Tracy Morgan is the sort of living comedy icon who can elicit laughs as soon as he enters
a room.
But behind the comedy, he's experienced serious pain.
From a rough upbringing to the horrific car accident that nearly ended it all, these are
the tragic details of Tracy Morgan's life.
Morgan grew up in the Tompkins housing project in Brooklyn's rough-and-tumble Bedford-Stuyvesant
neighborhood.
He talked about his childhood in a 2009 interview with NPR's Fresh Air and recalled a stormy
relationship with his mother, who had split from his father.
Growing up in the neighborhood he jokingly dubbed "Ghetto USA," he described his childhood
as not particularly happy, but also not particularly out of the ordinary.
As he put it,
"I was like any other inner-city kid with a chip on his shoulder because his daddy and
his mommy [weren't] together."
When Morgan's father returned home from the Vietnam War, he also brought back a nasty
drug habit.
As Morgan recalled to Vanity Fair in 2018,
"My father was a heroin addict.
He died of AIDS.
But he was always in his kids' life.
His kids [were] his legacy.
Me, my brothers, and my sister were his world.
We were his world."
In his 2009 memoir I Am the New Black, Morgan wrote about an incident from his senior year
in high school in which his whole world turned upside down.
After he and his father had a vicious fight that ended with Morgan telling his dad he
wished he was dead, his father responded later that day by showing his son his test results
indicating that he had AIDS.
Crime plagued Morgan's neighborhood when he was growing up.
As he recalled in his memoir,
"My backyard became the city's market for crack and heroin, and our people were right
there to participate in every way — as dealers, as addicts, and as statistics day after day."
With few other prospects, Morgan began supporting himself by selling crack.
As he revealed to Rolling Stone,
"I was the worst drug dealer you could imagine.
I would throw meetings with the f---ing crackheads.
I'd tell them, 'Listen, I'm tired of all your bulls---.
You've got to get your s--- together.'"
Morgan also joked about his crack-dealing days during a 2018 appearance on Conan, when
he called himself, quote, "a crack dealer with a heart of gold."
"I would sell them crack and then feel sorry for them."
"Yeah."
Decades later, Morgan came to regret that part of his life.
As he put it on his Fresh Air interview,
"It still bothers me today, but it's something that I did.
It was survival."
Dealing crack in Bed-Stuy in the 80s was obviously not without its risks.
That hit home especially hard for Morgan when his best friend Alan was killed at the age
of 19 in the midst of a drug deal gone bad.
Before his death, Alan had told Morgan something that stuck with him.
As he recalled to Fresh Air,
"He would say to me, 'Yo, Tracy, man, you should be doing comedy.'
A week later, he was murdered.
And that for me, that was like my Vietnam.
I had my survival guilt when I started to achieve success.
Why I made it out and some guys didn't."
Armed with a firsthand lesson about the fragility of life, Morgan decided to do something substantial
with his own life.
He began crafting a standup comedy act, taking to the stage of every open-mic night that
he could find in The Bronx and any comedy club that would allow him to deliver five
minutes of material.
As Morgan honed his standup act, he landed a slot on the TV series Def Comedy Jam, where
he played a character that he'd created called Biscuit, sporting a propeller-topped beanie
with a food stamp affixed to it.
Fellow comedian Martin Lawrence hosted that particular episode, and he went on to hire
Morgan for his sitcom Martin to play a character dubbed "Hustle Man."
Soon thereafter, Morgan auditioned for Saturday Night Live, and Biscuit was among the characters
that he showcased.
As he recalled in an interview with The New York Times,
"Biscuit was just me as a child with a chip on my shoulder because my dad wasn't around."
Although he landed the job, Morgan initially found himself floundering on SNL.
He was rarely cast in sketches and didn't feel like he was truly part of the show, as
he was, quote, "the only black dude there besides Tim Meadows."
But then his whole outlook changed when SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels assured
him that he wasn't there because he was black but because he was funny.
As Morgan recalled to Rolling Stone,
"I never for­got that.
I'm here because I'm funny."
In 1996, Morgan was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and he only exacerbated his condition
by not taking it seriously until he got too sick to ignore it.
"There's no link between diabetes and diet.
That's a white myth, Ken!
Like Larry Bird or Colorado."
In 2010, he was forced to sit out two episodes of 30 Rock so that he could undergo a kidney
transplant, which fortunately ended up being successful.
Sadly, though, that wasn't the last of his health woes.
In 2012, TMZ reported that Morgan appeared "extremely intoxicated" while attending an
award show ceremony during the Sundance Film Festival.
While being escorted out of the building, he abruptly fell unconscious, and an ambulance
was dispatched to rush him to a hospital.
A hospital spokesperson told TMZ that no drugs or alcohol were found in his system, while
his rep blamed the comedian's collapse on exhaustion and the high altitude.
Morgan seconded that opinion when he later tweeted,
"Superman ran into a little kryptonite.
The high altitude in Utah shook up this kid from Brooklyn."
Even though drugs and alcohol weren't a factor in Morgan's Sundance collapse, the speculation
could be forgiven, considering his prior DUI convictions.
The first of these occurred in 2005, when he was arrested and charged after being pulled
over for speeding while he was driving in Hollywood.
