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THENEWYORKER,M AY13, 2019 39
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more ... they feel it in the moment.”
One of the first things that Fey worked
on with Morgan was a sketch in which
he played the TV personality Star Jones,
who is best known for her work on “The
View.” “It’s not a great source of pride
that one of my most successful things I
did with him was put him in drag,” Fey
said. “There should have been a female
African-American—or three or four—
there to do it.” Morgan didn’t have a Star
Jones impression. The sight of him in a
dress just made people laugh.
Morgan threw parties after the after-
parties that “S.N.L.” has long been fa-
mous for. “They were sometimes in, like,
a makeshift illegal casino, in an empty
loft, and there were women there, serv-
ing drinks—women in thongs,” Fey said.
“He’d be, like, ‘You gotta come to my
party!’” By then, Morgan writes in the
memoir, he had begun rolling with a
rather large entourage. “I had this felon
named Young God around me, I had
Pumpkin, I had motherfuckers named
Guilty all around me.” He felt less com-
fortable around his castmates. “I had
my finger on the pulse of urban com-
edy, but when I brought my act to
‘S.N.L.’ those motherfuckers just felt
bad for me,” he writes.
After Fey left “S.N.L.,” she pitched
a TV show to Kevin Reilly, then the
president of NBC’s entertainment di-
vision—and now, incidentally, the pres-
ident of TBS, home to “The Last O.G.”
The concept was for a sitcom set at a
cable-news channel which played the
tension between a liberal producer and
a conservative pundit for laughs. Reilly
suggested that she write something set
at a place like “S.N.L.” instead, and, al-
most immediately, Fey thought of Mor-
gan. Adding a “rich movie-star version”
of her former co-worker could, she re-
alized, make for a more complex ar-
rangement of non-convergent world
views. On “30 Rock,” Fey played Liz
Lemon, the put-upon head writer of
“T.G.S.,” alongside Alec Baldwin as
Jack Donaghy, the semi-sociopathic
NBC executive who is Lemon’s boss,
and Morgan as the hammy and self-cen-
tered Tracy Jordan, whom Donaghy
hires as the new face of Lemon’s show—
led, to that point, by a pretty, blond star,
played by Jane Krakowski.“I was just young enough—just by
a minute young enough and foolish
enough—to not realize how potentially
insulting that could be,” Fey said, of her
characterization of the over-the-top Tracy
Jordan, which skimmed perilously close
to her perceptions of Morgan. The char-
acter was also based, in part, on other
black comedians, like Lawrence and Mur-
phy, who had gone from doing standup
to being movie stars, and then had em-
barrassing public episodes that called
into question not only their fitness for
the spotlight but also our culture’s abil-
ity to accommodate rare talent in black
artists. The first episode of “30 Rock” fea-
tures a quick montage of Tracy’s recent
erratic behavior, including a clip of him
walking through traffic in nothing but
briefs, brandishing a toy lightsabre and
screaming, “I am a Jedi!” It was an obvi-
ous echo of a 1996 incident in which
Lawrence ran onto Ventura Boulevard,
in Sherman Oaks, California, carrying a
handgun in his pocket and shouting,
“Fight the establishment!”
When critics pointed out the resem-
blance, Morgan worried that he might
have offended his friend, and he went to
Fey. “He was right to be concerned,” she
told me. “When you come out of ‘S.N.L.,’
and you’re just used to doing whatever
you want all the time, you’re just, like,
‘Yeah, listen, I think it’s gonna be fine.’”
Lawrence had joked about the incident,
too: on his widely praised standup spe-
cial “Runteldat,” from 2002,
he admitted that he was
on drugs at the time. “I was
smoking that ooh-wee!” h e
says. “What kind of shit has
the dope man sold me?!”
Morgan went to Lawrence,
who, he says, told him, “If
it’s funny, do it.” It was Law-
rence, Morgan added, who
got him “to see that the court
jester was the noblest per-
son in the court. He was the only one al-
lowed to tell the truth.”
Morgan has never had a problem with
jokes that use his own persona as the
punch line. During his first season on
“S.N.L.,” he woke up one morning un-
able to see. He was given a diagnosis of
diabetes, but he continued to eat and
drink heavily. In 2004, after the cancel-
lation of “The Tracy Morgan Show,” he
went on the road to do standup, and thedrinking worsened—twice, he almost
slipped into a diabetic coma. He was ar-
rested for drunk driving in December,
2005, and sentenced to three years’ pro-
bation; then, a month after the “30 Rock”
première, in the fall of 2006, he got an-
other D.U.I. During the show’s second
season, he was using insulin whenever
he felt sick. His immune system finally
gave way, and he was admitted to the
hospital with pneumonia. His doctors
told him that he should have been dead.
“We would be shooting, and between
takes someone would come into his dress-
ing room and take part of his foot off,”
Fey said. He shot much of that season
wearing a court-ordered ankle bracelet,
on account of the drunk-driving convic-
tions. “And, to his credit, he was, like,
‘Yeah, fine, write jokes about it,’” Fey said.
She hadn’t planned for the character to
share a first name with Morgan, but he
had insisted. “‘I’m gonna get famous
doing this,’” Fey remembers him saying.
“‘I don’t want people yelling at me on
the street going, like, “Hey Chickie!”’ H e
wanted that Jerry Seinfeld mold of ‘Just
call me Jerry if you see me on the street.’”
The role not only artfully transmuted
Morgan’s persona but also used the unique
unction of his performance to comment
on the entanglement of race and com-
edy. The show’s eighth episode, “The
Break-Up,” featured a secondary plot
about the relationship between Tracy Jor-
dan and a “T.G.S.” staff writer nicknamed
Toofer—as in “twofer,” be-
cause he is, as one character
puts it, both “a black guy”
and “a Harvard guy.” Toofer,
played by Keith Powell, is a
parody of the kind of highly
educated, quasi-intellectual
black person who might view
broad humor like Tr a c y ’s —
and Morgan’s—as embar-
rassing to the race. Tracy is
cast in a “T.G.S.” skit as a
woman named Shamanda, and Toofer
objects. “I just think it’s demeaning for a
black man to do drag,” he says, adding,
“Chris Rock doesn’t do it. Dr. Cosby
doesn’t do it.” Tracy decides he won’t do
it, either; then the bit is a smash with a
white castmate in the part. Tracy, regret-
ful, angrily regales Toofer with a counter-
canon: “Eddie does it, Martin does
it—Jamie Foxx, Flip Wilson!” The ex-
change pinpoints a tension betweenFact Cunningham Tracy Morgan 05_13_19.L [Print]_9508104.indd 39 5/3/19 6:50 PM