kind of comeback tour. The first season of “The Last O.G.” had received good ratings and solid reviews, and he’d been doing standup with arguably more rigor and consistency than he had in the years before the crash. Earlier that week, in a ceremony at Brooklyn Borough Hall, he’d been given a key to the borough. Everywhere he went, people seemed happy just to see him.
His S.U.V. pulled up outside the stage door at the Beacon, and he hustled from the car through a metal detector—it beeped but went unheeded—and onto a narrow escalator that took him up a few floors, to the green room. He was accompanied by the model Megan Wollover, whom he married in 2015; their five-year-old daughter, Maven; and Tracy, Jr. Morgan wore a do-rag that looked to be made of velvet, and a champagne-colored Gucci sweatsuit. Several friends were waiting for him in the green room. “Happy birthday!” they shouted, popping a bottle of Martinelli’s apple cider. Morgan used to drink before going onstage, but the habit became unmanageable during his years on “S.N.L.,” and he got sober about a decade ago. A tray of mini-cupcakes sat on a low wooden table.
Somebody produced the wireless speaker I’d seen on the “Last O.G.” set, and Morgan put on a mix that began with Faith Evans’s “You Used to Love Me.” As the music went on, the tracks got funkier and stretched further into the past. Morgan sat on a ratty-looking couch, cracking jokes and going over bits from his set with the comedian Jeff Stilson, a longtime standup with a friendly, weathered face. Stilson was a writer on the “Late Show with David Letterman” and “The Chris Rock Show,” and now writes for “The Last O.G.” and helps generate standup material for Morgan. He held a piece of printer paper with an outline of the night’s routine and walked Morgan through the order of the jokes, jogging his memory about the contours of stuff he hadn’t performed in a while.
Shortly after Morgan got into standup, in the late eighties, he began attending a workshop held on Wednesdays at the Uptown Comedy Club, on 133rd Street, in Harlem. There he learned the fundamentals of the craft. “I hate to see a comedian fucking around with the mike stand,” he told me. “Take the mike out, put the stand away, and get going!” Within a couple of weeks, Morgan started getting regular slots at the club. In 1992, a television show featuring Uptown Comedy performers onstage began airing on local networks, and Morgan was chosen as a cast member. Method Man, who was a guest on the show several times as part of the Wu-Tang Clan, saw hints then, he told me, of Morgan’s mature style. Method Man grew up on Staten Island and on Long Island; Morgan “was more New York, more ghetto” than other comedians, he said, adding, “I could tell he was from my era.” One evening, when the comedian Chris Tucker couldn’t make it, Morgan headlined the show. He did a bit that he called “fat Michael Jackson,” telling the crowd that he was a distant cousin of the King of Pop, putting a dirty white sock on one of his hands, and doing a poor imitation of the moonwalk. He also did a routine about “a little boy from the ghetto named Biscuit,” who wears a beanie with a propeller and is “angry at everybody because his daddy left the family.” (Morgan, in his memoir, notes that his “favorite bit was when Biscuit got so mad about his dad leaving his mom that he beat up Barney,” the purple dinosaur.)
A year later, Morgan got a slot on HBO’s “Def Comedy Jam,” which was hosted by Martin Lawrence, who, at the time, also had his own sitcom, “Martin,” on Fox. You can find the set on YouTube. Lawrence introduces Morgan in what looks like a state of astonishment. “You’re gonna enjoy him, because the boy is bugged out,” he says. “And he’s from Brooklyn, New York, straight from the motherfuckin’ projects.” Morgan bounds onstage wearing a beanie with a food stamp taped to its front, and a baggy white dress shirt buttoned up to only the bottom of his sternum, his broad, upholstered-looking chest poking out. He acts as a sort of aggrieved emissary from a comic underclass, musing about a new public-housing-themed cologne called Back Stairway and complaining about Puerto Rican neighbors, with their music and the smells of their garlic and adobo. He spits out “adobo” almost combatively, directing it with senseless annoyance at a Latina woman in the audience. The word’s three syllables—with a hard, hoarse emphasis on the “do”—are a marvel of facial and tonal slapstick, hacky as text but brilliant as performance.
