Tracy Morgan gives some of the best talk show interviews in the business. He approaches them not, like so many other celebrities, as an opportunity just to promote his new work with a polite back and forth, but as chances for him to act as an agent of chaos, debuting whatever jokes he’s been thinking up regardless of how appropriate they may be for the late night format.
Now, having nurtured this instinct over a month of quarantine, Morgan’s been out doing the circuit, theoretically to advertise the new season of The Last OG, but in practice to try out his best self-isolation jokes.
Three of these interview segments were uploaded yesterday. The first, which gives a good idea of what to expect from the rest, sees Morgan guesting on Late Night With Seth Meyers through a home video call where he spends a bunch of time playing around with a medical mask and gloves while detailing how good they are for role-playing with his wife. He calls the whole pandemic situation “freaky-deaky,” completely rejects Meyers’ question that he should name his fish and sharks (“They don’t even have brains, they just have nerves”), and explains how they’re holding up (“They don’t like wearing the hospital masks in the water”). He also says that he’s home schooling his kids with lessons like going “to the turnpike on a field trip [to] teach them how to get hit by a FedEx truck,” and says his wife’s gotten pregnant once a week in role-playing sessions where she pretends to be “the young maiden whose grandfather was infected with coronavirus and I’m the scientist who found the cure and she’ll do anything to save her grandfather. And I mean anything.”