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divergent styles in black comedy—a di-
vide that has to do not only with per-
sonal sensibility but with how much a
given comic cares about how white peo-
ple view his work. It calls to mind a rou-
tine from Murphy’s standup special “Raw,”
in which he describes getting an out-of-
the-blue phone call from Cosby, who, he
says, demanded that Murphy refrain from
all the “filth-flarn-filth” in his act.
In another first-season episode of “30
Rock,” the Black Crusaders, a group of
celebrities led by Cosby and Oprah Win-
frey, agitate to end Tracy’s career, because
they regard him as a discredit to the race.
The story line was inspired by a conspir-
acy theory that arose after the comedian
Dave Chappelle abruptly quit his pop-
ular sketch-comedy series, “Chappelle’s
Show,” in early 2005. Several months
later, Chappelle explained, on “Oprah,”
why he’d actually left. He’d been taping
a sketch, he said, and a white person on
set had laughed in a way that made him
worry about the nature of his comedy. “I
know the difference of people laughing
with me and people laughing at me,” he
said. Chappelle also spoke to Oprah about
his sense that white executives in Hol-
lywood exploit black performers: “When
I see that they put every black man in
the movies in a dress at some point in
their career, I start connecting the dots.”
When I first watched “The Break-
U p, ” I found that it articulated, and then
mocked, my own reservations about how
white audiences—and even, to some ex-
tent, the white writers on “30 Rock”—
understood their appreciation for a per-
former like Tracy Morgan. (Donald
Glover, who went on to create and star
in “Atlanta,” about a black Princeton
dropout, wrote for “30 Rock,” but he
tended to pitch stories that centered on
Kenneth, the white network page played
by Jack McBrayer, who, like Glover, is
from Georgia.) It’s one thing to hear
Martin Lawrence call Morgan “bugged
out” and connect that to his being from
“the projects”—it’s another to hear a white
person say something similar. But the
message of “The Break-Up” might be
that, if Morgan doesn’t care, I shouldn’t,
either. The point of comedy—at least, of
Morgan’s kind of comedy—is that it’s
an opportunity to take a break. Relax.
Fey told me that the “30 Rock” writ-
ers often threw random lines at Mor-
gan which they thought would be funnyto hear him say, and he’d deliver one
bonkers interpretation after another,
making bouquets of oddball actorly
choices. She remembered one, verba-
tim, echoing Morgan’s intonation per-
fectly: “I once saw a baby give another
baby a tattoo. They were very drunk!”
The line appears in a fourth-season
episode of “30 Rock,” in which Tracy de-
clares his intention to win an Oscar, then
finds that he can’t do the emotional work
necessary to deliver a performance dra-
matic enough to win the award. He’s for-
gotten most of his childhood. “From ’75
to ’82 is just a blur,” he says. Tracy’s body-
guard Dot Com (Kevin Brown, the for-
mer business manager of the Uptown
Comedy Club) and Kenneth, the page,
take Tracy to his old neighborhood, and
the painful memories come pouring hi-
lariously forth.
“It’s all coming back to me!” Tracy
says, tearing up. “Oh, my God! I slept
on an old dog bed stuffed with wigs! I
watched a prostitute stab a clown! Our
basketball hoop was a rib cage. A rib
cage! Why did you bring me here? I
blocked all this stuff out for a reason.
Oh, Lord! Some guy with dreads elec-
trocuted my fish!”
“The Last O.G.” allows Morgan to
revisit his past in a more grounded, and
even slightly sentimental, way. It’s what
he’s wanted to do on TV for a long time.
“The Tracy Morgan Show” was supposed
to draw on his early experiences. “I wanted
to tell a story about the ghetto,” he writes,
in “I Am the New Black.” But the show’s
creators, he says, “turned it into a false
idea of what it’s like to be a black fam-
ily,” and it became “a modernized Cosby
Show.” In addition to Haddish, who, like
Morgan, got an early TV break on “Def
Comedy Jam,” “The Last O.G.” features
Cedric the Entertainer, who helped to
popularize “Def Jam”-style comedy on
the “Original Kings of Comedy” tour.
The show, which has not yet been re-
newed for a third season, revels in the
kind of comedy that made Morgan feel
like an outsider on the set of “S.N.L.,”
and it sometimes struggles to balance
the excitement of that mode with its
more dramatic moments. Tray, on occa-
sion, behaves ridiculously, but he’s not
primarily the object of fun. Rather than
a novelty, he’s an Everyman, surrounded
by people who share his values. “He’s a
very smart guy, and the characters thathe’s played in the past are sort of crazy,
in a way,” Peele told me. “I was really
taken with the depth of Tracy Morgan—I
hadn’t seen that.” There are many differ-
ences between “The Last O.G.” and Mor-
gan’s work on network television, but one
of the most striking is that “The Last
O.G.” does not seem to have been made
primarily with white viewers in mind.R
ecently, I went to see Morgan at the
house he built after the Walmart
settlement, a brick-sheathed mansion in
Alpine, New Jersey, just across the Hud-
son River from New York. There’s a ma-
chine next to the huge front door which
Saran-Wraps the bottoms of your shoes,
so that you don’t track dirt onto the shiny
white tiled floors. Morgan’s office, near
the back of the house, is styled after Vito
Corleone’s, in “The Godfather,” with
black leather, gold drapes, and an over-
sized desk, covered in awards. Morgan
has always loved fish, and the office, in
a departure from Coppola’s vision, con-
tains two extremely large fish tanks, each
of them florid with neon plants and dan-
gerous-looking creatures slipping around
in dark water. “I’ve got some of the most
poisonous fish in the world in there,”
Morgan said. A guy named John, shor-
tish and smiley in a red cap and a drab
uniform, cleaned the glass and tended
to the fish as we talked.
Morgan, dressed in a white sweatsuit
with black stripes, reminisced about an
evening in the mid-nineties, shortly after
he was cast in “Martin.” He was at the
Comedy Store in Los Angeles with Law-
rence. “Guess who rolled in,” Morgan
said. “He was already in a wheelchair:
Richard. I started crying.” He looked like
he might do so again right then. “I got
his autograph on a piece of paper, and
I kept it in my wallet for twelve years.”
Keeping relics like these is a lifelong
habit of Morgan’s. He tends to hold on
for as long as he can. “Lemme show
you something deep,” he said. He pro-
duced a Fendi wallet from one of his
pockets and pulled out what looked like
an enormous ball of lint matted against
a crumpled piece of paper. He held it
out, close to my face.
“Do you know what that is?”
My guess, some schmutz and a for-
gotten receipt, didn’t seem appropriate
to say. I told him I didn’t know.
“It’s cotton from Africa,” he said. “PureFact Cunningham Tracy Morgan 05_13_19.L [Print]_9508104.indd 40 5/3/19 5:35 PM