The set shows his nearness in tone to contemporaries like Lawrence, Robin Harris, and Bernie Mac—big physicality, exuberant profanity, a preference for the stuff of daily life rather than for politics and social commentary—but it also points backward. Morgan, like every comic, has watched a lot of Richard Pryor, and his standup, like Pryor’s, dwells on the viscera of working-class existence. He talks about blown-off limbs, drug-embattled uncles, dark nipples, genital funk, and crud of all rude kinds. Over the years, his presentation has sharpened; the register of blunt, set-stopping anger is still available to him, but he usually cloaks it in bafflement at the outer world, rather than in exasperation at the particular corner of it that he comes from. Since the crash, he has tended to steer his comedy in a positive direction.
Morgan’s real debt is to the generation of performers who preceded Pryor. “I would study Jackie Gleason, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett,” he told me. When he and Peele first talked about “The Last O.G.,” he mentioned that he’d like to play a character like Gleason’s Ralph Kramden, from “The Honeymooners”—cantankerous and somewhat overmatched by the changing times, but ultimately sympathetic.
Morgan especially brings to mind the posture and the milieu of Redd Foxx, who became famous, in the fifties, for his “party records”—LPs that captured his profane night-club acts which people could put on in their living rooms, to re-create that exotic late-night atmosphere for their families and friends. Foxx went on to star in the sitcom “Sanford and Son,” which premièred in 1972, and brought an entire attitude out of the night-club scene and gained it worldwide public attention. (Morgan was approached a few years ago about playing Foxx in a long-planned Pryor bio-pic, but the movie has yet to be made; a photograph of Foxx hangs in the halfway house where Tray lives on “The Last O.G.”) To listen to the old records, with their jokes about bodies and faces and the ongoing problem of achieving orgasm, is to revel in Foxx’s flouting of speech codes, and to visit a largely black world of comedy and entertainment that wouldn’t enjoy mass viewership until the eighties and nineties, with the arrival of shows like “Def Comedy Jam” and BET’s “ComicView.” These shows helped introduce comedians like Morgan, Sommore, and Bruce Bruce, whose early popularity depended on a large audience of viewers whose experiences and vocal styles had not yet been spun upward into popular art.
These performers did not adopt the ironic stance of the comic as outsider—in contrast to Pryor, who, at the start of his career, worked to mimic mainstream comics like Bill Cosby and Johnny Carson, and whose raunchier, “realer” mid-career style was in fact a canny melding of street cadence, ardent confession, and the cool, Catskills-descended presentation of those earlier models. Rather, they acted as emotional conduits, channelling, through vocal and physical mimicry, familiar types: your auntie, your cousin, the neighborhood storefront preacher. (Pryor could do those kinds of routines, too; but, then, he could do it all.) When they mentioned race, it was less often to lament or point out racism than to describe, almost lovingly, a set of intimate, in-group experiences. The result was the kind of gut-busting laughter that commentator comics, however clever, often fail to elicit. Chris Rock has told the story of trying to follow Martin Lawrence, who was serving as his opening act, after some time away from standup—Rock had done a short, frustrating stint on “S.N.L.”—and being intimidated by the raucous laughter and foot stomping that he heard while waiting backstage. “It was like watching somebody fuck your wife with a bigger dick,” Rock said.
Backstage at the Beacon, as showtime approached, Stilson brought up an old bit that Morgan hadn’t done in a while. “About your grandmother?” he said.
Morgan grunted in recognition. “Wife’s grandmother,” he said.
But neither of them could remember the bit all the way through. Other people started to huddle around, trying to reconstruct the specific wording of the joke and the vocal inflections that made it funny.
Morgan’s friend Marc Theobald, a frequent opener on Morgan’s standup tours and another writer for “The Last O.G.,” walked in, wearing a shiny gold blazer, a gift from Morgan. He got some friendly shit for the getup.
“Marc, how did I do that joke about when I was visiting my wife’s grandmother?” Morgan asked.
“White grandmother,” Stilson said.
“ ‘You’re scared your grandmother’s gonna call me a nigger,’ ” Morgan said, trying to jog Theobald’s memory and his own.
No, no, Theobald corrected, above some crosstalk. The joke, he explained, was that his wife was nervous that her mother “was gonna call you a nigger because she’d just called somebody a nigger the day before!”
“Yeah,” Morgan said, remembering. “ ‘We went to go visit her grandmother down South . . .’ ”
“That’s what it was,” Stilson said. “ ‘But he was a nice . . .’ ” Stilson did not say “nigger.” Stilson is white.
