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Hey, you know what's a trip?
They have so much stuff on TV...
It's like, how could there be all of this stuff and not one thing to watch?
You be flipping, just flipping and flipping and flip...
I be like, "It's not shit to wa--" And it be five of my movies on.
I be like, "There ain't shit to watch! I don't want to see none of this shit."
Hai!
I've done all kinds of stuff.
I can't think of another actor, a dramatic actor,
Black, white... that's done so many different types of things.
Otay!
Hey!
From just me on the stage with a microphone...
I have some ice cream
...to where I'm everybody in the scene.
This so fabulous. Nothing like getting together with family, having a good meal.
And everything in between.
Motherfucker, you can't have my cornbread. That's for damn sure.
I've been cops. I've been a professor. I've been a doctor...
Bad guy.
I've been an old Jewish guy...
He beat Joe Louis's ass.
...I've been an old lady.
Whoo! Might make your head blow off.
I danced in the clouds with Michael Jackson.
I've been a donkey.
I'm a donkey on the edge!
I was even a rocket ship.
And to all the young actors, I like to tell all of them,
don't ever play a rocket ship.
What am I setting out to do?
Ultimately... is to make people laugh.
I remember once, on one of those talk shows...
...they had the Klan on the show.
And the Klan was like, "I can't stand niggers! Oh..."
And he says, "Are you telling me that you don't like any Black people at all?"
And the Klansman was like,
"I'll... I'll tell you, I like that Eddie Murphy. He's funny."
I was like, "What the fuck?"
"So you hate all Black people?"
"Yeah, everybody except that one nigger, Eddie Murphy. Boy, he tickles me."
There's something about him that's in the past before him.
There's something about him that informs the future beyond him.
He has great seats to life. He gets...
And it's uncomfortable having seats that good.
You see the good up close. You see the bad up close.
You see the ugly up close.
But something about him seems...
Like, the core of him seems unscathed by it,
even though I'm sure he's got scars.
Whatever he was protecting... everyone has something they protect,
his is probably well-preserved.
I started so young. Now, it's kind of like, "Wow."
I realize how young I was 'cause I've been around for, you know,
over 40 years.
That's a trip.
I come on SNL in the 1980-81 season.
They was auditioning all the comics at the club.
They was putting them up for the SNL people.
And they specifically wanted a Black guy.
And my first reaction was like,
"Saturday Night Live?"
I never thought about something like Saturday Night Live.
I was like, "I thought I was gonna be Richard Pryor."
Police got a chokehold they use out here, though, man.
They choke niggas to death.
Yeah. Two grab your legs, one grab your head, it'll snap.
"Oh shit. He broke."
First time I heard Richard Pryor, I must have been about 13.
That put me on the road to myself, when I started hearing him.
I was like, "That's who I am."
I wanted to be Richard so bad, I used to go out on stage when I was 15
and talk and act and walk, and do everything like Richard Pryor.
My whole act back then was about taking a shit
'cause that's all I had done at 15.
That was my life experience, but it sounded like Richard Pryor jokes.
I'd be going, "You ever, like, sometimes, right, you get on that toilet,
and when you shit, that water splash up on your ass?"
I wanted to be funny as Richard. And I wanted to be cool like Elvis.
And I wanted to be as big as the Beatles.
It's all magic people.
He likes the magic people,
who are kind of pretty much totally out of control.
And it still is magic.
But then there's always this giant ball of fire at the end.
But not Eddie. The rules are just different for him.
The very first show business thing I asked for was,
as a kid, I asked for a ventriloquist dummy.
And my mother, she got me this dummy called Willie Talk.
Willie Talk's eyes didn't move. His mouth just moved.
From the very beginning, it was a multiple-character thing.
What were you like when you were nine? Did you know?
Had the notion crystallized in your head at nine...
I did a lot of voices, but I didn't know I wanted to one day go into show business.
I was just, you know, a strange child.
My mother used to say, "Who's Eddie? What voice is Eddie's voice?"
When my brothers did something wrong, they couldn't go outside.
When I did something wrong, I couldn't watch TV.
As a kid, I'd get a blanket, go throw it over the dining room table
so it was hanging down like a tent,
put the TV under there, and I'd watch all day long.
