‘SNL’s Tracy Morgan Felt ‘Culturally Isolated’ on ‘Whitest Show in America’
“Man, you’re going to know about everything.”
Those are the first words spoken in the four-part Peacock documentary SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night as Tracy Morgan promises, “I’m going to open up.”
Morgan, an SNL cast member from 1996 to 2003, makes no bones about his inauspicious start in show business. “My best friend Al, we was selling crack. He used to say, ‘Yo, Tray, you mad funny. You should be at the Apollo.’ I said, ‘Shut the fuck up, Al, and keep bagging up,’” Morgan remembered about his stand-up origin story. “Four months later, I was on Def Jam. Comedy found me, I ain’t found comedy.”
This article not your thing? Try these...
Morgan delighted in watching archival video of his SNL audition. “I remember when I wrote this,” he said about a young character in a propeller beanie reading a Christmas poem. “I don’t know what Lorne Michaels and them saw. They saw something.”
Morgan was understandably excited about the opportunity. “I wanted to show them my world, how funny it was,” he said. “But the first three years, I felt like I was being culturally isolated sometimes. I’m coming from a world of Black. I’m a inner-city kid. To be on … like the whitest show in America. I felt by myself. I felt, you know, they wasn’t getting it.”
Chris Rock knew what it felt like to be stranded in “this weird, Waspy world,” according to oral history Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live. “I had a talk with … the new Black guys,” Rock said. “I told these guys they’ve got to assert themselves.”
The advice echoed a conversation with Michaels that Morgan says got him on the right track. “He said, ‘Tracy, I hired you because you’re funny. Not because you’re Black. Do your thing,’” Morgan said. “And that’s when I started doing my thing.”
Over the latter half of his SNL career, Morgan became one of the show’s featured stars, parlaying that success into the Michaels-produced sitcom The Tracy Morgan Show and his Emmy-nominated turn in Tina Fey’s 30 Rock. Those accomplishments were built on Michaels’ reminder of why Morgan was hired at SNL in the first place. “Anybody could do comedy,” he explained. “I could teach all y’all in here how to tell jokes and do comedy. But are you funny?”