East Tennessee’s Drew Morgan finds his magic in comedy

Southern Charms

“I’m the kind of a guy who needs a lot going on,” says comedian Drew Morgan.

Calling from Southern California, Morgan has spent his afternoon pitching an idea for a television show and preparing for the upcoming WellRed comedy tour with his buddies Trae Crowder and Corey Ryan Forrester. He’s also gearing up for his first short tour with fellow comedian D.J. Lewis, with the first of those three shows taking place in Knoxville at Boyd’s Jig and Reel and featuring local comedian Jeff Blank as host. The show will also feature local Rowan Young.

It’s a homecoming of sorts for Morgan, whose comedy career really started rolling in Knoxville’s comedy circuit.

Morgan grew up in Sunbright, Tennessee, a small town north of Wartburg in Morgan County. In school, he was an athlete, but there was something about comedy that drew him to it.

“I dreamed about being able to do it probably since I was about 8,” says Morgan.

He remembers his uncle regularly showing up at his house with new Jeff Foxworthy tapes and his mother listening to Jerry Clower. However, something really struck Morgan one night when he was supposed to be sleeping but snuck out of his room to find out what his mother and aunt were laughing at. It was an Eddie Murphy cable TV stand-up show.

“I’m behind the couch, and these good-hearted Christian women are laughing their asses off at this man saying ‘ass’ and much worse, and I’m like, ‘What is this magic trick where this dude is saying all this stuff I’m not allowed to say and doing all this stuff I’m not allowed to do and my mom loves it? What is that?’”

He also credits his father, a minister, for inspiring his comedy by virtue of his wild tall tales that Morgan’s mother would believe, sometimes for years, before realizing she’d been fooled.

Morgan’s first attempt at his own stand-up was at a comedy contest in Miami, where he then was working as a public defender.

“I made it through the first round the first night I got onstage, and it was instant addiction,” says Morgan.

He says, at that time especially, he approached comedy with a very academic view.

“The set was very rigid: set up, punchline, example, act out. It’s not ever gonna be the best stand-up, but it worked.”

Shortly thereafter, Morgan moved back to East Tennessee to work as a public defender. He fell in with then-Knoxvillian Matt Ward, a comedian who was organizing shows in the city.

“There was a community, and Sidesplitters [Comedy Club] was also still there,” says Morgan. “For a city the size of Knoxville, there was a lot of comedy going on. I could get onstage and practice my craft and get good. … Comedy is a thing you have to do in front of people. It’s not like a musician where you can practice in your room. Compared to most cities that size, there was a lot of opportunity.”

Morgan says it took him some time to develop his comedy instincts, but develop they did. He fell in with like-minded comedians who performed in the city, most notably Trae Crowder.

The “Liberal Redneck” moniker, which took hold when Crowder’s YouTube videos suddenly became a viral sensation, came to define Crowder, Morgan and Forrester. National audiences who had viewed the South as owning one homogeneous conservative mentality had their minds opened through their funny bones – and progressive people in the South found comedic champions. The trio set out on their own tours and wrote “The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin’ Dixie Out of the Dark.”

The enterprise seemed to be as much about educating liberals in the rest of the nation about the actual diversity of the South as it was about enlightening the comedians’ neighbors in the South. Whether everyone who heard the act got it, it’s hard to tell; there still is a lot of folks who instantly dismiss Southerners as soon as they hear the accent.

“I’m as Southern as anybody, and I’ve got that chip on my shoulder where I’m used to being made fun of,” says Morgan. “But at the end of the day, I chose to be an entertainer. My job is to make you laugh with me, not at me, but I really don’t give a [expletive].”

And it would be a big mistake to think that Morgan’s entire repertoire is based on politics and current affairs.

“I like talking about politics, but I also like to talk about relationships and family and all this other [expletive],” he says. “If I don’t start from a place that’s personal, whatever I talk about won’t resonate with people at all, no matter what it is, whether politics or family. I usually start with a story and expand from there. Sometimes it’s more political, sometimes it’s more social and sometimes it’s just how we relate to one another, whether it’s men and women or our parents and us or whatever.”

What did not influence his stand-up was his job as a public defender.

“I don’t find a lot of it funny, and if I don’t find something funny, there’s no reason for me to try to get strangers to laugh at it,” says Morgan. “I do have a few jokes from it, but what I may do one day with it is do a one-man show about what it means to be a public defender in America today with the justice system being so messed up. I think it will be a funny one-man show, but it won’t be funny the whole time. I’ve got some funny stories, but, for the most part, that system just grinds people into a pulp – both the people who work in it and the people caught up in it.”

With the WellRed crew not touring quite as much, Morgan needed some new projects. One is the podcast “Into the Abiscuit,” a collaboration with his good friend D.J. Lewis.

He says the podcast has a small but dedicated following so far.

“Somebody said it sounded like ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ guys if they had philosophy degrees,” says Morgan. “That’s perfect, and it’s exactly what I was going for. It’s dark and Southern, and D.J. was the perfect person to talk about existential crises and biscuits with.”

Part of Morgan’s reason to create the podcast was to give the two a reason to do a comedy tour together.

“We jokingly called this tour ‘Drew Morgan and D.J. Lewis Touch Butts Across America,’ but some of the venues and on Facebook some people were like, ‘Uhhhhh, let’s not do that!’”

“D.J. is one of the most unique, talented and hilarious individuals I’ve met in my whole life,” says Morgan. “He’s seen a lot more hardship than me, and his viewpoint is so beautiful. I think our experiences and views of the world contrast, but we are very similar souls: dark, Southern ridiculous souls – creates a good show.

“Something that I’m comfortable saying that I might not have been three years ago is that I’m really funny, and so is D.J. You are going to laugh until your face hurts.”

Drew Morgan & D.J. Lewis

When: 7 p.m. Monday, March 16

Where: Boyd’s Jig & Reel, 101 S. Central St.

Tickets: $12, available at eventbrite.com

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