“That’s a great joke,” Morgan said.
“A great joke,” Stilson said, pointing at his printout. “And it fits right in here!”
The music had turned to Al Green’s “Call Me.” Stilson said, nostalgically, “Tracy, explain to me—why don’t they use horns anymore?” It sounded like a prompt for fresh material.
“The studios don’t wanna pay for the backup singers and they don’t wanna pay for groups!” Morgan said, as though he’d been holding back this complaint for a while. “Why would they, when you can just lay tracks behind somebody. All they need is one person. I told you: entertainment is going to Wall Street. It’s all going to Wall Street. Nowadays there are no more Robert Redfords. Nowadays the movie is the star. You look at ‘Star Wars’ and you don’t know anybody in there!”
Morgan looked offended to the point of befuddled pain. “Because of Instagram, there’s a lot of celebrities,” he went on. “There are very few stars. Very few! Denzel’s probably the last one that’s active. Cruise, maybe. They’re not trying to pay nobody ten million a movie anymore.”
At the mention of Washington and Cruise, people started chiming in with other names. Wasn’t Michael B. Jordan, from “Black Panther” and the new “Creed” franchise, gearing up for the old-school star treatment?
“Very few,” Morgan said, settling the matter. “I’m probably the last star out.”
He looked over at me, grinning. “I was joking. Don’t fucking quote me on that. I’m just doing my thing.”
Early in 1994, after Morgan had made a second appearance on “Def Comedy Jam,” Lawrence gave him a small recurring role on “Martin.” He played Hustle Man, a guy who’s always trying to turn somebody else’s throwaway items into a buck or two for himself. It was his first part on a scripted show. Then Morgan’s agent at the time, Barry Katz, got him an audition for “Saturday Night Live.” Morgan says that he felt loyal to Lawrence, but he knew that “Martin” wouldn’t be around forever. When he mentioned “S.N.L.” to Sabina, she said, “That’s where Eddie comes from,” as in Murphy. “Wow,” Morgan said. He did his Biscuit routine at the tryout, and he got the job. “Choosing me for the cast was like giving white America a dose of BET,” Morgan writes in the memoir, adding, “I knew the score; this was a white show and I was the token black guy. That didn’t bother me.” (Morgan overlapped with a handful of other black performers on the show, including Tim Meadows and, more briefly, Finesse Mitchell.)
Some standups without a background in the collaborative work of sketch performance have struggled on “S.N.L.” Morgan found success early on, perhaps because he has none of the stereotypical standup comedian’s hangups about performing material that other people have written. As he reminded me, the source of his uniqueness as a performer isn’t the content of his jokes. “It’s not about material,” he said. “It’s just being funny. Anybody can get material, but you’re either funny or you’re not.”
Tina Fey told me, “I remember early on realizing that, the kind of funny Tracy is—just, you can’t teach it, and you can’t buy it.” Fey arrived at “S.N.L.,” as a writer, a year after Morgan. Some of the actors, she noticed, were sticklers about each beat of the sketches in which they appeared. But Morgan “just kind of breezed in and charmed the room,” she said. “I don’t think his hands have ever typed a sketch on a keyboard. When he would say something at the table, or when he would roll out in front of the audience, you could feel that they were predisposed to like him.” She added, “Some people have that, and the rest of us—it takes years for us to build the audience’s trust that we’re allowed to be talking. You could just feel people sit up and be, like, ‘Ah! This is gonna be funny!’ ”
“Tracy’s not someone you go to for precision, necessarily,” Fey continued. “It’s not race-based,” she added, tacitly acknowledging how easily these stylistic categories might slide into racial observation. “There’s a lot of white actors that I would also not go to for precision—they’re more visceral, they’re more . . . they feel it in the moment.”
One of the first things that Fey worked on with Morgan was a sketch in which he played the TV personality Star Jones, who is best known for her work on “The View.” “It’s not a great source of pride that one of my most successful things I did with him was put him in drag,” Fey said. “There should have been a female African-American—or three or four—there to do it.” Morgan didn’t have a Star Jones impression. The sight of him in a dress just made people laugh.