What do you say to your mother when she brings you Jell-O?
When we was growing up, they ain't have all these channels on TV.
You only had a couple of channels,
and my brother pointed at the television and said, "I'm gonna be on that one day."
And when he pointed at it, I think there was probably one Black person on it.
It was Julia, so I'm like...
So it was unfathomable that he would even become a star.
I'm the older brother. So, when we was kids, right,
I found out that I could whip a lot of motherfuckers' ass,
that I didn't think I could whip, because they stepped to him.
So I was like, you know...
I don't care if you all big butchy,
I got to do you, because you...
If I go home, and my little brother's messed up,
and my mother says, "Well, what did you do?"
I better be messed up worse than him.
That's me and Charlie.
That's the picture that... that ended my mother and father's marriage.
Because my mother had spent some money.
Actually, I'm three years old in this picture.
And I'm laughing because the photographer took the picture,
and the flash was a delay--
It didn't flash as soon as he hit the button.
And I thought that his camera didn't work.
And I busted out laughing. I literally remember this moment.
But my father came home and found out that my mother had
spent some money on some pictures.
"You spent our money on some goddamn pictures?"
You know? And that was... I mean, I'm sure they were having issues.
But that was... This was the straw that broke the camel's back.
This was the last straw.
"You buy some goddamn picture?"
My mom is so pretty. They're only 18 years old here.
Babies, little babies, 18.
This is the year before I was born.
My dad was a character. Supposedly, my dad was the life of the party.
Party started when my dad came.
He was loud and funny, you know, and...
I'm... And I am not the life of the party.
Ever.
I have a handful of memories.
But my very first memory of all is of my mother and father fighting.
That's my very first memory.
And... I remember my mother threw--
She had, like, a porcelain Virgin Mary on the desk.
She threw the Virgin Mary at him. And I remember seeing that broken.
And then I remember seeing my mother on the floor in the hallway crying.
Then my dad came, and he picked me and Charlie up and put us on his lap.
And he said... And my pajamas was crooked.
I remember it was pulled all the way backwards. We were crying.
He said, "You can go with me, or you can go with your mother."
And I said, "I want my mommy."
My dad died when I was seven or eight years old.
I know stuff, but I don't know everything.
I know that he was killed.
The woman that killed my father...
- Oh, it was a woman? - Yeah.
Wow.
- Why did a woman kill your father? - Lovers' quarrel.
- Your parents weren't together? - No, they weren't together.
It's one of the oldest stories in the books, you know.
I tell my kids, man, "Hey, man... if the girl is mad,
don't close your eyes."
Then my mother met my stepdad.
And he was, you know, the solid father figure in my life for the rest of my life.
Vernon Lynch, that's who raised me.
That's a sweet blessing, to have a man like that come into your life
and be the type of man that he was.
The example that he set, and I saw what he did, you know,
and I feel like I'm the man that I am
because of him.
When you have three young men growing up together in one household,
my dad didn't raise no punks.
Punishment was a whoopin'.
You know?
Punishment was... was a... was a whoopin'.
- I used to change his diapers. - Yeah, he did.
- I never changed his diapers. - Yeah, you did.
I never changed his diapers once.
My dad just instilled in us, you have to be able to protect yourself.
And this is how you do it.
Eddie's stepdad, Mr. Lynch, was a boxer.
You know how legendary the discipline of boxers can be.
He's from that kind of household.
To become a boxer, you have to be a different breed of human being.
Here's a picture of me punching Ali in the face.
See this?
Ali is my hero.
But I did punch him in the face one night.
You know, Ali could talk some shit.
Every now and then, Ali be talking too much shit.
And you know, I punched him in his face.
Nobody like Muhammad Ali in American history.
He looked like he's plugged into the wall. He had this light.
He just stood up to the government,
stood up for what he felt was right.
And he was kicking ass, and he was making a sacrifice.
You know, "Fuck it. If I can't have it this way, then I..."
"You can take... you can strip me of my title, all my money."
You won't even stand up for me in America for my religious beliefs,
and you want me to go and fight,
but you won't stand up for me here at home.
We're little kids watching it. I'm a little kid watching it.
