Tracy Morgan is returning to standup
A gruesome highway accident followed by months of pain and rehab. That’s no laughing matter.
Not unless you’re comedian Tracy Morgan, who’s mining this ordeal for laughs with his “Picking Up the Pieces” standup tour.
After its current warmup phase, the tour officially launches Feb. 5 at the Horseshoe Casino in Hammond, Indiana, and continues through May.
Among other dates, he will perform three shows in New Jersey, including a New Brunswick theatre about 20 miles from where the accident occurred.
“I’m in a good place in my life,” says Morgan during a recent phone conversation.
“When I first got back on the stage, I had to work on my confidence. But I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t nervous. I was excited!”
It was June 7, 2014, when a Walmart truck slammed into the limousine Morgan was riding in. The crash killed a close friend and fellow comedian, and left Morgan with broken bones and brain damage. He was ina com a for two weeks.
“I was basically knocking on The Door,” he says, but adds with undisguised gratitude, “I came back. That’s the spirit moving me.”
That was plenty impressive. But still it held no promise that Morgan, who has long scored laughs in concert, on “30 Rock” and “Saturday Night Live,” would ever be able to perform again.
On the “Today” show last June, in his first public appearance since the accident, Morgan sat clutching a cane and, with a tear streaking down his cheek, acknowledged he wasn’t “100 per cent yet.”
“When I’m there, you’ll know it,” he said. “I’ll get back to making you laugh, I promise you.”
He made good on that promise three months later with a surprise appearance on the Emmy telecast.
By then he had made good on a promise to himself to wed his fiancee, Megan Wollover, on his own terms: walking her down the aisle with no cane.
Then, in October, he returned triumphantly as guest host of “SNL,” where he had been a cast member from 1996 to 2003.
“I felt so good going back home to ‘SNL,’” he says.
“It was like the first day I was there many years ago. That first time was crazy, but to have the opportunity to have the feeling all over again — wonderful, man! And I said, ‘I want to (tour) again.’ That was the end” of any doubts.”