Morgan threw parties after the after-parties that “S.N.L.” has long been famous for. “They were sometimes in, like, a makeshift illegal casino, in an empty loft, and there were women there, serving drinks—women in thongs,” Fey said. “He’d be, like, ‘You gotta come to my party!’ ” By then, Morgan writes in the memoir, he had begun rolling with a rather large entourage. “I had this felon named Young God around me, I had Pumpkin, I had motherfuckers named Guilty all around me.” He felt less comfortable around his castmates. “I had my finger on the pulse of urban comedy, but when I brought my act to ‘S.N.L.’ those motherfuckers just felt bad for me,” he writes.
After Fey left “S.N.L.,” she pitched a TV show to Kevin Reilly, then the president of NBC’s entertainment division—and now, incidentally, the president of TBS, home to “The Last O.G.” The concept was for a sitcom set at a cable-news channel which played the tension between a liberal producer and a conservative pundit for laughs. Reilly suggested that she write something set at a place like “S.N.L.” instead, and, almost immediately, Fey thought of Morgan. Adding a “rich movie-star version” of her former co-worker could, she realized, make for a more complex arrangement of non-convergent world views. On “30 Rock,” Fey played Liz Lemon, the put-upon head writer of “T.G.S.,” alongside Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy, the semi-sociopathic NBC executive who is Lemon’s boss, and Morgan as the hammy and self-centered Tracy Jordan, whom Donaghy hires as the new face of Lemon’s show—led, to that point, by a pretty, blond star, played by Jane Krakowski.
“I was just young enough—just by a minute young enough and foolish enough—to not realize how potentially insulting that could be,” Fey said, of her characterization of the over-the-top Tracy Jordan, which skimmed perilously close to her perceptions of Morgan. The character was also based, in part, on other black comedians, like Lawrence and Murphy, who had gone from doing standup to being movie stars, and then had embarrassing public episodes that called into question not only their fitness for the spotlight but also our culture’s ability to accommodate rare talent in black artists. The first episode of “30 Rock” features a quick montage of Tracy’s recent erratic behavior, including a clip of him walking through traffic in nothing but briefs, brandishing a toy lightsabre and screaming, “I am a Jedi!” It was an obvious echo of a 1996 incident in which Lawrence ran onto Ventura Boulevard, in Sherman Oaks, California, carrying a handgun in his pocket and shouting, “Fight the establishment!”
When critics pointed out the resemblance, Morgan worried that he might have offended his friend, and he went to Fey. “He was right to be concerned,” she told me. “When you come out of ‘S.N.L.,’ and you’re just used to doing whatever you want all the time, you’re just, like, ‘Yeah, listen, I think it’s gonna be fine.’ ” Lawrence had joked about the incident, too: on his widely praised standup special “Runteldat,” from 2002, he admitted that he was on drugs at the time. “I was smoking that ooh-wee! ” he says. “What kind of shit has the dope man sold me?!” Morgan went to Lawrence, who, he says, told him, “If it’s funny, do it.” It was Lawrence, Morgan added, who got him “to see that the court jester was the noblest person in the court. He was the only one allowed to tell the truth.”
Morgan has never had a problem with jokes that use his own persona as the punch line. During his first season on “S.N.L.,” he woke up one morning unable to see. He was given a diagnosis of diabetes, but he continued to eat and drink heavily. In 2004, after the cancellation of “The Tracy Morgan Show,” he went on the road to do standup, and the drinking worsened—twice, he almost slipped into a diabetic coma. He was arrested for drunk driving in December, 2005, and sentenced to three years’ probation; then, a month after the “30 Rock” première, in the fall of 2006, he got another D.U.I. During the show’s second season, he was using insulin whenever he felt sick. His immune system finally gave way, and he was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. His doctors told him that he should have been dead. “We would be shooting, and between takes someone would come into his dressing room and take part of his foot off,” Fey said. He shot much of that season wearing a court-ordered ankle bracelet, on account of the drunk-driving convictions. “And, to his credit, he was, like, ‘Yeah, fine, write jokes about it,’ ” Fey said. She hadn’t planned for the character to share a first name with Morgan, but he had insisted. “ ‘I’m gonna get famous doing this,’ ” Fey remembers him saying. “ ‘I don’t want people yelling at me on the street going, like, “Hey Chickie!” ’ He wanted that Jerry Seinfeld mold of ‘Just call me Jerry if you see me on the street.’ ”
