Eddie Murphy slams SNL for making fun of his movie flop
Eddie Murphy talks about his decision to stay away from “Saturday Night Live” for decades in his Netflix documentary “Being Eddie.” It all stemmed from a joke David Spade made on “SNL” in 1995 about Murphy’s struggling film career. Murphy previously called the joke “racist,” but he says in the document that his anger was directed at the show in general and not directly at Spade. “SNL” made Murphy a comedy star, and Murphy revived “SNL” ratings when he was a cast member from 1980 to 1984.
About a decade after Murphy’s post-“SNL” blockbuster, he experienced a box office 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, kids, it’s a shooting star. Make a wish! You make a Hollywood minute omelet, you break some eggs.”
“I just had ‘Vampire in Brooklyn’ released,” Murphy says in the documentary (via The everyday beast). “The crowd there said ‘Boo’ and hissed at him for saying it, right? So I was like, hurt. My feelings were hurt. I come from the same thing… It’s like your alma mater is taking a shot at you – at my career, not at how funny I was, by calling me ‘a shooting star.’ If there was a joke like that right now, and it was about another SNL cast member, and it was about how shitty their career was, it would be shot down.”
“The joke had gone through all those channels that the joke has to go through, and then he was on the air and said, ‘Catch a shooting star,'” Murphy continued. “So I wasn’t like, ‘Fuck David Spade.’ I was like, ‘Oh, fuck “SNL.” Fuck you all. How y’all gonna do this shit? Is that how you all think about me? Oh, you dirty bastards.” That’s how I was. And that’s why I haven’t gone back in years.”
Spade wrote in his 2015 memoir that the reaction to his Murphy joke was “so much worse than I imagined,” adding, “I wanted to apologize, explain the joke, whatever, but nothing came of it. Here was one of my all-time favorite comedians ripping me a new motherfucker. I had adored this guy for years, knew every line of his stand-up. And now he hated me. He really, really hated me. It was horrible. I didn’t hate him. Or Of course not. He just got caught up in friendly fire and my deep desire to impress my bosses and keep my job. How sad.
Murphy stayed away from “SNL” for decades. He first returned to the show for a brief appearance during the “SNL” 40th anniversary special in 2015, then returned in full to host the 2019 Christmas episode.
“I thought, ‘You know what? Fuck this. ‘SNL’ is part of my history,” Murphy says in the doc about his return. “I need to reconnect with that show because that’s where I come from. That little friction I had with ‘SNL’ was 35 years ago. I ain’t got no smoke without David Spade. I ain’t got no heat or none of that with nobody….”
‘Being Eddie’ is now available to stream on Netflix.