Barack Obama's watching it.
Oprah Winfrey's watching it. Michael Jordan is watching it.
We're the first generation of Black overachievers.
Like, we're the first fearless ones.
And I think that that's what we got from Ali.
I am the greatest.
Around 12 or 13, I started saying I was gonna be famous.
And then I started saying, "When I'm 18, I'm gonna be famous."
That was my mantra.
And I really, really, really, really believed it with every fiber.
It was like, the ide-- "What if you don't get famous?" was like...
"What the fuck are you talking about? I am getting... I'm going to be famous."
I didn't encourage him. If anything, I discouraged him.
I said, "Gee whiz, this is what he really wants to do?"
"And what if he doesn't make it? What, will I have a bum here?"
You know, I really worried 'cause he wasn't interested in anything else.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Eddie Murphy.
I can remember when my brother would go and he'd do a high school,
or he would go do Hofstra University...
Now it's a bit ironic that I'm on television because I hate TV.
I don't watch anything because TV has gotten disgusting.
You ever watch the commercials and stuff on TV?
It makes me sick to my stomach to see...
You know, little sets he was doing around the area,
and the ability to go in front of an audience and express yourself
and make them laugh, you know what I'm saying?
That was, like, really amazing to me, that he had that... that power.
Cosby'll come out, and he's really nice, he's really cool, he'll say,
"What do you say to your mother when she brings you a bowl of Jell-O pudding?"
When I first started, I didn't do anything that had anything to do with me for real.
I was 90% impressions.
Thank you. You've been beautiful. Good night.
That's the easiest way in. You don't have to have an act.
All you have to do is sound like somebody.
After a year or two of being up there and doing impressions,
you start to get your own stuff and settle into who you are.
And by the time I'm... 17,
I have a... you know, I have an act, and I'm, you know, a comic.
I am from Roosevelt, Long Island.
I grew up in an all-Black neighborhood.
I did. Did you grow up in an all-Black neighborhood?
Grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood?
See, 'cause, like, we've pretty much taken over New York, the Blacks.
Think about it.
The whites are going, "Hey, that's not funny."
When you ran into Eddie in the clubs in the '70s,
he had this great face and this fantastic smile.
And then all this other stuff, it was like a miracle.
Just when you thought it was safe to move back into Queens...
And to me, that he's from Long Island, was so perfect.
Long Island is just schleppier, you know?
It's kind of an advantage when you get into the upper realms of the industry.
Hang on to your schleppiness, you know?
Then when I turned 18, the comics that were around were like,
"Thought you were gonna be famous when you were 18."
I had, like, a year of that.
Then the next year, I got Saturday Night Live.
'Cause if God would've wanted whites to be equal to Blacks,
everybody'd have one of these.
Eddie's been in my life since 1980,
when I first saw his face on Saturday Night Live.
It was the season after the original cast had left
and Lorne Michaels left.
And they got all new people in.
It was not well received, because the show was, like, really, really popular.
The audience was like, "You know what? I want the old people. And fuck you."
Be walking down the street, people like, "Fuck you!"
Just screaming, "Fuck you" to you.
Eddie was right out of high school.
And he was very shy.
And he was very... kept to himself.
But he was just fearless.
I'm Ronald Reagan's illegitimate son.
Can you use this word in a sentence?
"Mister Robinson's Neighborhood" and "Gumby."
I loved Gumby. That's a real Long Island...
I had a Gumby bit, actually, also.
I'm Gumby, dammit. You don't talk to me that way!
I used to love Velvet Jones.
I want to be a ho.
Every impression, Ali...
I'm the greatest fighter of all time.
...Cosby...
That's why I got light beer.
James Brown, "Celebrity Hot Tub."
Hey! Too hot in the hot tub
Burn myself
He would get into character,
like Dana Carvey or Mike Myers, on that level, right?
Oh boy! Ooh! Aah!
Ugh!
And at the same time, he can be himself, like Bill Murray.
In 1981, a good education is just about as important
as a warm bucket of hamster vomit.
Very few people have both moves.
When I was eight... I was up late one night, and I remember watching.
I can't remember what episode it was, I just remember, like, it was over.
