Maybe I’m alone, but I love Tracy Morgan. I know he’s crazy, but I totally love him and his 30 Rock character, which I assume is loosely based on the real Tracy. African-American comedians have had a tortured history on Saturday Night Live – for every Eddie Murphy, there are at least two players whose names you can’t even remember because they were hardly in any skits, and they left after a year or two. The fact that Tracy was able to find a character that people love – even if it is based on his life – is wonderful.
Anyway, Tracy has a new tell-all book called “I Am the New Black”. Tracy writes about his Saturday Night Live days, as well as his childhood and the nature of fame. The biggest revelation is that everything wasn’t so happy and cozy at SNL – Tracy claims that Chris Kattan and Cheri O’Teri used to ignore him. Tracy writes: “I could remember those two, especially those two people, treating me like the invisible guy. Now look where they at. Cheri Oteri, she can’t even get arrested…That’s what happened to me over there. They never treated me well. I never cared for them either. F— ’em.” Gatecrasher has more:
Watch out, “Saturday Night Live” cast members: Tracy Morgan has a new tell-all, and he’s not afraid to use it.
In “I Am the New Black” – out from Random House next Tuesday – the funnyguy slams some of his former “SNL” co-stars, writing of his 10-year stint on the show: “I had my finger on the pulse of urban comedy, but when I brought my act to ‘SNL,’ those mother——— 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—- can’t even get arrested.”
But Morgan does have some love for a few of his past “SNL” cohorts, including his current “30 Rock” boss, Tina Fey. “Tina wasn’t scared to come into my world and find the funny up in there. She’s that kind of cool,” he writes.
The two get along so well, in fact, that Fey even used one of her more bizarre nights during her ‘SNL” stint with Morgan as the inspiration for a famous “30 Rock” episode in which she accompanies Tracy to an “after-after-after-after party.”
“I wasn’t really friends with many of my castmates at ‘SNL,’ but that doesn’t mean I didn’t roll up into ‘SNL’ and all those after parties with my own friends,” the comedian explains. “Friends of mine were running an illegal strip club they called the Loft. It was in an office space 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.”
(And a few, er, other things, which Morgan details in the tome – but it’s a tad too racy to detail here.)
“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 … they thought it was just a private party. Then these two girls came out onstage and started [engaging in sex acts], 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.”
But even Tracy knows that if he’s anything, he’s memorable. “They might have left,” he says, “but it was all that anybody talked about around the show for the next week.”
[From Gatecrasher]
I’ve always found Chris Kattan pretty annoying, so I can believe that about him. But I hoped that Cheri O’Teri was nicer than that. Oh well. She could be a piece of work, who knows? Generally, I find these sort of tell-all, behind-the-scenes books very tedious, but Tracy’s might be a good read.
30 Rock is coming back this week, by the way. I can’t wait, I’m so excited. And I actually enjoyed Tracy’s story of his boys arranging the after-party. One of my favorite parts of 30 Rock is Tracy’s (and the other characters’) interactions with his two-man entourage, Dot Com and Gris. Those two actors are so lovely and so funny, they kind of steal every scene they’re in. More Dot Com and Gris!
Tracy Morgan and Bret Ratner are shown at the VH1 Hip Hop Honors on 9/23/09. He’s also shown 8/29 with Spike Lee at Michael Jackson’s 51st birthday celebration in Brooklyn. Credit: WENN.com
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