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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: entertain-
ment is going to Wall Street. It’s all going
to Wall Street. Nowadays there are nomore 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! Den-
zel’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.”E
arly in 1994, after Morgan had made
a second appearance on “Def Com-
edy Jam,” Lawrence gave him a small re-
curring role on “Martin.” He played Hus-
tle Man, a guy who’s always trying to
turn somebody else’s throwaway itemsinto a buck or two for himself. It was his
first part on a scripted show. Then Mor-
gan’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 perform-
ers on the show, including Tim Mead-
ows and, more briefly, Finesse Mitchell.)
Some standups without a background
in the collaborative work of sketch per-
formance have struggled on “S.N.L.”
Morgan found success early on, perhaps
because he has none of the stereotypical
standup comedian’s hangups about per-
forming 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 ma-
terial,” he said. “It’s just being funny. Any-
body 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 ap-
peared. 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 predis-
posed 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 contin-
ued. “It’s not race-based,” she added,
tacitly acknowledging how easily these
stylistic categories might slide into ra-
cial observation. “There’s a lot of whitea
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