Just under a year later, he was arrested and charged with DUI once again, this time in
Manhattan.
According to TMZ, police claimed that he was pulled over because he "was unable to maintain
a position in a lane of traffic."
It was also reported that he smelled like alcohol and failed a Breathalyzer test.
When Morgan was sentenced in 2007, he managed to avoid jail, though he didn't get off scot-free.
In addition to performing five days of community service, he was also sentenced to wear a Secure
Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitoring ankle bracelet, which can detect vapors of alcohol
emitted through the skin.
He was later ordered to wear the device for an additional 80 days when he was busted for
having a forbidden cocktail.
In October 2007, a judge ruled that he'd completed the terms of his probation.
June 7, 2014 is a date that Tracy Morgan will never forget.
On that day, he and some friends were being driven from a standup gig when their vehicle
was struck by a tractor-trailer on a New Jersey highway.
Morgan was rushed to a nearby hospital in critical condition, while his longtime friend,
comedian James McNair, was killed.
Morgan broke his ribs, nose, and leg in the crash, which also left him comatose for two
weeks with no memory of the incident.
He also suffered a traumatic brain injury.
A few weeks after the accident, Morgan was moved to a rehab facility where he would spend
the rest of the year healing his body and his brain.
His rigorous rehab regimen included daily speech, cognitive, vocational, and physical
therapies in order to bring him back to the man he was before the accident.
When The New York Post asked Morgan's lawyer Benedict Morelli if the comedian would ever
perform onstage again, he admitted that it was still far too soon to tell.
As Morelli put it,
"The doctors don't know the answer.
I don't know the answer."
The accident also cost Morgan some lucrative career opportunities, including a movie and
an FX TV series.
While his ultimate prognosis at the time was still very much up in the air, he remained
optimistic about an eventual comeback, as he told The New York Post,
"I love you all.
I'm fighting hard every day to get back."
In June 2015, Morgan was still recovering from the car accident when he appeared on
NBC's Today to discuss his condition.
He admitted that the recovery process was slow, as he had to use a cane to assist with
walking while his brain injury left him plagued with memory issues and headaches.
As he noted,
"I have my good days and my bad days where I forget things, you know.
There are times when I got the headaches and the nosebleeds."
When Morgan was asked about his eventual return to comedy, he declared that he couldn't wait
to get back to the stage.
As he put it,
"I love comedy.
I love comedy.
I never stopped loving her.
I love comedy, and I can't wait to get back on tour, but right now my goal is just to
heal and get better 'cause I'm not 100 percent yet.
I'm not."
"And when I'm there you'll know it.
I'll get back to making you laugh.
I promise you."
The experience ultimately gave Morgan a whole new perspective on life and death.
As he told GQ in 2017,
"When your room is ready, your room is ready.
You know why I survived?
Because I'm a tough motherf---er.
Tough times don't last.
Tough people do.
That's why me and you still here."
"You may have seen on the news I was in a terrible car accident a year ago.
It was awful.
But it also showed me how much love and support I have in this world."
Morgan's accident led to a high-profile lawsuit against Walmart.
The driver of the truck that smashed into the comedian's vehicle was found to have been
awake for 28 hours straight when the crash occurred.
The National Transportation Safety Board took the side of Morgan and his attorney in placing
the blame on the sleep-deprived truck driver.
By May 2015, the suit had been settled.
Payouts weren't disclosed, but court documents reportedly indicated that the settlement figure
was possibly more than $90 million for Morgan and another passenger in the vehicle.
However, Morgan's attorney disputed that figure, as he told CBS News that amount wasn't even
close to the correct number, without indicating whether the actual settlement was more or
less than what was reported.
Even with the cash windfall, the loss of Morgan's dear friend James McNair was a pain that still
lingered for him, and he blamed himself.
As he admitted in an interview with ABC 7 New York,
"When you're in an accident, your life is shattered.
When you lose a friend like that, your life is shattered.
I have to forgive myself for asking everyone to be on that bus.
I had to forgive myself so I could move forward."
Morgan also even eventually found it within himself to forgive the Walmart driver.
"You did forgive the Walmart driver, is that right?"
"I forgave him, and I'm not even mad at him no more."
While the details of how much money Morgan received in his settlement with Walmart have
yet to be revealed, he was doing well enough financially in the spring of 2019 to buy a
brand new $2 million Bugatti sports car.
But his excitement about his new purchase didn't last long, because just hours after
he bought the car, it was damaged in a fender-bender when a Honda CRV wound up smashing into the
side of his Bugatti.
An eyewitness told Page Six,
"[Morgan] said he got it literally an hour ago and he paid $2 million for it.
He just bought it, dude, and it's pretty scraped up.
It still had a dealer tag."
Morgan was reportedly and understandably not very thrilled about the situation.
The driver of the other vehicle told Page Six that she was left "traumatized" when Morgan
started yelling at her.
Obviously, this incident falls squarely onto the lighter side of Morgan's spectrum of tragedy,
and he was accordingly able to take it all in stride.
After the fender bender, he took to Twitter to let his fans know that he was okay and
also to put things in proper perspective, as he wrote,
"Thanks for any concern but I am totally fine.
My NEW CAR?
We shall see.
Love you all."
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