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the stuff of daily life rather than for pol-
itics 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-em-
battled 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 par-
ticular 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 gener-
ation 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 Honeymoon-
ers”—cantankerous and somewhat over-
matched by the changing times, but ul-
timately 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 cap-
tured 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 sit-
com “Sanford and Son,” which pre-
mièred 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 lis-
ten to the old records, with their jokes
about bodies and faces and the ongo-
ing 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 eight-
ies and nineties, with the arrival of shows
like “Def Comedy Jam” and BET’s
“ComicView.” These shows helped in-
troduce comedians like Morgan, Som-
more, and Bruce Bruce, whose earlypopularity depended on a large audi-
ence of viewers whose experiences and
vocal styles had not yet been spun up-
ward 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 main-
stream 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 neighbor-
hood 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 de-
scribe, 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 open-
ing act, after some time away from
standup—Rock had done a short, frus-
trating stint on “S.N.L.”—and beingintimidated by the raucous laughter and
foot stomping that he heard while wait-
ing backstage. “It was like watching
somebody fuck your wife with a big-
ger dick,” Rock said.
Backstage at the Beacon, as show-
time 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 remem-
ber 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 grand-
mother?” 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, aboveFact Cunningham Tracy Morgan 05_13_19.L [Print]_9508104.indd 37 5/3/19 8:59 PM