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“To be on the whitest show in America, I felt by myself… I felt like they weren’t getting it.”
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, and, as part of the celebrations, fans have gotten a peak behind the scenes in a new Peacock docuseries, SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night.
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The four-part show welcomes back a ton of current and former cast members, writers, and celebrity hosts to reflect on SNL’s monumental history and their experiences being a part of it.
As well as telling stories behind the most infamous sketches, many of the returning cast members were asked to reflect on their auditions and early years on the show, leading to some revelations about what it’s really like to earn a coveted spot in the cast lineup.
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And though SNL was a dream come true, Tracy Morgan got brutally honest about feeling “culturally isolated” when he first joined the predominantly white cast in the ‘90s.
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For context, Tracy was a cast member on SNL from 1996 to 2003, and in that time, he solidified his status as one of the greats. He was the ninth Black cast member to join the show and has since returned to host twice.
“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,” he recalled in the docuseries. “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.”
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“I felt like they weren’t getting it,” he added.
As he navigated his early years as a cast member, Tracy said he ultimately reached a turning point when he opened up to SNL creator Lorne Michaels about how he was really feeling.
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“Lorne Michaels had that talk with me. He said, ‘Tracy, I hired you because you’re funny, not because you’re Black. So just do your thing,’” he recalled. “And that’s when I started doing my thing.”
Notably, Tracy isn’t the only Black cast member to have talked about experiencing cultural difficulties on SNL in its earlier seasons. In the docuseries, Damon Wayans also recalled “purposefully” getting himself fired from the show in 1985 after growing frustrated with the limiting material the writers were giving him each episode.
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Damon recalled Eddie Murphy telling him before he joined the cast that he should write his own sketches, otherwise, “they’re gonna give you some Black people shit to do, and you ain’t gonna like it.”
“Everything Eddie said came true,” Damon said, recalling that his sketch ideas were repeatedly disregarded by the writers. He was instead asked to perform sketches written for him, where his characters were often rooted in offensive stereotypes.
Damon said he often pushed back and eventually reached his breaking point when a sketch called “Mr. Monopoly” was chosen over one he’d written. So, as an act of rebellion during the live broadcast, Damon broke one of SNL’s golden rules and went off-script, delivering his lines “like a very effeminate gay guy.”
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This decision to go off-script and play on a different stereotype led Lorne to fire him when he walked off the stage. Fortunately, Damon went on to find plenty of success elsewhere, and recalling his dismissal from SNL, he said: “I just did not care… I purposefully did that because I wanted him to fire me.”
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