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’30 Rock’ Cast Mates, Larry David Roll With Tracy Morgan – ‘Saturday Night Live’

October 18, 2015 5:54am

An exuberant Tracy Morgan hosted Saturday Night Live last night with an emotional assist not only from 30 Rock castmates Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Jane Krakowski and Jack McBrayer, but from Larry David in the cold open, the SNL team and an appreciative, supportive studio audience as well.

It was his first appearance since the Emmy Awards last month, and his first sustained outing since a June 2014 highway collision that killed fellow comedian James McNair and resulted in his own catastrophic injuries. Morgan was fully present and accounted for, from the opening monologue that featured a fake flashback to a “prescient” episode of 30 Rock to the usual gamut of sketches that ranged from good to, well, not ready for late night, let alone prime time. In other words, the usual.

A special nod, however, goes to Fey, who returned later in the show for “Weekend Update,” in the night’s second-most memorable and certainly funniest, bit, to offer a pungent and visually hilarious sendoff to Playboy magazine’s decision, first revealed by Deadline, to stop publishing photographs of naked women. Mounting the anchors’ desk to show off some planned moves for her own now-dashed-dream of a Playboy photo shoot, she ended with a kind of horizontal-spread-eagle pose and said, “The last time I did this this long, a baby came out.”