The role not only artfully transmuted Morgan’s persona but also used the unique unction of his performance to comment on the entanglement of race and comedy. The show’s eighth episode, “The Break-Up,” featured a secondary plot about the relationship between Tracy Jordan and a “T.G.S.” staff writer nicknamed Toofer—as in “twofer,” because he is, as one character puts it, both “a black guy” and “a Harvard guy.” Toofer, played by Keith Powell, is a parody of the kind of highly educated, quasi-intellectual black person who might view broad humor like Tracy’s—and Morgan’s—as embarrassing to the race. Tracy is cast in a “T.G.S.” skit as a woman named Shamanda, and Toofer objects. “I just think it’s demeaning for a black man to do drag,” he says, adding, “Chris Rock doesn’t do it. Dr. Cosby doesn’t do it.” Tracy decides he won’t do it, either; then the bit is a smash with a white castmate in the part. Tracy, regretful, angrily regales Toofer with a counter-canon: “Eddie does it, Martin does it—Jamie Foxx, Flip Wilson!” The exchange pinpoints a tension between divergent styles in black comedy—a divide that has to do not only with personal sensibility but with how much a given comic cares about how white people view his work. It calls to mind a routine from Murphy’s standup special “Raw,” in which he describes getting an out-of-the-blue phone call from Cosby, who, he says, demanded that Murphy refrain from all the “filth-flarn-filth” in his act.
In another first-season episode of “30 Rock,” the Black Crusaders, a group of celebrities led by Cosby and Oprah Winfrey, agitate to end Tracy’s career, because they regard him as a discredit to the race. The story line was inspired by a conspiracy theory that arose after the comedian Dave Chappelle abruptly quit his popular sketch-comedy series, “Chappelle’s Show,” in early 2005. Several months later, Chappelle explained, on “Oprah,” why he’d actually left. He’d been taping a sketch, he said, and a white person on set had laughed in a way that made him worry about the nature of his comedy. “I know the difference of people laughing with me and people laughing at me,” he said. Chappelle also spoke to Oprah about his sense that white executives in Hollywood exploit black performers: “When I see that they put every black man in the movies in a dress at some point in their career, I start connecting the dots.”
When I first watched “The Break-Up,” I found that it articulated, and then mocked, my own reservations about how white audiences—and even, to some extent, the white writers on “30 Rock”—understood their appreciation for a performer like Tracy Morgan. (Donald Glover, who went on to create and star in “Atlanta,” about a black Princeton dropout, wrote for “30 Rock,” but he tended to pitch stories that centered on Kenneth, the white network page played by Jack McBrayer, who, like Glover, is from Georgia.) It’s one thing to hear Martin Lawrence call Morgan “bugged out” and connect that to his being from “the projects”—it’s another to hear a white person say something similar. But the message of “The Break-Up” might be that, if Morgan doesn’t care, I shouldn’t, either. The point of comedy—at least, of Morgan’s kind of comedy—is that it’s an opportunity to take a break. Relax.
Fey told me that the “30 Rock” writers often threw random lines at Morgan which they thought would be funny to hear him say, and he’d deliver one bonkers interpretation after another, making bouquets of oddball actorly choices. She remembered one, verbatim, echoing Morgan’s intonation perfectly: “I once saw a baby give another baby a tattoo. They were very drunk! ”
The line appears in a fourth-season episode of “30 Rock,” in which Tracy declares his intention to win an Oscar, then finds that he can’t do the emotional work necessary to deliver a performance dramatic enough to win the award. He’s forgotten most of his childhood. “From ’75 to ’82 is just a blur,” he says. Tracy’s bodyguard Dot Com (Kevin Brown, the former business manager of the Uptown Comedy Club) and Kenneth, the page, take Tracy to his old neighborhood, and the painful memories come pouring hilariously forth.
“It’s all coming back to me!” Tracy says, tearing up. “Oh, my God! I slept on an old dog bed stuffed with wigs! I watched a prostitute stab a clown! Our basketball hoop was a rib cage. A rib cage! Why did you bring me here? I blocked all this stuff out for a reason. Oh, Lord! Some guy with dreads electrocuted my fish!”