I was dying laughing. This guy was so funny.
And it became a thing for me and my mother,
where she would wake me up late on Saturday night,
and be like, "That guy you like is on."
And that was our first, like, bonding thing.
I remember the thing that really struck me is
he almost had to say nothing.
And it was funny.
When he gets dressed up in the white makeup,
and he goes out into the street,
and he commentates on what it's like being a white man in the world...
I was just like, "Oh... incredible."
I was 19 years old.
So that was my college years, I'm...
Saturday Night Live is like Harvard for comic actors.
You are truly a wonder.
Thanks a lot, Frank.
And when I first did Stevie Wonder, they was like...
"Oh, that's mean. How can he do that?"
"It was funny, but it was very mean."
And they stopped saying that when Stevie came on Saturday Night Live.
That's a very rare SNL, when Stevie comes on SNL.
It's very funny.
That's the worst Stevie Wonder impression I ever seen...
What's the matter with it?
Maybe the first six months,
I was still in my room at my mother's house.
I used to wear my makeup home from the show
'cause I would think people would see me on the train and know I was on TV.
They don't know you're on TV.
You just look like this kid with makeup on, on the train.
Seeing Eddie on SNL, skinny...
That's when comics are their most lethal, when we're skinny.
When we ain't had no food. He ain't even ate yet.
He's just skinny and funny as fuck.
Our first real meeting was at a steakhouse near Saturday Night Live.
I was going to talk to him about a movie career.
"This is great. What you're doing is amazing."
"There's a whole other opportunity for you."
"Not instead of, but in addition to. That's the beauty of it."
Jeff Katzenberg was the president of production at Paramount.
He was, like, the young guy.
The first two weeks of 48 Hrs., they wanted to fire me
'cause they were like, "This isn't working."
And Katzenberg came to them like, "No. Don't fire him. There's something there."
And they didn't fire me.
We've just been cool since.
When 48 Hrs. came out, I thought it was a oner.
I wasn't thinking, you know, I'm going to be in the movies.
Roxanne
In that first scene, it's a Black man singing "Roxanne"
as if he were a member of the Supremes.
- Rox-- Put on the red light - Hammond.
He's wailing it as if he's auditioning for American Idol.
It's also this moment of planting a flag in a culture and saying...
Hammond!
..."I'm all these things. I'm the next generation."
My stomach is starting to growl.
- We better go get-- - We eat when I say we eat.
Hey, now that's bullshit.
That's the last straw, all right? I want some food now.
If you don't like it, take me back to the penitentiary
and kiss my hungry, Black ass goodbye.
When 48 Hrs. came out, it was this new thing.
The Black actor in movies was the sidekick.
But when you start watching the movie,
it's like he can't do anything without this guy.
"What's our next move, convict?"
"Now what do we do, convict?"
I can see this is going to be a long fucking night, convict.
Transcendental Eddie Murphy moment is the bar scene in 48 Hrs.
What the hell kind of cop are you?
You know what I am? I'm your worst fucking nightmare, man.
I'm a nigga with a badge.
That mean I got permission to kick your fucking ass whenever I feel like it.
Contextually, seeing a young Black guy say that, it's like a hit record.
Just that... just that scene.
The reason why my stuff took off the way it took off...
And I want the rest of you cowboys to know something.
There's a new sheriff in town.
...is because they'd never seen a young Black person
go take charge in the white world.
And his name is Reggie Hammond.
Y'all be cool.
I got in this business when the still old Hollywood legends were still around,
and I got to meet a bunch of those people, the real ones,
the super talented Hollywood person that had, like, some long 50-year career,
because they were curious about me.
They'd say, "Hey, I want to have lunch with that nigger."
I met Brando and Charlton Heston, Sinatra. I met all those guys.
Through them calling my agent.
That'd be like if me right now... if some 22-year-old actor did some movie,
and I was like, "Hey, I wanna have lunch... I want to have lunch with them."
That would never happen.
I imagine for these old movie stars,
he was the symbol of the changing of the guard.
Show business was about to become something else.
He was at the forefront of it.
If you're an old movie star, you'll see people come and go.
"This one's famous for a minute, cold for a minute."
But man, he looked like he was exactly where he...
