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Eddie Murphy‘s place on comedy’s Mt. Rushmore is assured, so he’s looking back on his career with more transparency than he’s ever done before. Case in point, on a recent talk with David Marchese, the host of the New York Times podcast The Interview, he shared a hurtful moment from his early career.
New York native Murphy worked his way up from stand-up to a star on Saturday Night Live, the long-running NBC sketch show. He was on the show from 1980 – 1984 when per reports, it was on the verge of cancellation. Though he left the show after his breakthrough role in Beverly Hills Cop in 1984, he’s credited with making it popular.
His iconic characters on the show – Gumby, Velvet Jones, Buckwheat and more became cemented in pop culture. He helped usher in one of the most fertile comedy eras on SNL, which also brought Jimmy Fallon, Steve Martin, Tina Fey and Adam Sandler, among others, to stardom.
It’s why he says he was upset when the show took jabs at him during a career lull. Then SNL cast member David Spade poked fun at Murphy during a bit on the show decades ago. Spade says he was trying to come up with subjects for his Hollywood Minute segment, the only thing that was keeping him on-air at the time.
“One week I was writing my dopey Hollywood Minute, my bread and butter and basically the only thing keeping me from going back out on the road doing shows at the Gut Busters in Omaha or working in the skateboard shop,” Spade told Salon in 2015.
“I was sort of addicted to doing them because it was the only thing keeping me in front of the camera. So I’m sitting in my dumpy office and I realized that Eddie Murphy had put out two back-to-back flops. (By the way, there couldn’t be a harsher word to hit your ear when you’re an actor than flop. It’s brutal. Short, harsh, and to the point.”
He added, “I think the two films were Harlem Nights and Vampire in Brooklyn. So, I casually write a joke about Eddie Murphy for my piece that week. You know the line. “Look, kids, a falling star! Quick, make a wish . . .” He did the bit holding a photo of Murphy.
Murphy remembers it as a dig that he didn’t appreciate given his popularity on SNL.
“Yo, it’s in-house! I’m one of the family, and you’re f-ckin with me like that?” he told Marchese he thought at the time. “It was like: ‘Wait, hold on. This is Saturday Night Live. I’m the biggest thing that ever came off that show. The show would have been off the air if I didn’t go back on the show, and now you got somebody from the cast making a crack about my career? And I know that he can’t just say that. A joke has to go through these channels. So the producers thought it was OK to say that.”
Murphy, famously or infamously, depending on who you ask, was so insulted he didn’t return to SNL for another three decades, finally appearing for the show’s 40th anniversary.
“And all the people that have been on that show, you’ve never heard nobody make no joke about anybody’s career,” Murphy added. “Most people that get off that show, they don’t go on and have these amazing careers. It was personal. It was like, ‘Yo, how could you do that?’ My career? Really? A joke about my career? So I thought that was a cheap shot. And it was kind of, I thought — I felt it was racist.”
Fortunately, everyone is past it now, and Murphy says he’s on good terms with SNL, creator Lorne Michaels and Spade. Murphy is now starring in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F on Netflix.
Watch Spade’s original segment below.
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