"Scare Tactics": Tracy Morgan gets the "heebie jeebies" from a flamboyant prank victim

When I do watch Saturday night sketch comedy shows, I'm usually more of a MadTV kind of guy than a Saturday Night Live type, so I missed most of Tracy Morgan's run on SNL. I mostly see him as one of the many people hilariously giving Liz Lemon headaches on 30 Rock.

But back in January I saw an ad for Morgan's movie First Sunday (an ad I still have on my DVR because I refuse to delete the "Midnight Train to Georgia" 30 Rock episode during which the ad aired) and my favorable impression of him started to fade. In one scene, Morgan's character goes to a seedy massage parlor where he salivates over an Asian masseuse. Face down on a massage table, he's in an amorous mood until a masculine voice lets him know that he's being touched by a man, prompting horrified screams by Morgan's character. Forget offensive; how many times has that lame joke been done before?

Which brings us to this recent Scare Tactics bit where a rather flamboyant actor, Freddie, gets pranked while pulling a prank. Freddy's thinks he's on a show called "Fear Antics" playing a genie to a guy celebrating his birthday, something he does hilariously (I'm a sucker for repeated utterances of "Dahling"), only to have things go wrong in the end. After the segment, Morgan wraps it up by declaring, "One power you've got for sure, Freddy: the power to give me the heebie jeebies." Really, Tracy? A flamboyant guy gives you the heebie jeebies? That reaction seems like something out of the 80's ... but then again, so does that gag from First Sunday.

And that's not the only time Morgan's made insensitive and tired gay jokes. In 2005, Morgan played a cross-dressing, effeminate, gay inmate, Ms. Tucker, in the remake of The Longest Yard. I'm starting to think that any edgy comedy Morgan accomplishes on 30 Rock doesn't reflect on his own comedic sensibility (much like with Sherri Shepherd, who plays Morgan's wife on the show but has gone on to say things on The View so clueless it makes Elisabeth Hasselbeck look like Rachel Maddow in comparison).

After the break, check out that Scare Tactics segment for yourself.

What do you think? Is it just a throwaway joke that or part of an annoying pattern for Morgan? And did Freddie ever wonder what a prank about a genie in a bottle was doing on a show called "Fear Antics"?