He looked like he had that appointment with destiny.
And everyone who ever rode that train knew exactly what they were looking at.
Of course you would want to meet somebody like that.
Being the star that he was at 19 years old,
before 48 Hrs. came out, we made a multiple-picture deal with Eddie.
And, you know, at the time, was unprecedented.
You're making a ton of money.
He did an interview with Johnny Carson. Johnny goes, "So, Eddie, tell me,
what'd you buy with your money?"
Now, you go out and really... go nuts with it,
or do you put it away, or...
How do you handle the whole thing?
"Hey, Amos. Get a load of that coat!"
No, I wasn't saying...
Jeffrey Katzenberg sends me a script, and I read, essentially, Trading Places.
I didn't learn...
until... like, two weeks before shooting,
that in fact, the script had been developed
for Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder,
who had made a couple of buddy movies that were big hits.
And Richard...
set himself on fire.
Richard Pryor, the comedian and writer, was badly burned in an accident
at his home in California last night.
Pryor has told his doctors that he was using ether
to purify a batch of cocaine when the mixture exploded in his face.
And Jeff said, "I'd like you to consider Eddie Murphy."
And I, of course, went, "Who?"
Is there a problem, officers?
From the first moments of Eddie coming down the street
on his blind man routine...
I can see!
I have l-- I can-- I have legs!
It's as close to a perfect movie as you can have, in my opinion.
And I think we all felt it and saw it.
I went to a movie the other night with my friends, Trading Places.
- I hear it's very good. - With Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd.
And you go in the movies and start laughing,
and then they be funnier than you want them to be.
Right? I mean, it's funnier than you want, and you be...
You saw that.
- They're really funny. - Yeah. Hey.
But it's hysterical, man.
- That's what I hear. - Yeah. I'm going to kill him.
We're going to take a break.
Richard Pryor is the funniest stand-up comedian in the history of the art form.
How many people ever heard of freebasing?
Have you ever heard of anybody blowing up?
Why me?
Ten million motherfuckers freebase. I got to blow up.
Recently,
Chappelle is in that world where, like,
he's got his finger on it a certain way and an understanding of the audience.
And he's so smart.
And he really... he raised the...
he raised the roof.
Comedy is an art form.
Not in everybody's hands, but, man, the ones who treat it that way,
they literally vibrate on, I would say...
I can make an argument, one of the highest artistic frequencies.
And Eddie, any skill set you can think that a comedian needs, he has abundantly.
You know, I kept doing stand-up, even though I was making movies and stuff.
Fights where nobody's home with plenty of brothers and sisters,
and you try to kill them.
You'd be running around the house with a knife, going...
If I'm shooting in Philadelphia, when we're doing Trading Places,
I can go to the Comedy Works and work out.
And Delirious is mostly stuff that I had built up over the years.
Delirious had this energy, this manic energy around it.
And it really had a rock show quality.
That's why I had leather suits and shit on,
trying to roll around like Elvis.
Eddie Murphy!
He changed the way we view comedy.
Comedians aren't generally attractive.
Especially, traditionally speaking, up to that point.
They're very misfitty. They're very kind of beastly sometimes.
The ladies love him.
And, you know, I feel like I had a crush on him
all the way through, you know, this whole time.
And maybe it started there, with that red leather suit.
It was amazing.
Obviously, he was, like, the sexiest thing in the world in that red leather.
But like, why?
That red leather was awful.
But that's what made it so great.
And no matter what was going on, the ice cream man came, it stopped.
You'd be hitting some marbles and shit, and you'd hear...
Ice cream! The ice-cream man is coming!
My dad worked at Breyers Ice Cream my whole time growing up, we had a...
We had so much ice cream, we would not even eat the shit.
Like, you had to throw ice cream out, it'd get freezer burn.
But the beginning... I didn't start thinking about show business
or being a comedian till I was like 13.
Up until then, I was... I wanted to own a Mister Softee's ice cream truck.
Want a lick? Psych.
You want some ice cream You want some ice cream
He took the idea of character performance on stage to ultimate levels.
You can't--
Eddie Murphy telling a story made you feel like you were there.
My mother was like Clint Eastwood with a shoe.
