A little more than two years after narrowly escaping death in a horrific six-vehicle crash on the New Jersey Turnpike, comedian Tracy Morgan sits in the living room of his $13.9 million mansion in tony Alpine, NJ. He plays with his giggling 3-year-old daughter, Maven Sonae, and exudes a kind of soulfulness that rarely informs his bombastic stand-up routine.
“The accident gave me a different perspective on life,” he softly says over the phone. “It would have done the same for you.”
Morgan, 47, is not just alive, but truly thriving. His career has shot into overdrive: He appeared with Conan O’Brien at the Apollo this week, has projects galore on his slate, and will headline a New York Comedy Festival show at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night.
The comic has denied reports he got a $90 million legal settlement for the accident from Walmart, whose truck slammed into Morgan’s limo. In a statement in May 2015, he said, “Walmart did right by me and my family, and for my associates and their families. I am grateful that the case was resolved amicably.”
Morgan — who was in a coma for eight days and feared he’d never walk properly again — attributes his remarkable comeback to personal rather than professional motivations: “I wanted to be well enough to play with my daughter when she got older, to see my sons grow, to see my wife grow. Those things were on my brain. They focused me on getting healthy.” (Morgan has three grown sons with his first wife. His daughter, Maven, is with current wife Megan Wollover.)
While he has upcoming film roles (“Fist Fight,” “Tag”), Morgan’s current big project is a TBS sitcom featuring Jordan Peele as co-writer and executive producer. On the as-yet-untitled show, which has been shooting on location in Brooklyn, Morgan plays an ex-con returning from a 15-year prison stretch and adjusting to life in his newly gentrified neighborhood.
He says the crash gave him greater clarity in his creative process.
“I was sitting around after the accident with ideas and visions, things coming back to me, my brain rebooting,” Morgan says. “A lot of the show is based on my life in New York City. Stories I have known, lives I have seen that touched me. The idea was there before the accident, but [surviving] the accident gives me a second chance.”
He gets to reminiscing about inner-city New York — he describes himself as being from “Brooklyn, by way of The Bronx” — during a grim time.
“I’m from the ’80s generation,” says Morgan. “Crack and AIDS destroyed a whole generation of people. They went away to prison for making easy money by selling crack, or else they went away by dying of AIDS. I am from the missing generation.”
He quickly drops the crack-era talk and pauses the interview so he can wrangle his chattering daughter. One can almost see his smile — the one made famous when he played an exaggerated version of himself on “30 Rock” — through the phone line.
He talks about the excitement of appearing on “Conan” during the talk-show host’s stint at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. It’s his first time on that historic stage since his 2010 HBO stand-up special.
‘I wanted to be well enough to play with my daughter when she got older, to see my sons grow, to see my wife grow.’
“I got my start on 125th Street. It was at Uptown Comedy Club” — where Morgan and other up-and-coming comedians would engage in epic freestyling put-down battles — “and [I’ve] traveled millions of miles in comedy and showbiz. But it’s always good to come home.”
Morgan is all too aware of how close he came to never coming home again. However, bad as things had been for him — his wife, Megan, recently told Essence magazine, “I look back on [the post-accident period] like a movie or a nightmare” — he swears that he won’t shy away from mining the experience for laughs.
“Listen,” he says in his throaty, booming voice, “if you don’t laugh about it, you cry about it. But that’s what I built my career on, Richard Pryor-style, taking all the bad things in my life and making them funny.” Like when he made a surprise appearance at the 2015 Primetime Emmys and quipped about emerging from the coma and being “ecstatic to learn I wasn’t the one who messed up!”
Morgan acknowledges that nearly losing his life helped his comedy, even before he made a single crack about high-speed collisions on New Jersey highways.
“It gave me something to talk about. It gave me something to think about,” he says, leaving the impression that maybe he had begun taking his comedic talents too much for granted. “It’s like with a girlfriend. You ignore her for a long time, then you see her with another man and you get more into her. I’m paying closer attention. I’m more into detail.”
Still, when it comes to spinning the crash into comic gold, even a man as outrageously humorous as Morgan may have his work cut out for him. “I had nightmares, as any human would, but they were not accident nightmares. I don’t remember the accident,” he says. “They were dreams about Jimmy [Morgan’s frequent collaborator, James McNair, who died in the collision], childhood, my dad. You go through a traumatic brain injury and your life passes before you. Trust me on that.”
With the end of the allotted interview time at hand, Morgan puts in a heartfelt request. “Do me a favor,” he says. “Tell the people of New York City that I love them.”