Part 4 (1/2)

You didn't know I could heal white people with the touch of my hand, did you?

I even look fast, don't I? The track team, 1985.

Me with Coach Bert Blanco at DeWitt Clinton High School.

Better late than never: receiving my honorary diploma and football jersey from DeWitt Clinton High School, 2002.

The best way to reach kids is to visit schools.

I'm gonna be one hot grandmother someday: me as Maya Angelou on SNL in 2002.

Me with my Obi-Wan Ken.o.bi, Lorney Lorne Michaels.

Lorne is my Yoda, but I'm Yoda's Yoda: me imitating Sam Jackson on SNL in 2002.

Not quite how it really went down: on the set of The Tracy Morgan Show, 2003.

Me with Spoonie Luv from up above, at the premiere of Crank Yankers, 2002.

SNL Weekend Update with Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon, 2003.

I know what's under your s.h.i.+rt, Mrs. Jackson: me as Brian Fellow on SNL in 2004.

I am one foxy female: with Chris Rock in The Longest Yard, 2005.

Ladies, control yourselves: Tracy Jordan during the 30 Rock pilot.

It's amazing when actors do things like lose height for a role: me and Marlon Wayans in Little Man.

Alec, are we toasting to the Emmy nominations or the Golden Globes?

I look like a lesbian version of Prince: with Jane Krakowski and Lonny Ross on 30 Rock, 2006.

The party can start now: at the Screen Actors Guild Awards with Scott Adsit (behind my hand), Grizz Chapman, Kevin Powell (behind my arm), Judah Friedlander (in the hat), me, and Kevin Brown.

Yes we did! Giving the acceptance speech on behalf of 30 Rock at the Golden Globes, 2009.

I told you I look good as a blonde: in the Big Love skit with Casey Wilson, Michaela Watkins, Abby Elliott, and Jason Sudeikis on the night I came back to SNL as host, 2009.

Sabina and me, 2004.

My family: Gitrid, Malcolm, me, Tracy junior, and Sabina at the Little Man premiere, 2006.

- Once I got my first check from NBC for Sat.u.r.day Night Live, I had enough money to move my family out of the the South Bronx, out of the ghetto, for good. We moved the day after my birthday, on November 11, 1996, at four o'clock in the morning. I celebrated my birthday at this club and restaurant, Jimmy's Bronx Cafe. I left when they closed, went right home-Sabina had packed us all up-and we were gone by six in the morning. Anybody who's lived in the ghetto knows that you don't move during the daytime. Here's why: You don't want anyone knowing you're leaving, and you don't want anyone knowing where you're going. You don't want anybody seeing your s.h.i.+t and knowing where they can get their hands on it. If they see you moving out, you can be d.a.m.n sure they'll be sitting there on the sidewalk with an adding machine, totaling up how much they can get when they rob your new place. The Morgans were out of that apartment in two hours in the dead of night. No one in that neighborhood knew we were gone for at least two months.

It really was time for us to go. Forget about me being on TV and having more money; it was getting uglier in our neighborhood every day. I'm just glad we could leave before our kids got any older. In the nineties, the hood had more money coming in than ever. The economy was doing well, so there was more money at every level of society, and hip-hop had become a legitimate money-making industry by then too. But all that progress only made motherf.u.c.kers hungrier. No one was satisfied with being average anymore. As soon as someone saw a cat he came up with get on, he demanded the same for himself. It didn't matter that he couldn't rap like his boy could, he wanted what his boy had. That's why we got a lot of dead rappers and a lot of other dead motherf.u.c.kers too.

In the nineties, the neighbor part of our neighborhoods got capped and all that was left behind was the hood. And the hood is no place to raise a family if you've got a choice. I'm blessed to have had a choice. I wanted a better life for my family; I wanted my kids to have all the chances I never had.

We moved to Riverdale, which is still in the Bronx, but a whole world away. The first thing I noticed was that white people don't think sidewalks are trash cans! It was the first time I'd seen clean pavements in my life! And there were people walking on it, smiling, just going for a stroll. I'd never gone on a walk for no reason, with no destination, in my entire life. I tried it, just walking around, taking in the sights, and I realized it was pretty nice. It relaxed me, much more than it relaxed all the nice Jewish people I smiled at whenever I toured the neighborhood. They would check their pockets and look around for cops when they saw me, but that didn't bother me. I just smiled at them as wide as I could. I wasn't going to let them make me feel funny. I was going to make sure they felt funny for trying to make me feel funny. Does that make sense to you? It should! Hi, nice Jewish people! It's a beautiful day! I'm black and I live next to you!