If you fuck up, my mother walk in the room and was like...
By the time you see me in Delirious, talking about my family and stuff,
that's after years and years of doing it.
Why'd you eat the ice cream off the floor?
I didn't eat no ice cream...
Stand-up, as you know, is... it's intimate.
My father would stand up in the middle of the cookout and say, "It's my house."
"You know what it is."
"And if you don't like it, you get the fuck out."
I could be at Madison Square Garden,
but when I started doing my dad drunk,
you could hear my mother laughing in fr... 20,000 people.
"And, hey..."
"Kiss my ass if you don't like it."
And the stuff I would do about my dad made my dad stop drinking.
He was like, "That's how I look?" I was like, "Yeah, that's how you look."
He stop-- He stopped drinking.
I was a huge Eddie Murphy fan... 'cause of,
you know, Shrek, Dolittle, and all this stuff when I was like 8.
And my dad died on 9/11.
My mom took me to this store in the mall that had DVDs and CDs,
and Eddie Murphy, Delirious, was there.
I was like, "What's this? He looks cool, and this could be fun."
We had, like, those...
it was like an old Suburban that had those flip-down DVD players.
And, uh, immediately, you know,
"Fuck this, suck this..." you know, "Fuck you."
And my Mom's like, "Whoa, what'd you get?"
And I was dying laughing.
And she was like, "You can't watch this or any of that."
And I was like, "Please." I'm laughing. And I think she saw I was enjoying myself.
And... at a time where I really wasn't.
And she was like, "You can watch this stuff
as long as you don't repeat it or tell anybody."
And it was kind of a little pact we made. And that opened me to everything.
If I'm LeBron James, he was the Michael Jordan poster on my wall.
You know, what Richard Pryor would have been for him...
and I knew Richard Pryor's work, but Richard...
I didn't appreciate his work till I was older.
Eddie was plug and play for me. The spirit of the way he performed,
the impressions, the silliness of it.
How old's the other dude right there?
Oh, y'all fucked up now.
Y'all thought I would be going like this, "Otay," and all that shit, right?
You didn't know I'd be saying, "Our dicks is this big!"
That kid's gonna be waking up like this,
"The negroes' dicks are coming to get me, Mom!"
Richard, how do you feel when you read,
"Eddie Murphy's going to be another Richard Pryor"?
Or, "Watch out, Richard Pryor, here comes Eddie Murphy"?
Pissed off.
Yeah.
You know, no, I don't like it. I don't like it at all.
"People are saying he's the new Richard Pryor."
The fuck are you talking about?
Richard's here, and there will never be a new Richard Pryor.
There will be another man.
That syndrome,
that desire to pit
Black people against each other
and make it seem like there's one opportunity...
and if one of you want it,
you have to go into the Colosseum and destroy the other. You know?
No two white comics, I mean...
Let me put it like this.
Jeff Ross and Howie Mandel have never thought about
if it's either me or him.
Where you get that from? "It's everywhere. It's either me or him. I know it."
And that's just how it was. For years, it was, you know...
...one at a time that would get, you know,
mass appeal and be in big movies.
In the '60s, it was Sidney Poitier.
Then Richard was the one person that became the man.
And he was the one Black guy in most of the movies for a minute.
Then after me, the floodgates opened.
Eddie Murphy was considered a star on the rise.
But in those days, an African American actor
had never grossed more than $20 million or $25 million.
And that was Richard Pryor, by himself.
So this was a big risk to put Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop.
We're not gonna fall for a banana in the tailpipe.
You're not gonna fall for the banana in the tailpipe?
The conventional wisdom is, it wasn't gonna work...
- Get the fuck out of here. - No, I cannot.
...and then look what happened to the movie.
It was number one for 14 weeks,
which is unheard of.
I saw Beverly Hills Cop
three times on the day it came out.
Like, we wouldn't leave the theater. "Hey, let's see it again."
"No, let's see it again." I saw it three times in one day.
Eddie Murphy in that movie was smarter than everybody. He was Detroit slick...
And he literally ran laps around those guys,
not just in the funny moments,
but in the moment when he's... in the strip club with the guys, right?
And he's like, "Yeah."
