Stand-up suits the sitcom star 'I'm glad I'm funny,' Tracy Morgan says. 'People tend to think comedy is a step down (from serious acting), but actually it's an honour to be funny'. TRACY Morgan: larger-than-life, goofy, infuriating, coddled man-child with a string of comic blockbusters behind him? No, that's Tracy Jordan: the teasingly named but entirely fictional character created by Tina Fey for the sitcom 30 Rock, whose last episode recently screened in the US. "He's a character that's been created on a TV show, Tracy Morgan is nothing like that," he says when asked whether there is any aspect of him on which the character is based. Tracy Morgan is a little more ... subdued. At least that's what he tells The Australian down a terrible phone line from New York. Speaking to The Daily Telegraph late last year, he confided that Jordan had instantly reminded him of himself and his real-life alter ego, the hard-drinking and partying Chico Divine, so named by his friends. Right now he wants to disavow the similarities. He lives for live comedy whereas Tracy Jordan is purely a screen comic, he says. On 30 Rock, Tracy Jordan never does stand-up. That was a good thing and smart of Tina Fey," he says. Actually, in a pre-election episode from the show's final season, Jordan proclaims, "I've done stand-up in every state of America," and proceeds to predict regions' voting intentions based on how they react to his comedy. He and Fey are veterans of Saturday Night Live, the long-running weekly NBC sketch show where Morgan recorded seven seasons and which he calls a "university for funny." Then after The Tracy Morgan Show lasted only one season, he found a suitably madcap niche on the sitcom of the decade. For 30 Rock, Fey drew on her experience as head writer for SNL. Her character Liz Lemon, head writer of the "TGS with Tracy Jordan" sketch show, wrestles with the demands of a corporate alpha-dog boss played by Alec Baldwin, a ditzy but ruthless diva played by Jane Krakowski, and the all but unmanageable star Tracy Jordan. A successful TV career and the odd movie - including Cop Out with Bruce Willis and the US remake of Death at a Funeral - might be enough for some comics, but Morgan has never let a punishing shooting schedule keep him off the stage. "I've never stopped doing stand-up, I never will," he says. Whenever I can, I still do stand-up while I'm on TV. I do as much as I can. There's nothing like live entertainment. You have immediate response, you have immediate rapport and immediate connection with your audience. The level of honesty and trust is right there, and that's what I love most about live entertaining. He has spoken before about catching the acting bug early, when his father would take him to the theatre. But he has no regrets about not being a "serious" actor. I'm totally happy with who I am and the way things turned out. I have no regrets about acting in film or anything. I'm glad I'm funny. People tend to think comedy is a step down, but actually it's an honour to be funny. His advice to any aspiring comic? Do it because you love it ... don't think of the money or anything, do it strictly because you love it. Morgan is a character comic, impressionist and stand-up from one of comedy's premier schools of hard knocks, the Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto in Brooklyn, New York. In person he is thoughtful and serious, with touches of moroseness, while profoundly grateful to have the life he has. That life has been no easy ride, with a father who fought in Vietnam, returned a heroin addict and died of AIDS when Morgan was 17; a family from whom he is estranged; diabetes, exacerbated by alcoholism that required a kidney transplant (he is now sober); drink-related run-ins with the law; and a way of courting controversy more by clumsiness than design. "Yeah, I've had my problems, like everyone else," he says. Where I come from has given me an edge, sure ... I'm from Brooklyn, that's hard. He was born in the Bronx and grew up there and in Bed-Stuy, once the largest ghetto in the US. His mother threw his father out because of his addiction; Morgan left her to live with his father while in high school, then left school to care for him until he died. His comedy, he says, began as a defence mechanism against bullying, a surrogate for violence: "Sometimes kids in the schoolyard can be mean, so I had to defend myself and I guess this is the tool God gave me to defend myself. Later on it turns into engagements and all these other things. That's all I had - I don't know how it would have went (without a gift for comedy), it could have been tragic, could have went another way. He briefly tried his hand at selling drugs, which he did not enjoy and for which he has expressed remorse. By his early 20s he and his childhood sweetheart, Sabina, had three sons and were living