The World According To Tracy

Tracy Morgan is not Tracy Jordan. If there's one thing the 44-year-old comedian wants you to know, it's that the character he played for 138 episodes of the dearly departed sitcom 30 Rock is just that: a character. And that all the denial of the moon's existence, taking it behind the middle school to get it pregnant, being booby-slapped by a coked-out Russian stripper, and sleeping on a dog bed stuffed with wigs are not the vices and habits he indulges in.

In fact, in conversation, this is when Morgan comes most alive; when asked if people had trouble differentiating between Tracy Morgan and Tracy Jordan. “Those are the people who are idiots,” he spits, “The ones that can't separate fantasy from reality, fact from fiction. Tracy Morgan and Tracy Jordan – the only thing they have in common is the name 'Tracy'. I'm nothing like that character on TV. That character is a figment of someone else's imagination. That is not who I am. I am who I am. I'm not trying to be Tracy Jordan. I know how to come out of character. I'm a grown man. I don't run around talking nonsense every day. I don't get around in my tighty whiteys with a light sabre. Do people really think I'd do that? I don't do that. I'm somebody's father, I'm somebody's husband. Come on, man. I'm a grown-ass man!

“I don't even see how people can ask me that question. Like they don't know the difference between what's TV and what's real. Or, what's worse, they do, but they think I don't, y'know? I mean, do people ask Alec Baldwin that? Do they ask Tina Fey that? It's a booby-trap question, and it's insulting. I get asked that question, and most of the time it shocks me. Do people really not know the difference between Tracy Morgan and Tracy Jordan? You don't have to think outside the box to know that one of them is me; the other is a character on TV. People don't ask Brad Pitt what's the difference between him and Benjamin Button. I ain't mad about it, but, c'mon, people. You really think I go around my house acting like Tracy Jordan? You'd go to jail if you went around acting like Tracy Jordan!”

Yet, given how heavily the character of Tracy Jordan borrowed from Morgan's own personal travails – alcoholism, struggles with diabetes, a kidney transplant – you can forgive those who wondered how close this 'caricature' cut to the real man. In his time on Saturday Night Live – on which he lasted six seasons, from 1996 to 2003 – Morgan earned a reputation as a hard-drinkin', hard-partyin', hard-livin' bad boy; a 'toast of the town' figure who'd risen up from a hard-scrabble background and was now squeezing every drop out of life. When SNL kingpin Lorne Michaels and creator/writer/star Fey were conceiving of 30 Rock as a behind-the-scenes show based on their experiences working on the late-night TV institution, Morgan was brought on board for the express purpose of playing a variation of himself.

And yet, years later, things have changed. Morgan wants, no more, to be thought of as the wild and crazy guy, always on, always funny. He sees playing that role as playing up to what the media covering him, and his life, want. “People need a story,” Morgan says. “People want drama. Some people are just waiting for scandal, for gossip. But I don't care about that. Because I'm a focused man. I'm a grown man. I'm 44 years old. I'm not a little kid anymore. I'm not a teenager. If I was going to go off the deep end, I would've gone off the deep end long ago.”

Morgan is, in both life and conversation, seemingly on the straight and narrow. Whereas he once boasted, “I can never not be funny,” an interview with Morgan circa 2013 is, well, not particularly funny. Instead, he's all business. To the point where the string of no-nonsense, one-line answers make him sound like a sportsman; a response like, “we stayed focused, we stayed together, the chemistry was always good,” making his recently departed TV show sound like a basketball team.

30 Rock came to an end on 31 January, after 138 episodes and ceaseless acclaim; its passing met with countless obituaries. “It wasn't like an aunt died, or an uncle died,” Morgan says, of the end. “It's not like there's been a death in the family. A TV show just came to an end. Like all good things come to an end. It's sad to no longer see the people you've worked with for seven seasons, but I feel great. You get sad if you think too much about all those people that you've worked with, this family that you have that you're missing, but for the most part you just feel proud. We did seven years of great TV, and I'm really proud of that. I'm not focusing on the end; I'm focusing on the journey, the journey that we took.”

Morgan claims to have never had an inkling that such success was in store for the show – “our main goal was just to have fun, first of all; we didn't have a crystal ball, we couldn't see beyond the next episode” – and that it only dawned on him once he was routinely walking the red carpet. “First of all you say, 'Wow, the show is critically acclaimed and people are watching it,' but when you start getting those nominations, those Golden Globes and everything, it begins something else. When you can say, 'Wow, we got 97 Emmy nominations!' that's when you know you're doing something special.”

With the end of 30 Rock, Morgan has thrown himself back into his stand-up work. Though he's at pains to point out that he was never one of those comedians who stopped taking to the stage due to his television work – “that's the foundation on which my whole career was built on” – Morgan says, “there was never a point when I stopped doing stand-up”. He's now able to be in his “natural environment” far more often; currently touring around the American Midwest, and set for his first-ever trip to Australia, where he'll be performing a national tour.

“It's my experiences, my authenticity,” he says, of the shows. “It's me. It don't have nothing to do with TV or movies, this is my voice. That's what people are going to be hearing. This is my world, my stories, my experience. The experiences that I have are the same that any other father has, any other brother has, any other husband has, any other dad has. It's about me as a person. This is not 30 Rock, this is not Cop Out, this is not none of that. This is the world according to Tracy. ”

Referring to himself in the third person? Tracy being Tracy? The inner athlete in Morgan has returned. Morgan the wild is unseen. Instead, he's the straight man and turns intensely sincere, with almost a kind of childlike wonder, when he starts talking about coming to Australia – and crossing the equator – for the first time. “It's surreal to me the fact that I'm that funny it can take me around the world. My funny has taken me around the world? Oh man, I gotta thank God for that. I'm getting to go to Australia and make those people in the down under laugh at my world? C'mon! That's the best feeling in the world. I'm coming to Australia!”

REPPIN THE OLD SCHOOL

Tracy Morgan mentions during our interview, several times, that he's 44 years old. In a world obsessed with remaining youthful at all times, the proud “family man” is running in the opposite direction: reminding people that he's old. Tracy Jordan may have been mortal enemies with Bill Cosby – that aunt-impregnating, light-ass-kids-havin' titan of the Blackmerican illuminati, the Black Crusaders – but this is just another reason why Tracy Jordan is a character, not the man himself.

Instead, Morgan – who cites his grandfather (“a janitor for 38 years”) as his role model – feels like a man out of time, an almost Cosby-esque figure occupying the position of old-man puzzled by times changed. Hearing him repeat back the question, “Do I feel disconnected from the social media era?” feels like hearing that disconnect manifest; Morgan puzzled by the kids these days with their tweetin' and their twittin' and their Tumblrin'.

“I come from a different era,” says Morgan. “I never got into the social media era at all. I don't really know that much about it to even talk about it at all. It's just not my thing. I'm an old-fashioned person. I still use pencils. I use a regular phone. I don't know how to use a computer. I don't know how to do any of that new-fashioned kind of stuff. I'm an old-school kinda guy. And if people can't appreciate that, that's too bad. I'm Tracy. I am who I am.”

WHO: Tracy Morgan
WHAT: Tracy Morgan: Excuse My French
WHEN & WHERE: Saturday 13 April (8pm and 10pm) - MICF, Hamer Hall, Melbourne VIC