The New Yorker – May 13, 2019

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cotton—Bora Bora! Or, not Bora Bora.

I think it was St. Martin. One of them

saint islands. This is where they got the

cotton seeds to plant in America. Cot-

ton! Our ancestors! This keeps me

grounded!” His face had gone stoic and

his eyes looked meaningfully into mine.

“You know what that is, attached to

it?” he asked, indicating the piece of

paper. “That’s a food stamp.” The same

food stamp, he explained, that he had

stuck, like Yankee Doodle’s feather, onto

the beanie that he wore when he débuted

on “Def Comedy Jam,” initiating his

path to stardom.

He led me away from the office and

into a separate building on the prop-

erty, just across from an outdoor pool.

He wanted to watch as John, the fish

guy, continued his work. Most of the

pool house was occupied by a huge

aquarium. This is where Morgan keeps

his sharks. We sat on a little couch in a

viewing area, and had to crane our necks

to see the higher regions of the tank.

Caked up against the wide pane of glass

that we looked through were, here and

there, a few ripples of dark-green algae.

“Why is that there?” Morgan asked

John. Apparently, it had something to

do with the sun coming through the

doors of the building. John said he would

clean it off, but that it would inevitably

grow back. Anyway, it did no harm to

the sharks. They swam silently, carving

pathways around mounds of coral and

slowly waving seaweed.

“I want to try and go to Mecca to say

a prayer for the world,” Morgan said,

apropos of nothing in particular. “Look

where we’re at!” he added. “Somebody’s

gotta do it.”

I took him to be lamenting the gen-

eral state of things, and I tried to com-

miserate. “It’s pretty bad,” I said.

“No, it ain’t,” he said. “Stop lying.”

He didn’t think that the world seemed

to be in a rough state these days?

“No,” he said, looking genuinely ir-

ritated. “Are you here?”

“I am,” I said. “And that’s great, but—”

“Did you wake up this morning?”

I had.

“So you just said bad and great all in

one sentence, sir! How is it bad and

great?” His voice was rising. “Did you

wake up this morning?” he asked, ap-

parently unsatisfied with my earlier affir-

mation. Again, I said that I had.

“So He”—God, about whom Mor-

gan speaks often and easily, without ref-

erence to any particular creed, but with

total and obvious reverence and be-

lief—“spared your life. It’s a beautiful

place to be.” The world, that is; now I

wondered why, if everything was so beau-

tiful, he wanted to travel for so long to

say that prayer, but I couldn’t bring my-

self to ask and get scolded again. “With

all these broken dreams, and drudgery,

and shams”—he elongated “shams” into

an imprecatory, two-beat knife of a

word—“it’s still a wonderful place to be.

’Cause when you’re in that fucking box,

young man, you’re in that box. Enjoy it.

Stop looking at the fucking news.”

He went on, “If you just watched the

news, you’d be miserable.” My gloomy

outlook had reminded him of his sense

that, these days, comedians are overly

harried and audiences are too worried

about real-world troubles to mind the

deeper imperative to sit back and laugh.

“That was sacred ground on the stage,”

he said. “Now you gotta watch what

you say! It’s: freedom of speech, but

watch what you say. ”

The key to Morgan’s comedy, Peele

told me, is its “fabulous exploration of

all the shit you’re not supposed to say.”

A comedian with Morgan’s skill and feel

for an audience can generally find his

way toward jokes suited to the tastes of

any political attitude or moment in time.

In his most recent special, “Staying Alive,”

on Netflix, Morgan luxuriates in char-

acteristically silly images: a penis singing

Donna Summer, a new flavor of Ben &

Jerry’s called Titty Milk and Splenda.

When a woman in the audience cries

out, “I love you Tracy!” he says, “I love

you, too!” and then, seemingly as a reflex,

asks her to lift up her shirt. He also talks

about the crash as a point of division be-

tween his old life and a new one. “Be-

fore the accident, I could’ve sworn it was

three Kardashians—Kim, Khloe, and

Kourtney,” he says. “After I came out the

coma, it was six of them motherfuckers.

And one of them won the decathlon in

1976!” This joke, about his surprise at

Caitlyn Jenner’s gender transition, then

takes a turn. “Caitlyn is a hot MILF,” he

says. “I’d fuck the shit out of her.” When

he keeps going, getting into the scatology

of that imagined encounter, it almost—

almost—feels like a gesture of inclusion.

Not long before my visit, another

black comedian, Kevin Hart, had lost

his job as the host of the Oscars after

people dug up comments he had made

on Twitter which were full of gay slurs.

One of Hart’s old jokes, about his fear

that his son would be gay, had been

considered in a new light. I asked Mor-

gan what he thought of the incident.

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