on welfare. Then a friend put him on to Harlem's Apollo Theatre and the televised Uptown Comedy Club, and things turned. In his memoir I Am the New Black, he says comedy became the ark he built that allowed him to escape the ghetto. He describes using his first SNL pay cheque to move with his family at 4am to Riverdale, the Jewish part of the Bronx: "We was just gone one night ... In the ghetto, when you move, you should move at night 'cos nobody's up, nobody can see what you got and nobody can follow you to your new place. TV success also brought its dangers. Morgan says he became hooked on the party lifestyle, alcohol and fame - "the worst drug known to mankind" - and while it gave him the attention he never got as a child, it resulted in him not being there enough for his children and his wife, from whom he divorced in 2007. The Tracy Morgan who was Emmy-nominated in 2009 may not be Tracy Jordan, but he has been generous in sharing episodes from his life with his screen ego, including his kidney transplant and the alcohol-monitoring bracelet to which he was confined in 2007 after pleading guilty to driving under the influence and breaking probation. Not one to be precious, Morgan has said before that "the PC shit is killing comedy for me - that's why I love 30 Rock 'cos Tina Fey, she's got balls." With comedy in New York, race and racism are never more than half a joke away, but Morgan does not fixate on it. I guess racism is still there, it's alive and kicking. It's a part of life. It's out there waiting for me ... We make fun of it - Archie Bunker, George Jefferson on TV (the bigoted WASP and his black neighbour in the 1970s sitcom All in the Family) - but there are other issues going on in the world too ... social problems, social injustices, sexism. He has no opinion on Barack Obama's re-election, and was too tired from shooting 30 Rock even to celebrate that night. I'm truly not into politics, so I've never got into that stuff ... People think that's weird, but I don't follow politics. I just take care of myself. The character Tracy Jordan is notoriously difficult to pin down to scripts and rehearsals, and is something of a loose cannon. That lack of a brain-mouth filter is not entirely fictional. "I'm an artist, I'm spontaneous," he says when asked how scripted his stand-up is. I like to stay in the moment, so I have some sort of idea of what I might share on stage, but a lot of it is exciting and spontaneous. In mid-2011 at a gig in Nashville, Tennessee, he got too spontaneous and threw "the PC shit" into a big fan when he unleashed a homophobic rant that included saying that if his own son was gay, he'd better not announce it to Morgan in an effeminate fashion or he'd "stab that little nigger." Hit by a meteor of backlash, Morgan did a lot of apologising and for the first time went public with the fact his father had died of AIDS, by way of explaining that he had experienced the stigma attached to homosexuality (even though his father was not gay). The Nashville routine earned him a brilliantly stinging rebuke/defence from Fey: "The violent imagery of Tracy's rant was disturbing to me at a time when homophobic hate crimes continue to be a life-threatening issue ... It also doesn't line up with the Tracy Morgan I know, who is not a hateful man and is generally much too sleepy and self-centred to ever hurt another person. Louis CK - a respected and thoughtful comic whose flame-thrower is usually turned on himself and people like him - charitably suggested the real question was about notions of masculinity and Morgan's upbringing, and that the opportunity for a real discussion had been missed. Morgan doesn't want to have that discussion now. That's over with, as far as I'm concerned. I don't like to talk about it. I'm at a clear point in my life. I'd rather not talk about that stuff, it's nothing to do with being funny," he says. "If you don't mind," he adds politely. As Morgan contemplates life after 30 Rock - he says he hopes to work with Fey "forever" and is in discussions for a spin-off - he is now using the space and the opportunity to tour. This year will be the first time he has performed outside North America. "I'm excited, I'm going to visit different countries," he says, sounding indeed like an excited child. I'm excited to see how they will accept me and the experience of my life, where I come from, see how people respond to that. That said, and despite a life story with highs and lows that few could relate to, he's hoping to find a universal funny bone. I think people are the same all around the world, I think they're going to identify and relate with the stuff I say. I think funny is funny, no matter where you do it at. Where you live doesn't matter. Tracy Morgan will appear in Brisbane on April 9 and 10, then Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.