BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — The guy just wants to be funny. So why does comic Tracy Morgan often think that he’s tiptoeing through a minefield?
One thing he knows for certain: he hates the feeling. He may be proudly black, but he doesn’t want anyone telling him that jokes about race are out of bounds or that it’s wrong to be funny about religion or even mental illness.
That’s why Morgan felt like he had died and gone to heaven when NBC unleashed the taboo-breaking 30 Rock on unsuspecting viewers and cast him in the role of an addled television star whose behaviour frequently borders on dementia. He knows why 30 Rock has won such a cult following.
“It’s because the characters on the show are the most unlikely,” the Saturday Night Live veteran proclaims. “Me and Alec Baldwin? And Tina Fey? You gotta watch that show. There’s a little bit of something for everybody in there — something that you can identify with and relate to.”
Morgan is still surprised 30 Rock has even made it onto network television. “It’s really an HBO show.” he says. “We push the envelope — and that’s what TV needs. I’m sick of this political correctness. It’s killing comedy.”
Morgan yearns for the bad old days when the network police were less controlling and society was less uptight and TV comedy could poke fun at a whole range of now taboo subjects.
“Back in the days of Archie Bunker and George Jefferson, we used to make fun of racism. Now you can’t say nothing without people wanting to protest and all that stuff. I came up in a different generation of TV. You know what Redd Foxx was like on Sandford and Son? Anything came out of his mouth — and that was comedy.”
So what does Morgan want to say that he can’t say right now?
“I want to be able to say whatever I want to say,” he replies. “Freedom of speech! Not ‘watch what you say!’ ”
In fact, as he continues his affable rant, Morgan is also taking care to be politically incorrect on this particular morning. The 39-year-old smiles happily when reporters express disbelief that the oldest of his three kids is 22. He sees this as a cue to go off on an outrageous riff.
“Hey listen!” Morgan says. “In the ghetto, we use sex as a sedative, man. It eases the pain of poverty. We couldn’t afford a puppy — make a baby! You need something to love in a broken house.”
So how old was he when he had his first child?
“I was exposed early,” he says mischievously, then adds that if he hadn’t made it in the entertainment mainstream, he could have been a success in the pornography industry.
To explain this, Morgan carries his enthusiasm for political incorrectness to an unprintable level.
All of this is in aid of his theory that his brand of comedy works best when it’s based on life and it ventures into taboo territory.
“When I first started doing stand-up I was young,”Morgan says. “A lot of my material was based on imagination.
“Now I’m an adult, and a lot of material is based on observation, and it’s hilarious. Tragedy is funny — all that stuff.
“What I see is what I’m saying. I’m just gonna inject my sense of humour into it and make it funny. ‘Cause if you don’t laugh, guess what. You’ll cry. And I’m tired of crying.”
Morgan even finds it funny that he’s a guy who gets into trouble himself — with the law (because of an alcohol problem) and sometimes even when he’s working.
Morgan found himself in hot water during the making of his new movie, First Sunday, in which he and Ice Cube play a pair of bumbling buddies who set out to rob a church.
Scenes were actually shot in a church and Morgan — a non-attender — found himself in alien territory.
“I didn’t know how to act,” he says. His colleagues kept reminding him that he was in a holy place. “I’m like, wait a minute, ain’t this a movie? Camera men, grip guys — everybody’s behaving except me.”
He insists that he can’t remember why his conduct was so bad. “But I know I got kicked out a couple of times. ‘Mr. Morgan, you’ve got to go now. You just got to go. You’re making all this noise …’ ”
On the other hand, Morgan thinks the film gives him the chance to show that he’s really an actor — his character, a petty thief named LeeJohn, is one of society’s losers. Morgan wanted to be funny, but he also wanted to show some inner pain.
“When I read the role, it hit home with me,” he says. “It almost scared me, because I’ve known that pain. You see LeeJohn at the beginning and he’s a funny guy — a kind of knucklehead.
“And then you see the layers being peeled back. For a comedian, associated with being funny my whole career, it’s awesome when you get an opportunity to be emotional.”
When he worked on First Sunday, he was going through a “weird” time because of a court order which required him to wear an alcohol-detecting monitoring bracelet on his ankle during filming.
“It was heavy-duty stuff. It was a crazy time in my life filming that movie. I had just got the monitor, and I was going through some ups and downs legally — everybody knows my legal woes. So ain’t it incredible that I did this movie at that time? God works in mysterious ways, sometimes right in front of you.”
Jamie Portman, Canwest News Service © The Leader-Post (Regina) 2008