"See the guy over there with the jacket?"
"Kind of hot to be wearing that, right?"
"Watch my six."
- You changed, man. - I'm telling you to get back.
If you don't get back, I'm gonna blow your fucking brains out.
Police. Move and I'll kill you.
If you watch that scene, that's better than any action star you've ever seen.
And the way he handles it... and just before that, he had you cracking up.
Everything's under control.
Here's Eddie Murphy, sort of in a heartbeat.
There's a scene in Beverly Hills Cop where he's walking down Rodeo.
He walks past the guys in the leather outfits.
He starts laughing at them.
You're thinking, "You're laughing at guys wearing leather outfits?"
And it didn't seem hypocritical, because he's in that moment.
It's a real performance in terms of who that character is.
But it's also basically Eddie Murphy kind of making fun of himself.
I mean, there's so much going on in that moment.
It's such a complex beat in pop culture.
What a life I've had.
Oh, man.
Derrick Lawrence. That's the dude that...
In Beverly Hills Cop, there's a scene where I'm walking down the street...
And I've heard reporters and other people talk...
"Oh, yeah, that's an interesting moment
because Eddie Murphy is laughing at Eddie Murphy."
That's not what's happening at all. I'm not laughing at me.
Derrick was one of those guys, and he walked past.
And as he walked past, he made, like, a weird face.
And I was laughing at the face he made.
I wasn't laughing at me. I was laughing at Derrick.
And there he is.
What I wound up doing changed the perception of Black actors.
They saw me, and they saw the worldwide success.
And they was like, "Hey... so, Black can be worldwide?"
Like, "Yeah."
And that's where you get Morgan and Denzel and all those people.
They come after my stuff.
Sam, Spike Lee, all of that.
I was the psychological soil
that was... that was required for everything that happened after me.
I think Eddie is part of this wave of...
a hunger in the culture for a kind of Black experience
that related to a group of young people that wasn't being espoused yet.
With the exception of Michael Jackson,
Prince, Whitney Houston, and Eddie all kind of popped onto the scene like that.
And these four young Black people changed the world.
Not just American culture, they changed the world.
Currently starring in a film called Beverly Hills Cop, please welcome...
...Eddie Murphy.
Eddie, the kind of success you've had in a very short period of time
is the kind of thing that I don't--
I never remember this happening to anybody before.
He dominated, and we all wanted that.
We all wanted the big, funny movie, and we all wanted the lifestyle.
Hip-hop was not even a thing yet.
Athletes weren't making the money that they make now.
Eddie, at that time, was breathing very rare air.
Eddie Murphy has been in Buffalo for almost a week.
Most of that time has been spent inside Rick James's recording studio.
I was supposed to go just for the weekend to do the song.
Got snowed in at Rick's house and stayed for like two weeks.
My girl wants to party all the time
Party all the time, party all the time
Tell me about your music career.
What happens is, after a while, you start...
I guess your ego goes nuts, and you say, like, "I can do anything."
And you have people that work for you,
and they're on the payroll, so they start to say, "You can do anything."
Nobody had as much fun as we had in the '80s.
Nobody.
My 21st birthday party, I had at Studio 54.
Yul Brynner from The Ten Commandments, he was with his wife, and he was like,
"How would you like to go back to my apartment
with my wife and I and party?"
And I was like, "Nah, I'm cool. I'm..."
And I realized when I got older, I was like, "Party? He wanted to..."
His wife was smiling. I was like, "Did he want me to go fuck his wife?"
I was like, "What the...?"
When I got older, I thought back on it and was like...
And now I wish I would've went. The story would end better if, you know,
"Yeah, I went back to Yul Brynner's spot and fucked his wife."
"He was watching me fucking... He was going, 'Et cetera, et cetera...'"
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Man, that shit is extreme. Being Eddie Murphy in the '80s.
That's extreme. Wearing a red leather suit, like, before--
That's some extreme shit.
The pages are all brown. It's like, "How old are you?"
It's like... oh my God, look at those teeth.
"From stand-up comic to big-screen sex symbol."
That's what they said. I didn't say it. That's what they said.
See right there, "Big-screen sex symbol."
When Eddie made it, everybody's life, it changed.
