Key Points
Eddie Murphy revisits his feelings about Saturday Night Live taking a shot at him in the new documentary Being Eddie.
In a 1995 episode of SNL, David Spade made a joke about Murphy’s “falling” career.
“How y’all gonna do this s‑‑‑?” he remembers thinking. “That’s what y’all think of me?”
Eddie Murphy is revisiting the hurt he felt being the butt of a joke on Saturday Night Live a decade after he’d been a superstar on the show.
“It’s like your alma mater taking a shot at you,” the comedian says about the experience in the new Netflix documentary Being Eddie.
On the Dec. 9, 1995, episode of the sketch show, Spade appeared as himself telling jokes about pop culture during a “Spade in America” sketch. On screen next to an image of Murphy, whose Vampire in Brooklyn had just bombed at the box office, Spade joked: “Look, children, it’s a falling star. Make a wish.”
Murphy — who joined the cast of SNL at just 19 years old in 1980 and whose popularity is largely credited with saving it from the verge of cancellation — was so offended by the joke that he cut ties with the show for decades over it.
“The audience there said ‘boo,’ and hissed him for saying it,” the Coming to America star recalls in Being Eddie. “I was hurt. My feelings was hurt.”
He muses that it was “all of those channels that the joke has to go through” before air that led him to really take it personally.
“If there was a joke like that right now, and it was about some other SNL cast member, and it was about how f‑‑‑ed up their career was, it would get shot down,” Murphy says in the doc. “The producers look at you, ‘You can’t, you’re not saying that joke.'”
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Eddie Murphy during ‘Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood’ sketch on ‘SNL’ on Feb. 6, 1982
Murphy, who has previously said he felt the joke was racist, explains that he hadn’t put the full blame on Spade, but on the show as an institution that would choose to mock one of its own.
“I wasn’t like, f‑‑‑ David Spade. I was like, oh, f‑‑‑ SNL. F‑‑‑ y’all. How y’all gonna do this s‑‑‑? That’s what y’all think of me? Oh, you dirty motherf‑‑‑er,” he describes. “And that’s why I didn’t go back for years.”
Murphy finally made his return to SNL to host on Dec. 21, 2019 — 35 years after he’d last stepped on stage at Studio 8H.
“Going back to Saturday Night Live was a great experience,” Murphy says in the documentary. “My creative energy, everything had been turned back up to 10.”
Dave Chappelle, who made a cameo in the episode, also reflects on the magnitude of the night in Being Eddie. “Seeing Eddie Murphy in Studio 8H, it’s like I can’t explain it. It’s like being on safari and seeing a lion in the wild,” Chappelle remarks. “Even being in the sketch, I thought, I can’t believe this is happening.”
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Eddie Murphy (center) hosts ‘SNL’ on Dec 21, 2019, joined by Tracy Morgan, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, and Kenan Thompson
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The Oscar-nominated Dreamgirls star returned again during the show’s 50th anniversary special this past February, appearing in two sketches alongside a slew of past and present cast members.
Although they didn’t appear on camera together, Spade revealed on his Fly on the Wall podcast that he ran into Murphy backstage. “We were friendly,” Spade shared. “We should’ve taken a picture, ’cause it was fun to see him, and then there was no weird vibes at the show. It was all good.”
Being Eddie is on Netflix now.
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