Tracy Morgan Opens Up About Feeling 'Culturally Isolated' As A Black Cast Member On 'SNL'

Saturday Night Live is celebrating its 50th anniversary now that the late-night sketch comedy variety show has been entertaining American audiences since its debut on October 11, 1975.

To celebrate SNL's impressive milestone, many former and returning cast members, writers, and celebrity guests reflected on their experiences being part of the show in Peacock's all-new docuseries SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night.

While some looked back fondly on their time and reminisced with memorable anecdotes, not all of the cast recollections were viewed through a rose-colored lens.

SNL alum Tracy Morgan opened up about feeling "culturally isolated" when he first joined the mostly-White cast lineup in 1996.

The 56-year-old Brooklyn native was chosen over Stephen Colbert in the last round of auditions and became the ninth Black cast member to join the SNL ensemble.

Morgan was a regular performer until 2003 and has since returned for a guest appearance and to host the show twice.

In the four-part docuseries, Morgan admitted:

“I wanted to show them my world, how funny it was. But the first three years, I felt like I was being culturally isolated sometimes."

“I’m coming from a world of Blacks. I’m an inner-city kid. To be on the whitest show in America, I felt by myself.”

"I felt like they weren’t getting it," said Morgan, who mentioned the likes of Eddie Murphy, Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, and Richard Pryor, as his comedic influences.

Morgan's memorable SNL characters included Woodrow, apartment maintenance man Dominican Lou, Astronaut Jones, and ignorant Safari Planet host Brian Fellow.

Here's a vintage clip of him as Astronaut Jones.

His brilliant celebrity impressions included Della Reese, Harry Belafonte, Maya Angelou, and Little Richard.

In the docuseries, Morgan recalled a heart-to-heart he had with SNL producer Lorne Michaels that led to a turning point.

"He said, ‘Tracy, I hired you because you’re funny, not because you’re Black. So just do your thing.’ "

"And that’s when I started doing my thing," he said.

He wasn't the only comedian on the show who experienced a similar sense of isolation.

Damon Wayans divulged he “purposefully" got himself axed from SNL in 1985 after feeling like he wasn't given much to work with concerning the sketches written for him.

He was warned about the material playing on racial stereotypes at the time in a conversation he had with former cast member Eddie Murphy.

“They’re gonna give you some Black people sh*t to do, and you ain’t gonna like it," recalled Wayans of what Murphy told him.

“Everything Eddie said came true."

After his sketch ideas were constantly being rejected and he was asked instead to perform material handed to him, Wayans said he reached a breaking point with a sketch written for him called "Mr. Monopoly." During the live taping, he rebelliously went off-script to deliver lines “like a very effeminate gay guy.”

Michaels subsequently fired Wayans for breaking one of SNL's golden rules of not going rogue on air.

“I just did not care… I purposefully did that because I wanted him to fire me," Wayans shared.

People weighed in on the cultural environment in the earlier years of the show and on Morgan's career on the Live From New York subReddit and Entertainment subReddit threads.

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Since his stint on SNL, Morgan found further success on 30 Rock playing a caricature of himself, named Tracy Jordan, from 2006 to 2013, earning him a 2009 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series.

In 2018, Morgan starred in the TBS series The Last O.G. for four seasons.

He also starred in Adam Sandler's 2005 sports comedy film The Longest Yard playing a transgender inmate.

In 2022, Morgan became the overall ninth recipient and first Black recipient of the New York Friars Club's prestigious Entertainment Icon Award.