Eddie Murphy opened up about his decision to step away from Saturday Night Live after decades in the Netflix documentary Being Eddie. It all started with a joke David Spade made on SNL in 1995 about Murphy’s troubled film career. Murphy previously called the joke “racist,” but said in a written statement that his anger was aimed at the show as a whole, not Spade directly. “SNL” catapulted Murphy into a comedy star, and Murphy reinvigorated the show’s ratings when he was a cast member from 1980 to 1984.
Nearly a decade after Murphy began his career with the blockbuster SNL movie, he suffered a box office flop with Wes Craven’s horror film Vampire in Brooklyn. Regarding the film’s poor reception on SNL, Spade joked on “Weekend Update”: “Look, kids, this is a shooting star. Make a wish! You make a Hollywood minute omelet and crack some eggs.”
“‘Vampire in Brooklyn’ had just come out,” Murphy says in the doc (via The Daily Beast). “The audience there went ‘boo’ and hissed at him for saying that, right? And I was like, “I’m hurt. My feelings are hurt. I’m from the same place…It’s like your alma mater is attacking you, not for the fun of calling me a ‘shooting star,’ but for my career. If there was a joke like that now, and it was about other SNL performers and how bad their careers are, it would be shot down. ”
“The joke went through all the channels that a joke has to go through, and then he said, ‘Catch a falling star,’ and it got aired,” Murphy continued. “So I didn’t think, ‘Fuck David Spade.’ I thought, ‘Oh, fuck ‘SNL.'” Damn you. How are you going to do this? Do you all think of me that way? Oh, you dirty bastards. So was I. That’s why I didn’t go back for years. ”
Spade wrote in his 2015 memoir that the reaction to Murphy’s joke was “much worse than I imagined,” adding, “I wanted to apologize, explain the joke, say whatever, but nothing came out. My favorite comedian of all time. One of the guys came over to me and said, “I’ve been worshiping this guy for years, and I knew all his stand-up lines.” And now he really, really hated me. I didn’t hate him.” How pathetic that he was simply caught up in a peer attack and my deepest desire was to impress my boss and keep my job. ”
Murphy has been away from SNL for decades. He first returned to the show for a brief appearance on the 2015 “SNL” 40th Anniversary Special, but then made a full return as host of the show’s 2019 Christmas episode.
“I was like, ‘Holy crap,’ ‘SNL’ is part of my history,” Murphy said in the doc about his return. “I want to reconnect with that show because that’s where I came from. That little bit of friction with ‘SNL’ was 35 years ago. I don’t smoke without David Spade. I don’t have heat, I don’t have that with anyone…”
“Being Eddie” is now streaming on Netflix.
