Eddie Murphy Goes Woke in the Worst Way
'Beverly Hills Cop' star can't forget 29-year-old joke at his expense
Eddie Murphy can dish it out … but can he take it?
The “Saturday Night Live” superstar is still sore about a joke dating back to the Clinton era.
The context? Murphy’s ill-fated “Vampire in Brooklyn” had underwhelmed at the box office that year. The horror-comedy hybrid, directed by Wes Craven, seemed like a can’t-miss project in 1995.
It missed, earning just $19.8 million.
The film’s legacy is stronger than that box office snapshot, but it hardly has the cultural cache of “The Nutty Professor” or “48 Hours.”
It was Murphy’s foul luck that “SNL’s” David Spade was hosting the “Hollywood Minute” at the time, a segment that took no prisoners.
Even, apparently, the show’s biggest alum.
“Look children, it’s a falling star, make a wish.” Spade cracked as a picture of Murphy flashed on the screen.
Murphy is still mad about the joke today. He told The New York Times why it stung so much. The gag came from “in-house,” he said, on a show he practically saved with his stardom.
“A joke has to go through these channels. So the producers thought it was OK to say that. And all the people that have been on that show, you’ve never heard nobody make no joke about anybody’s career. 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.”
Murphy’s signature stand-up special, “Delirious,” took sizable pot shots at Michael Jackson and gay people, the latter which could get him canceled if the woke mob set its mind to it. He’s been slinging jokes for decades, some good and some bad, and few actors could match his level of fame.
He revisits his iconic ’80s character on July 3 via Netflix’s “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.”
So why harp on one joke?
Murphy contends he’s since made amends with both Spade and “SNL” brass. Why would such a reconciliation be necessary? Should some stars be off limits?
Spade’s segment killed week after week because it never pulled a punch, even when it came to the show’s best-known alum.
There’s another problem here.
Murphy came of age in the 1980s, a time when racism still infected the country in ways we tend to forget today. His work often intersected with that reality, like his subversive bit in “Raw” about Michael Jackson and Brooke Shields.
He noted the King of Pop took Shields to the Grammys as his date and the culture collectively shrugged. Why? Jackson wasn’t seen as a sexual soul.
“If I took Brooke Shields to the Grammys, ya’ll would lose your minds,” he continues. “That’s because Brooke Shields would get [bleeped] that night,” he quipped.
Or, recall Murphy’s iconic “SNL” sketch where he donned “white face” and entered white society.
Funny. Subversive. Thought-provoking. It’s what Murphy once did better than anyone. It’s akin to Dave Chappelle in 2024, making both valuable voices even when you strongly disagree with them.
To play the race card against both Spade and “SNL” is both beneath a superstar like Murphy and unproductive.
Poor little Eddie got his feeeelings hurt.
“Don’t you know who I am?”
Don’t you know who I was ?
So, Eddie thought they should show him favoritism because he got his start on SNL? If you go up in weight, expect to be hit harder. Such is life, Eddie. They hit harder in the Heavy Weights, quit whining!
Funny to see multi millionaire, privileged blacks scream ‘racism’ and claim to be oppressed. Other blacks in Africa live on $1 a day. Has Eddie lifted a finger to help them? Nope.
EGO, the great destroyer, has taken down many an entertainer, looks like it’s hour has come for Eddie Murphy too. Anyone who has followed David Spade knows that was just him doing what he does. He’s not a racist.
Well, it could be that SNL didn’t take shots at any other past alums because none of them was nearly as big a star as Eddie was after he’d left. I mean, if you think about it, even those that had successful post-SNL careers (like Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, John Belushi, Dan Akroyd or whomever), none of them rose to the level of stardom Eddie Murphy did (no one else has since then either; sure, Will Ferrell’s been a ton of things since he left, but he never hit the high peaks of stardom that Eddie did).
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Everyone in the 80s and 90s knew who Eddie was. He was iconic. He could do no wrong basically. Everything he was in before “Vampire” was a hit. Then he had one big ol’ flop, so they took a shot at him precisely because it was so unusual for him to flop like that and everything else he did was so successful.
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It was his very success in everything he did prior to “Vampire” that made him a target. Not his skin color. I love David Spade. The guy cracks me up all the time, and while I’ve followed his career, I’ve never gotten a racist vibe off of him. And while I think Lorne Michaels is a rather giant douche nozzle in a lot of ways, I never got a racist vibe off of him either.
Mostly agree. Belushi was as big or bigger. He didn’t get picked on bc of the obvious.
eddie looks more and more like tyler perry every day .. calling david spade a racist is pathetically petty in the worst way, reveals murphy’s truly poor character
I don’t recall Spade saying they’d reconciled. He always says Rock tells him, “still no.” Murphy is infected with Hollywood leftism. He should admit he’ll take any check for his plethora of mostly illegitimate kids.