Eddie Murphy opens up in his Netflix documentary “Being Eddie” about his decision to stay away from “Saturday Night Live” for decades. It all stemmed from a joke David Spade made on “SNL” in 1995 about Murphy’s struggling movie career. Murphy previously called the joke “racist,” but he says in the doc that his anger was toward the show at large and not Spade directly. “SNL” made Murphy a comedy star and Murphy revitalized “SNL’s” ratings when he was a cast member from 1980 to 1984.
About a decade into Murphy’s post-“SNL” blockbuster movie career, he experienced a box office flop with the Wes Craven-directed horror movie “Vampire in Brooklyn.” Spade joked about the movie’s poor reception on “SNL” when he said on “Weekend Update”: “Look, children, it’s a falling star. Make a wish! You make a Hollywood minute omelet, you break some eggs.”
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“I just had ‘Vampire in Brooklyn’ come out,” Murphy says in the doc (via The Daily Beast). “The audience there said ‘Boo’ and hissed at him for saying it, right? So I was like, hurt. My feelings was hurt. I’m from the same… It’s like your alma mater taking a shot at you—at my career, not how funny I was, calling me ‘a falling star.’ If there was a joke like that right now, and it was about some other ‘SNL’ cast member, and it was about how fucked up their career was, it would get shot down.”
“The joke had went through all of those channels that the joke has to go through, and then he was on the air saying, ‘Catch a falling star,’” Murphy continued. “So I wasn’t like, ‘Fuck David Spade.’ I was like, ‘Oh, fuck “SNL.” Fuck y’all. How y’all going to do this shit? That’s what y’all think of me? Oh, you dirty motherfuckers.’ I was like that. And that’s why I didn’t go back for years.”
Spade wrote in his 2015 memoir that the reaction to his Murphy joke was “so much worse than I had imagined,” adding: “I wanted to apologize, explain the joke, anything, but nothing came out. Here was one of my favorite comedians of all time ripping me a new asshole. I had worshipped this dude for years, knew every line of his stand-up. And now he hated me. Like, really really hated me. It was horrible. I didn’t hate him. Of course not. He just got caught in friendly fire and my deep desire to make an impression on my bosses and keep my job. How pathetic.”
Murphy stayed away from “SNL” for decades. He first returned to the show for a brief appearance at the “SNL” 40th anniversary special in 2015, then came back in full to host the show’s 2019 Christmas episode.
“I was like, you know what? Fuck this. ‘SNL’ is part of my history,” Murphy says in the doc about coming back. “I need to reconnect with that show because that’s where I come from. That little friction that I had with ‘SNL’ was 35 years ago. I don’t have no smoke with no David Spade. I don’t have any heat or none of that with nobody..”
“Being Eddie” is now available to stream on Netflix.
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