Tracy Jamel Morgan (born November 10, 1968) is an American actor, voice actor and comedian best known for his seven seasons as a cast member on Saturday Night Live (1996–2003) and 30 Rock (2006–2013). He was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2009 for his work on 30 Rock. He has appeared in numerous films as an actor and voice actor.
Morgan was born in the Bronx and raised in Tompkins Houses in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He is the second of five children of a homemaker, Alicia (née Warden), and Jimmy Morgan, a musician who returned from military duty in the Vietnam War as a recovering heroin addict, causing him to leave the family when Morgan was six years old.
His father named him Tracy in honor of a platoon mate and friend who shipped off to Vietnam with him and was killed in action days later.
The target of bullies as a child, Morgan attended DeWitt Clinton High School. In 1985, at age 17 in his second year, he learned his father had contracted AIDS from hypodermic needle use. His father died in November 1987, at age 39.
Morgan married his girlfriend Sabina that year and dropped out of high school just four credits short of his diploma to care for his ailing father. Already raising their first son and living on welfare, Morgan sold crack cocaine with limited success, but began earning money performing comedy on the streets after his best friend was murdered. He said in 2009: “He would say to me, ‘Yo, Tracy, man, you should be doing comedy.’ A week later, he was murdered. And that for me, that was like my Vietnam. I had my survival [sic] guilt when I started to achieve success. Why I made it out and some guys didn’t.”
Morgan embarked on a stand-up comedy career, successfully enough that he “finally moved to a nice community in [the Bronx neighborhood of] Riverdale, from a run-down apartment next to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx”.
Morgan made his screen debut playing Hustle Man on the television show Martin. The character sold various items from the “hood”, always greeting people with his trademark “What’s happ’n, chief?”, and had a pet dog he dressed as a rapper. In the 2003 Chris Rock film Head of State, Morgan appeared as a man watching television, often questioning why they are not watching Martin.
Morgan was also a regular cast member on Uptown Comedy Club, a sketch-comedy show filmed in Harlem that aired for two seasons, from 1992 to 1994. He was on the HBO series Snaps in 1995.
He appeared twice on HBO’s Def Comedy Jam.
Morgan joined the cast of the comedy series Saturday Night Live in 1996 (Lorne Michaels chose him over Stephen Colbert in the final round) and performed as a regular until 2003. He returned to host on March 14, 2009, and reprised his roles as Brian Fellow and Astronaut Jones. He then made a guest appearance on the 2011 Christmas show, hosted by Jimmy Fallon, and hosted again on October 17, 2015.
On October 20, 2009, Morgan’s autobiography, I Am the New Black, was released. The book includes stories about living in Tompkins Projects in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, to becoming a cast member on Saturday Night Live. Morgan appeared on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air hosted by Terry Gross, at times becoming very emotional about his former life in a New York ghetto.
In 1996, Morgan was diagnosed with diabetes and for years has struggled with alcohol abuse. Morgan has conceded that many of his own troubles were incorporated within 30 Rock episodes. In early December 2010, Morgan received a kidney transplant necessitated by his diabetes and alcohol abuse. Morgan admitted that he initially did not take his diabetes seriously but later realized the care for it would end up being a matter of life and death.
Written by Dianne Washington