In all seriousness, it was a major culture shock for me and my family. We got some evil looks from our neighbors, and school was much different for the kids. But we just looked at ourselves as the Jeffersons, moving on up whether the neighbors liked it or not. It was the first time, but not the last, that my home life and my work life went through big transitions at the same time. Sabina and I were learning new things, but episodes in our lives didn't end with laughs and a lesson learned. At home we were figuring out what it meant to live in a white neighborhood, and at work I was figuring out what it meant to live in white comedy. It took me about two days to realize that white funny ain't just black funny in makeup. I knew I was going to have to find my place at home and at work. I was on a planet I'd never visited before, and I did not know the customs of these aliens.

I showed up at SNL with a lifetime of ghetto experience and years of making it happen in the world of black comedy. I came from Def Jam, from Martin, from appearances on Live at the Apollo and in black-oriented comedy clubs around the country. Everyone I knew had stopped watching SNL when Eddie Murphy left-and that meant me too. That is probably why Marci and Lorne brought me in, because I'm real-life ghetto. Choosing me for the cast was like giving white America a dose of BET. But SNL wasn't ready for that, not at first, that's for sure. They must have known they wanted a part of it, but they didn't know what it really meant. It took a while for us to get used to each other.

Four months after I got into stand-up professionally I was on TV, and that was because there were so many urban vehicles for black comedy at the time that are now long gone. I was part of a movement and a community and a moment. Put it this way: I used to do routines as fat Michael Jackson from the projects, and they killed wherever I went. I made fun of the tragedy of the ghetto and was used to audiences who found that funny. I had my finger on the pulse of urban comedy, but when I brought my act to SNL, those motherf.u.c.kers just felt bad for me. None of the cast I came up with saw this future for me. No, sir. All I have to say about that is, where's Chris Kattan now? Where's Cheri Oteri now? That b.i.t.c.h can't even get arrested. None of them laughed at Biscuit when I did him then, but if I did it for them now, I bet you a million they'd say it's funny. It's all right; I don't mind. It's hard to get mainstream America to catch up. Mainstream America has just learned the words to Sugarhill's ”Rapper's Delight”! And we don't do that s.h.i.+t no more! Jay-Z and Lil Wayne don't sound like that! No one sounds like that no more!

Making a place for myself in the SNL scheme took some time. I knew the score; this was a white show and I was the token black guy. That didn't bother me; I was used to those odds. Of course Will Ferrell fit in every sketch they'd ever come up with, but not me. That's just how it was, so my answer to that was being as funny as a motherf.u.c.ker whenever I got the ball. Those weeks when my sketches made it to air, I made sure those minutes belonged to me. I didn't care who was in my sketch, I was going to eat their lunch! I was out to steal their thunder. When I got my shot at the basket, I drove the lane and dunked. I'd sink threes from the baseline and bring those rebounds down throwing elbows left and right. I was going to win; I didn't care how.

It didn't matter to me if I only had a one-line drive-by or an entire sketch. It didn't matter if it was the first sketch of the night or the very last one that no one even watches. I gave it everything I had, every time. And eventually people took notice of me. In the pitch meetings, people started to pay more attention to what I had to say. The writers started to connect with my ideas and take the time to write them up. I found my way into the system through patience and perseverance.

When I started getting regular airtime and feeling like I was part of the team, my SNL world changed. I was still coming from somewhere different, but I started to team up with a few of the writers, and for the first time I understood what it meant to collaborate. That's a whole other form of creativity that stand-up cannot teach you. Writing with someone is very rewarding when you both see eye to eye. A rough idea that's halfway funny can blossom into full-blown funny within just a few minutes if it's bounced off the right minds. This realization opened up new ways for me to think about comedy, and with that advantage on my side, the writers and I started to come up with regular characters.

Once you develop recurring characters, Sat.u.r.day Night Live becomes the show Lorne designed it to be: a showcase for emerging comic talent. The first big character of mine that became a regular was Brian Fellow. One night, Sabina and I were lying in bed and she was telling me about this gay guy she knew in high school named Fellow. I never met him, but what you see in the character is what I took from her description. I was cracking up just listening to her talk about him, so I knew there was something there I could use. I brought it in to SNL and pitched him.

