Eddie Murphy Slams SNL for Joking About His Movie Flop

Eddie Murphy opens up in his Netflix documentary “Being Eddie” about his choice to avoid “Saturday Night Live” for a long time. It all stemmed from a joke David Spade made on “SNL” in 1995 about Murphy’s struggling film profession. Murphy beforehand called the joke “racist,” however he says in the doc that his anger was towards the present at large and never Spade immediately. “SNL” made Murphy a comedy star and Murphy revitalized “SNL’s” rankings when he was a forged member from 1980 to 1984.

About a decade into Murphy’s post-“SNL” blockbuster film profession, he skilled a box workplace flop with the Wes Craven-directed horror film “Vampire in Brooklyn.” Spade joked about the film’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.”

“I just had ‘Vampire in Brooklyn’ come out,” Murphy says in the doc (through 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 consider me? Oh, you soiled motherfuckers.’ I used to be like that. And that’s why I didn’t return for years.”

Spade wrote in his 2015 memoir that the response to his Murphy joke was “so much worse than I had imagined,” including: “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 a long time. He first returned to the present for a quick look at the “SNL” fortieth anniversary particular in 2015, then got here again in full to host the present’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 again. “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 accessible to stream on Netflix.