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became an item. She was four years older
than Morgan, and had two young chil-
dren, 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. Mor-
gan, who had always been
able to make people laugh,
was urged by friends to try
standup. When he told Sa-
bina 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 di-
vorced in 2009.)
“I got funny to survive,” Morgan
writes. And, indeed, the rhythm of his
life seems to be this: macabre lows fol-
lowed quickly by the kind of triumph
that feels like a joke. He explained him-
self similarly to me. “Three things kept
us”—poor black people—“from killing
ourselves: jokes, music, and fucking, ” h e
said. “Why you think I became a come-
dian? 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.”I
n 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 culmi-
nation of a kind of comeback tour. The
first season of “The Last O.G.” had re-
ceived good ratings and solid reviews,
and he’d been doing standup with argu-
ably 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, peo-
ple seemed happy just to see him.
His S.U.V. pulled up outside the stage
door at the Beacon, and he hustled fromthe 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 wait-
ing 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 unman-
ageable 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 fun-
damentals 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 Up-
town Comedy performers onstage began
airing on local networks, and Morgan
was chosen as a cast member. MethodMan, who was a guest on the show sev-
eral 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; Mor-
gan “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 head-
lined 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 pur-
ple 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, “Mar-
tin,” on Fox. You can find the set on
YouTube. Lawrence introduces Mor-
gan in what looks like a state of aston-
ishment. “You’re gonna enjoy him, be-
cause the boy is bugged out,” he says.
“And he’s from Brooklyn, New York,
straight from the motherfuckin’ proj-
ects.” Morgan bounds onstage wearing
a beanie with a food stamp taped to its
front, and a baggy white dress shirt but-
toned up to only the bottom of his ster-
num, his broad, upholstered-looking
chest poking out. He acts as a sort of
aggrieved emissary from a comic un-
derclass, 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 mar-
vel 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 physical-
ity, exuberant profanity, a preference forthe stuff of dail
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