”Here's something I want to do,” I said. ”It's a guy named Brian Fellow. He's like this ...” I started acting gay and everyone laughed. ”I'm Brian Fellow and you're not!” I kept saying.

I said he was this weird gay dude who imagined stuff in his head and thought he knew everything. My man Tim Herlihy picked right up on that s.h.i.+t. (Tim writes for Adam Sandler, by the way.) He saw a bigger picture. I don't know where he got the idea, but he thought Brian Fellow should host an animal talk show. That sent the room into hysterical laughter. A delusional gay guy interviewing animals? What the f.u.c.k is that, Tim? I loved it, I knew it was gold, but I had to look at Tim and say, ”What is wrong with you, dude?”

Tim and I got to work on writing it up, and the first thing we did was record the theme song to the show, which we named Brian Fellow's Safari Planet. If I thought it was a good idea before, now I knew it was a hit. It takes a lot to make me think something is weird, so when I do, I know it's hilarious. Brian Fellow is a gay, self-centered, paranoid host of an animal talk show. And he only has a sixth-grade education too. The best thing about Brian's sketches was the voice-overs-that's where I could show how insane he really was. Brian worries about animals stealing his wallet and credit cards. He worries about animals talking s.h.i.+t about him. He's ridiculous! That character allowed me to say things that were nothing but completely absurd.

Another one of my regular characters was Woodrow. He was my first attempt at playing tragedy and comedy at the same time, which is something I always thought Eddie Murphy did so well on SNL. Eddie's character Mister Robinson was funny as h.e.l.l, but he was also sad; when he joked about being poor and avoiding Mr. Landlord, the message beneath the surface was real. Mister Robinson's situation was like too many everyday people's, which made the comedy a little bit uncomfortable to watch.

That kind of humor was nothing new; it was the formula Richard Pryor invented and lived better than anyone ever will. He's the ultimate; the rest of us are just paying tribute. When I came up with Woodrow, it was my chance to pay tribute to Richard and Eddie in some small way. I wanted him to be an evolution of what Eddie had done on SNL, but sadder and stranger. So I thought: ”What's worse than living in the ghetto? That's easy-living in a sewer!”

Woodrow became my version of Oscar the Grouch. In every skit he would almost succeed, but in the end he would always fail at getting the girl, usually played by an attractive female host. Woodrow was the saddest clown I could imagine. He was never getting out of the sewer and he was never getting anything he wanted, no matter how close he came. I saw him as being in the same category as the more socially conscious comedy that SNL did back in the seventies. Go back and watch it all; you'll see what I'm talking about.

Another character I enjoyed getting on the air regularly was Dominican Lou. He was my way of letting all Americans know that Dominicans are here and they're not going anywhere. If America wasn't going to hire them, I sure as h.e.l.l was going to play one because I grew up around them. He was my salute to the Dominican nation in this diverse town we call New York. Dominican Lou was the superintendent of an apartment building who thought he owned the place just because he had the keys to every door. He's the kind of character who would stand outside the building with a can of beer and tell you you couldn't park in front because it was his spot and his building. He was the kind of guy who you would see every day for five years but if you asked him to let you into the building because you forgot your keys, he'd say, ”Who you? You no live heeere.” Lou's funny like that.

For me, Sat.u.r.day Night Live was like being Alice in Wonderland. I was out of place from the start, and the further down that rabbit hole I fell, the more fantastic the ride became. The show consumed all of my creativity, and I loved it. Every week there was variety, and not knowing what was around the corner kept it fresh for me. It kept me learning; it kept me on my toes.

But that wasn't the only thing that kept me alert. Being the black guy on the show put me in a different category, in my mind at least. Like I said, I couldn't mess around. I felt like any mistake I made might be my last. I didn't feel like I had the freedom to blunder. Look in the books-there have never been a lot of black guys on SNL, and there still aren't. I believe that even today, on mainstream shows, outside of the urban television market, black people on TV are held to a higher standard. I certainly felt that way on SNL. I never thought it would be okay for me to break character like Jimmy Fallon and all of them did. That thought never crossed my mind, because I would have seen it as a failure on my part, and I thought others might see it that way too.

