Tracy Morgan on 'Rio 2' & Why He Chose a Career in Comedy

My stock just went up because I'm here with Tracy Morgan. Great to see you.

Thank you for having me.

I don't know if you know this or not, but you are our very first studio guest here at Young Hollywood.

Well, I feel honored.

It was four years ago.

Yeah, I remember.

Yeah. You have been, you've had a really busy year. I looked on your Facebook page. It's kind of been like a who's who. It was like there was the Fallon, the opening night of the Tonight Show. There was an epic, epic picture, it was like you, Kim Kardashian, Barbara Walters, Sarah Jessica Parker. Can we get like, do you have like a behind the scenes story, something epic that happened behind the scenes?

Oh, at Jimmy Fallon? Uh, not really. I mean, it was, it just all went so fast. I mean, you walk in and you see all your favorites. I'm there with Mike Tyson. Yeah. You understand? This is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. Right. So, you know, um, I think a little bit of P came out.

Did it?

Yeah, you know, I was so.

Do you get starstruck still at this point?

Uh, I mean, I've been in the game for a while, but, you know, I'm still excited to see my favorites.

Well, you're doing your thing. You're busy. A little bit. Bonafide, Comedy Central special. See, this is what I didn't know about you. You're like an old school romantic. You were talking in your, your comedy about how men these days they should not, and I wanted to ask you, do you think men should text for a date? To text a woman to ask for a date?

Yeah. No, I don't believe in that. I believe in just approaching her, getting to know her, and, you know, asking her in an old-fashioned way, you know, let's go out for some coffee or something. Right. To get to know each other.

You call?

Yeah, phone call. I love a phone call, anything but a text to me. I mean, I don't want to, I don't want us to lose the art of communication. Like me and you sitting here speaking, you feel my vibe?

Yeah.

You feel me?

I feel the love.

All right then. See that? You can't get that in a text.

Yeah. So you're going to be on tour.

Yeah, we have a tour popping off in May. It's called, uh, Tracy Morgan Turned it Funny with Live Nation and if you go online, you can, uh, look up where I'm at, if they're near you. Ladies, can I say something? All due respect, if you didn't lose weight before June 24th, you're going to be fed all summer.

How do you make it a fresh take every night? Not just for the audience, but for yourself.

Every night is something different. Even if I say the same material, I'm going to do it in a different energy. So it keeps it fresh. You move things around, you experiment, you take things out, you add things, and you just stay creative. There's only one way to do that. You stay creative. Every day is a different day. Every day you're not going to wake up with the same energy. You have your highs and you have your lows. You just don't let the highs get too high and the lows get too low. And I learned one thing about that on Saturday Night Live, know when to peak. It's like making love, you got to know when to peak, fellas.

Not not every guy knows that though.

Not every guy knows that. That's the subtleties. You got to know when to peak. Don't ever peak too soon. You won't be invited back.

And what about professionally?

During the day, if I have a big show at night, I'm not going to peak at 12:00 in the afternoon. As I'm on my way to the show, I might, you know, be gearing up, going over the stuff in my mind, and I'll peak at a certain point during the show when I, when I first get on stage and I grab the mic. I just want to identify and relate with the crowd, just say hi. You know, just saying what's up.

What does it because most people won't know what it ever feels like to like open a Madison Square Garden. What does it feel like in front of 5,000 people laughing at you?

Um, it's incredible. Growing up, my, my mom, my father, you know, they, they would talk to me constantly about loving myself and loving who you are. Loving who you are. So, now I'm an adult. I love who I am. I love what I do. I wouldn't, look, man, I'm in a room and I'm surrounded by beautiful women all around me. You can't beat that. You're not getting that in the mailroom at FedEx. I mean, no disrespect to people that work at the mailroom at FedEx, but this is show business, man. This is

Who knows though. Maybe they are.

This is awesome. I wouldn't trade this for none of the world.

You love what you're doing, so.

I love it. I love it. I love it. Even if I didn't have money or fame or none of that stuff, I would still be funny.

You get asked a lot on Twitter. I see a lot of your people tweet at you. They want to do what you do. They want to be comedians. A-list advice for sort of like making it your own, owning it because you're the man that's known to own it. You just go all out and you don't hold back.

For a lot of people, you know, it takes a lot of, if I may say, a lot of balls to go for your dreams. Especially when you have a lot of older people or people around you that are saying, why? You got to be the one to say, why not? Somebody had to come out of the projects in Brooklyn and become a star on Saturday Night Live and all that stuff, so I said, why not me? So, you know, if you love doing something and you feel you're funny, you can't listen to nobody. You just got to pull the trigger.

Did you say that to yourself early on like, why not me? And did you sort of envision your success?

Well, I had my dad there too, you know. He was our poor Richard Pryor. You know, we didn't have the money to go to Madison Square Garden to see Richard Pryor. Right. So, they looked at Jimmy and Jimmy made everybody in the projects laugh. So, I'm just mimicking what my father did.

You think people can be learn to be funny or think you just have it or you don't?

I think you can learn how to tell jokes. Yeah. But I think funny is in the gut. What I do is not created in a classroom or agent's office or manager's office. What I do is created with the people. It's out there. Could you teach Michael Jackson how to do that? Could you teach Michael Jordan how to do that? That's in his DNA. Right. You want to know what my motivation was for being funny? I was born this way. But you want to know what why I did it? The girls.

I was going to I was going to guess that. But But really, you chose a career path that was.

I got the girls cuz I made all the girls laugh. Yeah. Later on it became a business. All the girls.

Rio 2. I love them. You've described him before as a charming bulldog. Yeah. Could you describe yourself that way?

Uh, yeah, I have that. I have charm. Well, if I'm going to describe me,

Yeah. How would you describe you?

Contemporary wit. Nice. Contemporary wit. You know, I cut the monster. But I won't cut too deep cuz I know we need the monster.

What does that mean?

The comedy. We need it. If you don't laugh, you're going to cry. So, you know, yeah, I can be edgy. But I'm not going to go in too deep to where people are hurt. Right. I'm going to just enough so we laugh.

Great seeing you again. Thank you for coming back to Young Hollywood.

Thank you for having me.

Come back again. Don't let it be four years before you come back.

You got it.