The New Yorker – May 13, 2019

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WHAT ARE YOU LAUGHING AT?

Tracy Morgan turns the drama of his life into comedy, again.

BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM

I

n a long alleyway in Red Hook,

Brooklyn, not far from the East

River, Tracy Morgan sat on a direc-

tor’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 jump-

suit 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 preci-

sion. 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 at-

tention. Now he looked restless.

It was a September scorcher, cloud-

less 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-sea-

son 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 Had-

dish, best known for the torrent of rib-

aldry 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 sea-

son, Tray, desperate to earn a place in

his children’s lives, takes a job at a Star-

bucks-like coffee shop, one of many

signs of local gentrification. In the sec-

ond season, he tries to launch a busi-

ness venture that draws on his experi-

ence 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 charac-

ters 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 sum-

mon all the calamity, regret, and striv-

ing 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, ask-

ing 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 Mor-

gan, 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 com-

munity. This is a show starring the com-

munity.” Then, pointing at me with one

of his short, solid arms: “Print that!”

Given the show’s affection for Mor-

gan’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 char-

acter, 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 Pat-

terson “to sprinkle those people, those

characters, those relationships through-

out.” 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 en-

gaged in intense, one-sided feuds with

the animals that appeared on his day-

time 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 Morg

PHO

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