It's funny, I look back on some of the shows that inspired me and inspired so many comedy writers, from the best of them, like Tina Fey, to the guys in the trenches coming up, and they are the complete opposite of what flies for mainstream television comedy today. The shows that inspired me were things like Sanford and Son and Good Times and Diff'rent Strokes. If a network put a show like any of those on today, the NAACP would be all over them. They'd have a landslide lawsuit on their hands. Think about Diff'rent Strokes: a show about two black kids from Harlem being raised by an old white guy. The politically correct nation we have become would find that wrong twenty-four ways to Sunday. The truth is, everybody is too sensitive today. That PC s.h.i.+t is killing comedy. And that's why I love being on 30 Rock. I'm jumping ahead, but you want to know the moment when I knew we had a hit on our hands? When I read the script for the episode in the first season called ”The C Word,” which was about sensitivity training. Tina's got b.a.l.l.s, because we did a whole show about saying the word n.i.g.g.e.r! And it was bleeped out on purpose, but we all said it during the filming, and you could read our lips. We need to get back to the days of Archie Bunker, when they openly made fun of racism. That's healthy if you ask me. We are living in an age where someone like Michael Jackson went so far to show us that we're all the same inside that he changed his f.u.c.king skin color.

Anyway, after a while, I fell in with a few great writers at SNL who understood me more than anyone else had, and they made my career by giving me the chance to s.h.i.+ne. They saw my range, and more important, they taught me to stretch it. I have to thank T. Sean Shannon and Andrew Steele, my dark horses, who got me before anyone else did. I hooked up with those two, and they gave me the material that showcased my funny. So did Paula Pell and, of course, Tina Fey. Once Tina and I got together, it was over. Tina wasn't scared to come into my world and find the funny up in there. She's that kind of cool. Tina Fey, you know most of all what you did for me. Look at me, Tina Fey! I have to say it now and I'll say it again: I LOVE YOU, GIRL. I will always rock with you because you know my voice better than I do sometimes.

At SNL we were all definitely a family. It was compet.i.tive, but there was a camaraderie that everyone was a part of. It was very special to me, working there. It wasn't like The Waltons or The Brady Bunch, and we didn't have pajama parties or hang out like it was a dorm, but we did have a kind of family. And the head of it was my Obi-Wan Ken.o.bi, Lorne Michaels. He gave me my shot at real, national fame, and how much I owe him is self-explanatory. He changed my life and my kids' lives. They say that every Jewish man has got to love one n.i.g.g.e.r in his life. I'm glad Lorne Michaels chose me.

To tell you the truth, I wasn't really friends with many of my castmates at SNL, but that doesn't mean that I didn't roll up into SNL and all those after parties with my own friends. My time on SNL marked the beginning of my days rolling with an entourage that was much, much too big. I'd go out with about thirty people when I could. I used to come up in every club surrounded by felons. I had this felon named Young G.o.d around me, I had Pumpkin, I had motherf.u.c.kers named Guilty all around me. And I always brought D. Nice, who was just straight trouble. The rest of the cast never f.u.c.ked with me. I can't imagine why.

One time, though, I did get a lot of them to come to an after party that friends of mine were throwing. If you're a fan of 30 Rock and you've seen the episode where Liz Lemon goes out all night with Tracy Jordan and follows him to the After-After-After-After Party, this night is where Tina got all that from.

Friends of mine were running this illegal strip club they called the Loft. It was in an office s.p.a.ce they'd rented and converted into an after-the-after-party spot. They put a stage in it, they put a few futons all around, and they'd get strippers and girls to come and do shows. You'd walk in there and get your d.i.c.k sucked, there was usually some f.u.c.king going on, and there was liquor and couches everywhere. But this place was just a regular apartment s.p.a.ce, so the bar was really just the kitchen, and there was only one bathroom, which usually got stopped up at some point because of all kinds of s.h.i.+t getting stuffed in there. I invited everyone to go down there one week. And Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch, and a few others came along.

I didn't tell any of them what they were in for, so it was all cool when we got there. At first, as they got their drinks and sipped them and talked, they thought it was just a private party. Then these two girls came out onstage and started going down on each other and that just shut it down. All the grips and crew guys from SNL were standing around and loving it, but my castmates took one look at that, turned right around, and rushed out of there. They were all a bunch of Ivy League f.a.ggots and we'd taken it to the streets. They might have left, but it was all that anybody talked about around the show for the next week. None of them ever came back, but me and my boys did it for another two weeks at least.

Actually, one cast member really got into it. This party started late and kept going strong right into the morning. The next day around noon, I got a call from the guy running the party.

”Yo, Tray, what's up?”