“The Last O.G.” allows Morgan to revisit his past in a more grounded, and even slightly sentimental, way. It’s what he’s wanted to do on TV for a long time. “The Tracy Morgan Show” was supposed to draw on his early experiences. “I wanted to tell a story about the ghetto,” he writes, in “I Am the New Black.” But the show’s creators, he says, “turned it into a false idea of what it’s like to be a black family,” and it became “a modernized Cosby Show.” In addition to Haddish, who, like Morgan, got an early TV break on “Def Comedy Jam,” “The Last O.G.” features Cedric the Entertainer, who helped to popularize “Def Jam”-style comedy on the “Original Kings of Comedy” tour. The show, which has not yet been renewed for a third season, revels in the kind of comedy that made Morgan feel like an outsider on the set of “S.N.L.,” and it sometimes struggles to balance the excitement of that mode with its more dramatic moments. Tray, on occasion, behaves ridiculously, but he’s not primarily the object of fun. Rather than a novelty, he’s an Everyman, surrounded by people who share his values. “He’s a very smart guy, and the characters that he’s played in the past are sort of crazy, in a way,” Peele told me. “I was really taken with the depth of Tracy Morgan—I hadn’t seen that.” There are many differences between “The Last O.G.” and Morgan’s work on network television, but one of the most striking is that “The Last O.G.” does not seem to have been made primarily with white viewers in mind.
Recently, I went to see Morgan at the house he built after the Walmart settlement, a brick-sheathed mansion in Alpine, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from New York. There’s a machine next to the huge front door which Saran-Wraps the bottoms of your shoes, so that you don’t track dirt onto the shiny white tiled floors. Morgan’s office, near the back of the house, is styled after Vito Corleone’s, in “The Godfather,” with black leather, gold drapes, and an oversized desk, covered in awards. Morgan has always loved fish, and the office, in a departure from Coppola’s vision, contains two extremely large fish tanks, each of them florid with neon plants and dangerous-looking creatures slipping around in dark water. “I’ve got some of the most poisonous fish in the world in there,” Morgan said. A guy named John, shortish and smiley in a red cap and a drab uniform, cleaned the glass and tended to the fish as we talked.
Morgan, dressed in a white sweatsuit with black stripes, reminisced about an evening in the mid-nineties, shortly after he was cast in “Martin.” He was at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles with Lawrence. “Guess who rolled in,” Morgan said. “He was already in a wheelchair: Richard. I started crying.” He looked like he might do so again right then. “I got his autograph on a piece of paper, and I kept it in my wallet for twelve years.”
Keeping relics like these is a lifelong habit of Morgan’s. He tends to hold on for as long as he can. “Lemme show you something deep,” he said. He produced a Fendi wallet from one of his pockets and pulled out what looked like an enormous ball of lint matted against a crumpled piece of paper. He held it out, close to my face.
“Do you know what that is?”
My guess, some schmutz and a forgotten receipt, didn’t seem appropriate to say. I told him I didn’t know.
“It’s cotton from Africa,” he said. “Pure cotton—Bora Bora! Or, not Bora Bora. I think it was St. Martin. One of them saint islands. This is where they got the cotton seeds to plant in America. Cotton! Our ancestors! This keeps me grounded! ” His face had gone stoic and his eyes looked meaningfully into mine.
“You know what that is, attached to it?” he asked, indicating the piece of paper. “That’s a food stamp.” The same food stamp, he explained, that he had stuck, like Yankee Doodle’s feather, onto the beanie that he wore when he débuted on “Def Comedy Jam,” initiating his path to stardom.
He led me away from the office and into a separate building on the property, just across from an outdoor pool. He wanted to watch as John, the fish guy, continued his work. Most of the pool house was occupied by a huge aquarium. This is where Morgan keeps his sharks. We sat on a little couch in a viewing area, and had to crane our necks to see the higher regions of the tank. Caked up against the wide pane of glass that we looked through were, here and there, a few ripples of dark-green algae. “Why is that there?” Morgan asked John. Apparently, it had something to do with the sun coming through the doors of the building. John said he would clean it off, but that it would inevitably grow back. Anyway, it did no harm to the sharks. They swam silently, carving pathways around mounds of coral and slowly waving seaweed.
“I want to try and go to Mecca to say a prayer for the world,” Morgan said, apropos of nothing in particular. “Look where we’re at!” he added. “Somebody’s gotta do it.”
I took him to be lamenting the general state of things, and I tried to commiserate. “It’s pretty bad,” I said.
