Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Call it a comeback.
In fact, hail Tracy Morgan as a modern miracle, back from the near-dead and back onstage, just about three years removed from the New Jersey Turnpike crash that killed his friend and put Morgan into a coma. No need to forgive the comedian, then, for entirely appropriating the opening of Saturday Night Fever for his first Netflix special, Staying Alive — as Morgan re-enacts John Travolta’s strut below the subway line in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, complete with similar suit and slices at Lenny’s Pizza set to the sounds of the crooning Bee Gees.
Morgan can afford the extravagance. Shown not so subtly at all with a close-up of his blue Walmart shopping bag, which Morgan reaches into to grab a wad of cash to purchase a white fur coat.
Onstage at the Count Basie Theater in Red Bank, N.J., Morgan’s decked out in a white three-piece suit paired with white Adidas. “We can get right to it. Everybody in here knows I got hit by that f—ing Walmart truck.”
But the set doesn’t focus so much on the accident, as much as it does on Morgan’s comeback from it, and his new life, new wife now.
Morgan left most of his Walmart jokes on the cutting room floor after embarking on his cross-country “Picking Up the Pieces” stand-up tour. I saw him live twice in 2016; first at SXSW last March, then at Carnegie Hall in November. The differences in just the past year in his physical stamina, confidence, and outlook have been astounding to see.
Morgan does still make light of his near-death experience, though, joking about how God rejected him at the gates of Heaven because “only the good die young,” but not before he apparently got a few words in with several dead celebrities to report back to us.
“When I came out the coma, I got deep,” he says. He worried not just about his traumatic brain injury and its lasting effects, but also about being able to regain full use of his limbs. “I wanted to walk my wife down the aisle. Without a crutch. Without a cane.”
Morgan still has a chair onstage, though he only sits sparingly in it. Whenever he does, he tends to get sentimental, standing back up to animatedly act out one of his relatives or his own sexual thoughts. Oh yes, the old Tracy Morgan is back. Casual TV viewers may forget that Morgan’s stand-up comedy is and always has been downright raunchy, filthy enough to lose some audience members regularly over the years. That Tracy Jordan caricature you saw on 30 Rock? Rooted in deep truths. His “I’m going to get you pregnant” perhaps the most family-friendly catchphrase he had.
He jokes about how his new wife has to put up with him during sex, looking at a face that’s a mash-up of Wesley Snipes and Biz Markie.
But this hour finds Morgan much more introspective with gratitude, too.
“I miss y’all. I miss doing this,” he says while seated halfway through the special.
So he relishes the chance to reflect on what he learned about himself while in rehab, as well as mock his Brooklyn relatives who get themselves into such darkly comic situations that they make Morgan himself seem not only more reasonable, but his most likable self.
