Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Tracy Morgan: Takin’ It Too Far’ On Max, The Comedian Falls Back On His Old Habits

Tracy Morgan was perhaps the biggest name on the list when HBO announced the first slate of stand-up specials coming exclusive to its streaming platform, back in 2019, back when it was still HBO Max. Now he’s the last of that batch to arrive. Were they saving the best for last? Or are we putting too much thought into it…

TRACY MORGAN: TAKIN’ IT TOO FAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Nine years after he almost died in a horrific highway crash on the New Jersey Turnpike, and six years removed from his comeback comedy special on Netflix, Tracy Morgan turns now to Max for this set recorded at Boston’s Wilbur Theater.

It opens with a montage set to Morgan’s voiceover, as he recounts his career arc, from his beginnings performing shows in Harlem and the Uptown Comedy Club sketch showcase, to Def Comedy Jam, Saturday Night Live and beyond, how he has rehabbed and come back from surviving and settling with Walmart after the tractor-trailer demolished his passenger van. Only to end with Morgan announcing: “F— that, I’m the same ol’ Tre-bags!”

Which means we’re in for some raunch.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: This feels more like a comeback vehicle for “Tracy Jordan,” the 30 Rock caricature, than for the real-life Morgan.

Memorable Jokes: Of course Morgan has a take on the 2022 Oscars slap, and his involves a sight gag (a white guy in a suit walks onstage with a baseball bat as Morgan threatens anyone in the crowd who might want to have a go at him), and a barb for Chris Rock, claiming Will Smith smacked Rock so hard that he can only date white women now.“Where’s my tough guy at the Oscars?”

He also acts out his interpretation of Bobby Brown trying to date at his age, and what you might find deep down in the belly button hole. As for Morgan, he’s single again and jokes it’s tough to date in his 50s, imagining himself on Tinder and gladly accepting gold-diggers over women with actual accomplishments in their profiles, simply wanting women to give him a good story.

Time and again, he’ll remind of us how he had to re-learn living following the Walmart accident. “If I could survive that, I could survive anything.” That earns him an applause break, which he interrupts: “Boy, was I f–ing wrong!” He has since been hit by the pandemic, divorce papers and child support.

He jokes about how gentrification has changed Brooklyn since he grew up there, and claims he lives next to an Asian woman who’s the CEO of Pepsi (NOTE: Indra Nooyi, 67, did head PepsiCo from 2006 to 2018), and how with all of the white women in his neighborhood, getting them pregnant would result in a lot of ‘mulatto kids.”

Still, he much prefers stand-up to his previous jobs at places such as McDonald’s and Red Lobster. “To me, shit is normal again,” he says. 

Our Take: Morgan ends his set by telling the audience: “Thank you for letting me be me.”

What does it say about him, though, that Morgan being Morgan is a guy who loudly makes queef sounds for laughs, who impersonates Louis Armstrong for an old lady giving him a blowjob, and who also graphically describes his preferences for a woman’s clitoris?

This is the Tracy Morgan I remember from two decades ago, after SNL but before 30 Rock, when he’d pack comedy clubs while also walking crowds who weren’t prepared for or ready to indulge him his dirty talk. It’s one to laugh at “Tracy Jordan” claiming he’ll get you pregnant; it’s another to see Morgan carrying on like this.

Sometimes a return to form isn’t the wisest choice. But then, we’re in an age where old IP gets rebooted or revived for sequels we didn’t know we didn’t want until it arrived.

When Morgan tells us that Instagram is a lie, and claims that “DJ Khaled is not that f-ing happy,” I wonder how much he’s trying to telegraph his own emotional state to us. He does joke that if we see Morgan dancing in his underwear on TikTok, then that means he has lost all of his Walmart lawsuit money.

That said, watching him sling these dirty jokes for money on Max isn’t that far off.

Our Call: SKIP IT. If you want to see Morgan at his best, instead turn back to his 2017 Netflix special, Staying Alive.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.