“No, it ain’t,” he said. “Stop lying.”
He didn’t think that the world seemed to be in a rough state these days?
“No,” he said, looking genuinely irritated. “Are you here?”
“I am,” I said. “And that’s great, but—”
“Did you wake up this morning?”
I had.
“So you just said bad and great all in one sentence, sir! How is it bad and great?” His voice was rising. “Did you wake up this morning?” he asked, apparently unsatisfied with my earlier affirmation. Again, I said that I had.
“So He”—God, about whom Morgan speaks often and easily, without reference to any particular creed, but with total and obvious reverence and belief—“spared your life. It’s a beautiful place to be.” The world, that is; now I wondered why, if everything was so beautiful, he wanted to travel for so long to say that prayer, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask and get scolded again. “With all these broken dreams, and drudgery, and shams”—he elongated “shams” into an imprecatory, two-beat knife of a word—“it’s still a wonderful place to be. ’Cause when you’re in that fucking box, young man, you’re in that box. Enjoy it. Stop looking at the fucking news.”
He went on, “If you just watched the news, you’d be miserable.” My gloomy outlook had reminded him of his sense that, these days, comedians are overly harried and audiences are too worried about real-world troubles to mind the deeper imperative to sit back and laugh. “That was sacred ground on the stage,” he said. “Now you gotta watch what you say! It’s: freedom of speech, but watch what you say.”
The key to Morgan’s comedy, Peele told me, is its “fabulous exploration of all the shit you’re not supposed to say.” A comedian with Morgan’s skill and feel for an audience can generally find his way toward jokes suited to the tastes of any political attitude or moment in time. In his most recent special, “Staying Alive,” on Netflix, Morgan luxuriates in characteristically silly images: a penis singing Donna Summer, a new flavor of Ben & Jerry’s called Titty Milk and Splenda. When a woman in the audience cries out, “I love you Tracy!” he says, “I love you, too!” and then, seemingly as a reflex, asks her to lift up her shirt. He also talks about the crash as a point of division between his old life and a new one. “Before the accident, I could’ve sworn it was three Kardashians—Kim, Khloe, and Kourtney,” he says. “After I came out the coma, it was six of them motherfuckers. And one of them won the decathlon in 1976!” This joke, about his surprise at Caitlyn Jenner’s gender transition, then takes a turn. “Caitlyn is a hot MILF,” he says. “I’d fuck the shit out of her.” When he keeps going, getting into the scatology of that imagined encounter, it almost—almost—feels like a gesture of inclusion.
Not long before my visit, another black comedian, Kevin Hart, had lost his job as the host of the Oscars after people dug up comments he had made on Twitter which were full of gay slurs. One of Hart’s old jokes, about his fear that his son would be gay, had been considered in a new light. I asked Morgan what he thought of the incident.
“What did I think about it?” he said. “I went through it!”
In 2011, Morgan was onstage in Nashville, Tennessee, and talked about how he would react if his son told him that he was gay. That might be O.K., Morgan reportedly said, but his son better tell him “like a man and not in a gay voice, or I’ll pull out a knife and stab that little nigga to death.” Discomfort with homosexuality has popped up in Morgan’s act from the beginning, but the violence of the comment was unusual for him, and disturbing. He ended up going back to Nashville to visit with gay youth and to give a tearful, apologetic press conference.
What were his feelings about this experience now, years later?
“Just jokes,” he said. “I talk about everybody!”
Earlier, he’d told me a story about one of his first standup gigs, in a community center on Webster Avenue, in the Bronx. Back then, he said, he didn’t have any jokes; he’d just get onstage and poke fun at members of the audience. One night, he called out “this Puerto Rican girl” at random, made fun of her, and moved on, thinking little of it. “All I knew how to do was attack,” he said. After the show, he saw her crying in the parking lot. He resolved never to use his comedy as “a bully pulpit,” he said—only to help, to edify. “I said I’d never use the microphone to hurt anybody.” Comedy was supposed to be a tonic.
Now, though, he was indulging anger at the cultural moment. “P.C. taught us how to lie,” he said. “Instead of telling a motherfucker his breath stink, you wanna offer him some gum. You’re around him every day. You gotta deal with this shit—you love him!—but his breath smell like shit. His breath smell like eight cans of orca shit. Sixteen cases of camel shit!”
