Tracy Morgan: Book Opened 'Old Wounds'

Tracy Morgan wrote his upcoming memoir I Am the New Black “because they gave me a big bag of money,” he says, adding that it took him two years to complete because“it was a lot of old wounds reopened,” he tells Time. “It was a lot of me going back to my father, my mother, what we had to go through living and growing up in the projects.”

Morgan also discusses how “staying funny” helped him through his struggle with alcoholism—he’s been sober a year and a half—and, of course, waxes humorous on the Obamas. Of the president’s Nobel, he says, “I wish he would just punch somebody in the face. You can’t finesse a bull, man.” And of the first lady? “Michelle knows. We had something going on back in the day. One of them little girls is biologically mine.” (More Tracy Morgan stories.)