If you surveyed 100 people, Family Feud-style, and asked them who was Saturday Night Live’s first Black cast member, Eddie Murphy would be the number one response. But in fact it was Garrett Morris who kicked that door down.
For five seasons, beginning with SNL’s launch in 1975, he broke ground as the show’s only Black cast member, dutifully serving as the show’s Black conscience. After that breakout, Morris went on to become a TV fixture for the next half-century, starring in hit sitcoms alongside Martin Lawrence, Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Coolidge – the great friend who introduced Morris at his Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony earlier this year.
Now 87, Morris has lost some strength in his voice and his body; arthritis forces him to get around with a walker. Otherwise, he is as sharp as ever, reflecting on his tremendous life over a two-hour Zoom call from Los Angeles while puffing on a joint.
As Morris tells it, had it been up to his pious New Orleans family, his career would have never happened. The last thing his grandmother told him before he moved to New York was: “You will never succeed.” She did her part to make sure of it, calling ahead to tell Morris’s aunt in the Bronx to turn him away on sight. In previous interviews Garrett has talked about being a child of rape, a trauma that made it difficult for his family to fully accept him.
For an uncomfortably long stretch in the early 60s, Morris was unhoused and living on the streets of Harlem. Facing serious jail time for vagrancy, he caught a break from a sympathetic judge – who set Morris up with a room at a local YMCA until he could find a job. It was there, while holding a self-directed singing rehearsal in the Y’s auditorium, that Morris crossed paths with a prolific singer called Ned Wright. “Ned hears me sing and says, ‘There’s a job for you, with the Harry Belafonte Folk Singers.’” As Morris toured the country as part of one of the biggest acts around, he was forced to reckon with segregated laws that sometimes forbade his Black and white bandmates from staying in the same hotel.
The racism shaped his views of America and show business and, eventually, promoted his move into the world of experimental Harlem theater – which was under constant police surveillance. “Every three months or so, the cops would be coming up the stairs with AK-47s,” he recalls. “The third time it happened, I said, ‘Call me an Uncle Tom if you want to, but I gotta find another line of work.’”
SNL was nominally a safer work environment, but it still aspired to be thought of as edgy. Though hired by the producer Lorne Michaels into SNL’s writers’ room in 1975 for the debut season, Morris was also tasked with recruiting Black actors as supporting performers. All the while, he found it difficult writing jokes with preppy white guys like Tom Schiller and Al Franken.
“I will say to the end of my days: Lorne’s writers had a lot of racism going on,” Morris says, “Lorne himself? Zero racism. Because, remember, when I was hired I was the only Black writer. Lorne wanted to have somebody Black on TV at night-time. People didn’t want that. They were clamoring to make it all white. He didn’t.”
And yet, Morris assumed his days on SNL were numbered when Michaels called him to the Studio 8H green room early in production for a one-on-one meeting. But when he walked in, he saw Michaels was watching Cooley High, the Black cinema classic in which Morris has a meaty part as a history teacher. Apparently, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and Jane Curtin had put Michaels on to it. “Because of that, I was asked to audition for the Not Ready for Prime Time Players [the working title for SNL],” Morris says, “and I went from being a writer to being part of the group.”
Morris’s time on the show wasn’t what he’d call fun. “I made a lot of bad choices,” he says. “I was a coke fiend.” But in his defense, SNL had a pretty serious drugs problem at the time. Throughout his five years on SNL, Morris fought against attempts to pigeonhole him into stereotypical Black roles. “It really threw me when we were going through the first show,” Morris says. “I didn’t have a skit, but I was watching another one. I said to Lorne, ‘There’s a doctor in this skit. Why don’t I play the doctor?’ And he says, ‘Garrett, people might be thrown by a Black doctor.’ Now mind you I had come from New Orleans, where you’re surrounded by Black medical doctors and Black PhDs. In all big cities down south, for that matter.”
Somewhat reluctantly, he scored his breakout with Chico Escuela, the Dominican Major Leaguer whose one line is “base-e-bol been beddy-beddy good to me”. And fans really liked him as the deaf interpreter on the Update desk who simply said Chevy Chase’s news lines louder, instead of signing them. Throughout, Morris, who came to SNL as an accomplished playwright, did what he could to imbue the stereotypical roles with intellect and nobility.
Ultimately, SNL’s white writers failed to appreciate Morris as more than a Black utility player. As a result, the Black performers who followed Morris on the show publicly expressed their concerns about being similarly used. None were louder about it than Murphy, who made Morris’s name a byword for racial typecasting. It hurt. “I feel proud that I was a minuscule part of the beginning of SNL,” Morris says, “that I created the chair for the non-white performer.”
After 99 episodes, Morris moved on from SNL to one-off parts on sitcoms like The Love Boat, Who’s the Boss? and Married … with Children. And while he’d often join forces with other SNL alums, Morris only worked with Michaels once after leaving the show on the 1993 Coneheads film. By then, Morris had already moved to Martin – the Martin Lawrence small-screen vehicle that has been described as the I Love Lucy of Black TV. Morris played Stan, the skinflint radio station boss that time forgot. The gig was going well until Morris was shot in an LA car park during a botched hold-up attempt.
“Something happened to this day that I’ll never understand,” says Morris. “While I’m going to get what amounted to 10 operations, I get a script that says, ‘Stan sells the radio station and moves to China.’ My makeup lady was in the hospital room at the time, and I had her read it. I said, ‘It sounds like I’m being fired.’”
Luckily for Morris, Foxx was waiting with his own network TV project to pick up Morris as soon as Martin dropped him. “And he didn’t do any background checks, either!” Morris jokes. He wound up scoring a lead role as Uncle Junior – the gambling addict father figure who runs the family business, an LA hotel – and The Jamie Foxx Show went on to a 100-episode run, the bar for syndication.
After The Jamie Foxx Show, Morris strung together bit parts in film (Ice Cube’s The Longshots) and TV (Family Guy) before landing another mega sitcom role in 2 Broke Girls as Earl, the tart-tongued diner cashier who’s stuck in his 60s heyday. So what if it was another supporting role. That sitcom ran for 138 episodes, longer than any of his other hits, and paid him more than he’d ever made on TV.
Morris was not slated to be involved with the SNL feature film Saturday Night. But then Lamorne Morris, the New Girl star tapped to play the SNL pioneer (no relation), reached out to his namesake after being explicitly told not to by the director, Jason Reitman. (“I wanted to make sure he was actually going through this stuff,” Lamorne told Variety.)
It’s just one of a number of ways that this generation’s Black performers look out for Morris. Robin Thede, the creator of A Black Lady Sketch Show, is one of a number of Black writers who have scrambled to cast Morris in their projects. Their respect for him means the world. “I like what I see coming up,” Morris says. “I have no doubt that the new crop of comics will hold us in good stead.”
As for SNL, he still watches, of course – but can’t help feeling as if something’s missing. “I don’t see the courage,” he says, “the experimental impulses. That was the whole core of what happened the first 10 years. I keep expecting it to attack in a funny way and bring out the foibles not only of individuals but of the government and all that. And nowadays, although people still check it out, I think they’re catering to too many people too much of the time.”