He’d worked himself into a state of agitation. His assistant, Lucas, appeared, and, as he stepped into the room, may have closed the door a little loudly. “Don’t slam my door!” Morgan said. “You’ll scare my sharks.” Lucas looked confused but unlikely to protest. “Please,” Morgan went on. “I don’t need them running into nothing. Don’t do that. Ease the door closed like this”—he opened and shut it with incredible delicacy—“because otherwise you scare my sharks, and they hit the sides, then they die. Don’t ever do that again, Luke.”
He turned back to me. “Politics ain’t nothing but poli-tricks,” he said. “I don’t give a fuck—I ain’t never voted in my life! I don’t give a fuck about Presidents and all that other shit. You know why? I’m down with the fucking King. I don’t give a fuck who you voted for. When your room’s ready, your room is ready. When He’s ready to meet you, He’s gonna meet you. You ain’t gotta get hit by no truck. You ain’t gotta get shot. You ain’t gotta get stabbed. Just simply lay down in your bed and not wake up! It happens every day!
“So your best bet is to run your fucking race. White, black, male, female, straight, gay—I love you, motherfucker, and ain’t shit you can do about it. Only thing you can do about it is love me back.”
Since the crash and the coma, Morgan has been going to therapy. “You take a bump on the head like that, you gotta go talk to somebody,” he said. We’d finished in the pool house and gone back to the office. It has taken work for Morgan to forgive the driver of the Walmart truck, and to grieve for his friend. It’s taken work, too, to forgive himself. Under other circumstances, his wife and young daughter might have been in the car with him. Maven was only ten months old at the time of the accident; Megan had kept her home because she was teething.
“My doctor tries to tell me not to beat up on myself, but, if you must beat yourself up, don’t use a bat—use a feather,” he said.
It was reported while Morgan was in a coma that his mother, having learned about the crash from TV news, had come to see him in the hospital and had been told to leave. Morgan said that she was turned away only because no visitors were being allowed at that time. She came back the next day, and was able to spend a few minutes at his bedside, but he was not yet conscious. When he woke up, their estrangement continued.
Recently, though, his mother fell sick, and his brother called to tell him. He sat with the knowledge for a while, then headed into Manhattan for a session with his therapist, a black man named Henry McCurtis. “We’re very close,” Morgan said, of McCurtis. “We had a session, and I told him what was going on with my mom. At first, he didn’t say anything—just looked at me. He listened, just like you. Piercing eyes.” They left the topic and discussed other things. But then, toward the end of the session, McCurtis leaned in, a bit closer to Morgan’s face. Morgan recalled him saying, “Yo, what kind of son would you be if you let your mom go out like that?”
“From his office, on Central Park West, all the way until I got on the bridge, I was crying, crying, crying, crying,” Morgan went on. “My brother gave me my mother’s number; I called her. She said, ‘Hello.’ I said, ‘Hey, Ma.’ She said, ‘Who’s this?’ I said, ‘Your son Tracy.’ She dropped the phone and started screaming. I couldn’t take that, so I hung up. I called her back a half hour later and we started talking. I told her, ‘Thank you, Mommy.’ ‘For what?’ ‘For having me.’ ”
Before I arrived at his house, Morgan had queued up a scene for me to watch from the movie “First Sunday,” a 2008 comedy that was directed by the black playwright and filmmaker David E. Talbert and mostly starred black actors. Morgan had a leading role, opposite the rapper and actor Ice Cube. He pressed Play, and we saw LeeJohn, Morgan’s character, talking to a kindly church lady named Sister Doris, a sort of mother figure, played by Loretta Devine. They shared a meal, and LeeJohn told Sister Doris how sad he’d been as a kid never to have had a birthday party. He’d been a foster child. “This is one of my favorite scenes from my career,” Morgan told me. “This right here is when I knew I could act—knew I had chops.”
Onscreen, LeeJohn began to cry. “Most actors can’t eat and cry at the same time,” Morgan said. Sister Doris started to sing to LeeJohn. “Look at me!” Morgan said. “I’m already in a dark place. I’m already in pieces. Thinking! In a dark place in my life.” LeeJohn kept crying, and, watching himself, Morgan started to cry, too.
“This movie was so fucking underrated,” he said, just before he turned it off. ♦
