For what it’s worth, Saturday Night Live was not, according to him, his worst job. Lord, he didn’t like it, but he was happier there than he was doing schlocky horror movies over and over again. It’s also definitely true that literally no one would be happy being paired with Chevy Chase. Especially not people who actually had to work with him. Still, we can’t help our early childhood influences, and I’m sure quite a lot of people, when they picture Garrett Morris at all, they picture him yelling that Generalissimo Ferdinand Franco is still dead.

Still, there is more to Garrett Morris than that—a lot more. In fact, he even had a cameo in the MCU, though admittedly that’s because he was the first person to portray the character of Ant-Man in live action, on an episode of SNL. (The MCU does know its roots.) But his first TV appearance was fifteen years before Lorne Michaels put him into the Not Ready For Prime-Time Players. That’s the same year that he recorded an album with Pete Seeger and Guy Carawan called South African Freedom Songs. Morris trained at Julliard. Occasionally on the show, he would actually sing using his real, highly skilled, voice.

I suppose part of it is that there weren’t a lot of musicals being made during the height of his career. On Broadway, true, and off-Broadway, but if he was going to stay onscreen, he wasn’t much going to be singing. And I don’t think SNL really knew what to do with a performer who was a singer—I’m not sure they do now. You get the occasional Blues Brothers sort of thing, but they were never much for making songs part of the comedy. Could Garrett Morris have done that? Almost certainly, yes. Heck, he was initially hired as a writer; possibly he could’ve done it by himself.

People don’t realize how many of the greats Garrett Morris worked with; long before SNL, he was one of the Harry Belafonte Singers, even appearing on Ed Sullivan with them. He worked at the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem. He was third-billed in Cooley High, and though he was much lower billed in Car Wash, that was also in alphabetical order, so he came squarely in the middle. Heck, SNL wasn’t even his first recurring TV appearance; he was in the failed Gelbart/Reynolds World War II comedy Roll Out for nine episodes.

And, yeah, he spent thirty years of his life on cocaine. There are a lot of stories about it, about him. He tells some of them himself, but I’m not sure anyone who worked on the show with him doesn’t have a story about it. Why did he do those drugs? I’m not qualified to say. But he did. He was also shot in 1994; when inmates heard who had done it and that the guy was in prison with them, they beat him up for doing such a thing to Garrett Morris. It’s actually kind of impressive—even in 1995, people cared that much about Garrett Morris. Talent inspires, it seems.

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