I don’t know if you’ve heard the interview with Tracy Morgan on Fresh Air yet, but if not you should give it a listen. Maybe before you read this post, as that’s what it’s about.
At first I just kept thinking, “He is REALLY crazy.” and “He really IS crazy.” Then I realized that isn’t at all what is weird about the interview; it is that he ISN’T crazy… He is just a normal effed up dude, with emotional problems and difficulty making his way in our celebrity culture. Tracy Morgan talks about serious things that happened in his life, and how they affected him, and you can feel how invested he is in what he’s talking about. What does it mean that when a celebrity acts like a human being that listeners and interviewers become uncomfortable?
It IS crazy that he is where he is in life, in the spotlight, when he’s clearly got very different boundaries than most people who make it to that level of celebrity. Most people we see interviewed have a persona, and they maintain it. There are tons of famous people who are dedicated to talking about nonsense as though it’s really important to them, and kissing people’s asses, and never speaking about negative feelings, because they desperately need to stay in the good graces of whoever they’re talking to in order to maintain their income. Usually we get a seemingly intimate glance into people’s lives through interviews, but it there’s an unspoken agreement that we take it with a grain of salt, and they do not get too serious about the information they reveal. This seems especially true for comedians speaking in a serious context. I have heard a larger percentage of comedians than other entertainment-based celebrities talk about coming from messed up families or suffering from serious depression, but that information is conveyed almost always as jokes, which have the same sense of detachment and not necessarily being real. The difference here is that Tracy Morgan is not making light of his situation. He’s bogged down in it to some degree, and his funny-guy persona comes off as a defense mechanism.
Do we all create personas that then go out of our hands and into the hands of the people we interact with? Is who you think you are irrelevant to everyone except yourself, even when (or particularly when) you’re a celebrity? Quite possibly. It ultimately was really refreshing to listen to someone who wasn’t participating in that kind of public discussion in the usual way. Tracy Morgan seems to be just himself, and although that’s kind of volatile and makes for weird interviews, it also reveals our expectations around the celebrity interview process, and how falsified that process itself is.
I was expecting the bathroom to be utter wreckage, but it actually seemed cleaner than the rest of the bar.*
|)
i <3 you