Charlie was in the service.
He came home, started working security for Eddie.
I started working, you know, with my brother.
- You were security? - I was head of security.
Did you know anything about security?
No, I knew you better not fuck with my brother, that's all I knew.
That's all... that's all I knew.
When we did this sketch on Chappelle's Show...
"Charlie Murphy, True Hollywood Stories,"
the genesis of it was Charlie just telling crazy stories at lunch.
We're walking up into the VIP section, you know.
I'm looking around and see who's there, and looking at the girls and everything,
and all of a sudden, I heard someone go, "Charlie Murphy!"
Cocaine's a hell of a drug.
That Rick James sketch on the Chappelle Show,
had a surreal thing for me when I had watched them
'cause I thought they were super funny.
But then I was like...
But this is, like, just some night in my life.
You know, this... And every night was like that.
It's funny, when I hung out with, like, Rick James and them in the '80s,
when I would start seeing certain people come in the room,
and you know what's getting ready to go down,
they get ready to be in the other room... I just bounced.
I was never curious about it.
I never wanted to go in there, check it out or nothing.
I just wasn't with it.
If you ever see Eddie out, he's not the guy dominating the room.
He's very introverted. He'll sit in the back of the room with a Coca-Cola.
When I was 19, it's my first year of Saturday Night Live,
I went to a blues bar with John Belushi and Robin Williams.
They put some blow on a table,
and I'm standing there with, you know, two heroes.
I wasn't even curious. I was just not with it.
I've never even tried cocaine or touched cocaine or some shit like that.
I don't drink. I don't smoke cigarettes.
I never smoked a joint till I was... 30 years old when I first smoked a joint.
First time I met Eddie Murphy was at The Comic Strip.
Think he had, like, a leather suit on,
had the whole entourage.
They used to let me get on stage if I'd stack chairs when the show was over.
The owner of the club introduces me to Eddie,
and Eddie says, "When are you going on?"
And I go, "I'm not on tonight."
And then Eddie says, "Well, you're going up next."
And I had a really good set, and he laughed really loud...
The fact that Rock could talk to Eddie, we would just be like,
"And then what did he say?"
"And then what did you say? And then..."
You know, just... Just too exciting... Too exciting to be--
Yeah, he was... definitely Elvis to us.
I was literally with him...
going from theater to theater,
watching the audience laugh at Raw.
I mean, Raw was a... fuckin'...
Was a... I mean, Raw... Whew!
I got a lot of people from other countries that see my films and come over
to the United States 'cause New York is like a tourist place.
And they get HBO, they catch Delirious, and they can't speak English,
and try to do my act, and all they got is the curses.
I got foreigners from all over the world walking up and going, "Eddie Murphy!"
"Fuck you!"
First time I heard him was in my living room.
"Fuck you, Eddie!"
And my dad was watching Raw on VHS tape.
And don't touch his tape. "Don't nobody touch my tape."
And then it was about me sneaking and watching it.
I mean, fucking and making love, let's be real, I mean, the physical act,
I like to fuck somebody I'm in love with,
but I ain't making love to nobody. I get in the bed...
I get in the bed... Well, think about it.
You get in bed, would you rather have somebody say, "Make love to me"?
Or grab the back of your head and say, "Fuck the shit out of me"?
In a weird way, he kind of served the same function
in a young kid's mind that hip-hop did, in the sense that,
that shit you listen to in the car before you walk into that meeting,
that gives you that edge or that confidence.
Eddie's like that.
He made me feel cool or want to be cool.
Or nothing ever hurts the comedic hero.
He was that.
I ran in the house all excited to talk to Bill,
and picked up the telephone, and Bill got raw on me.
I was like, "Hello, Mr. Cosby?" And you hear,
"I would like to talk to you..."
"...about some of the things
that you do in your show."
I remember I went to a movie theater with my brother
every day after school and watched Raw.
It was ironic, 'cause that was the year, ultimately, that I started doing stand-up,
and that's when he stopped.
I never had a moment where I said, "I'm not gonna do stand-up right now."
It just kind of gradually stopped.
I do know that it stopped being as much fun,
and that's why I stopped going to the clubs like I used to, and...
Yeah, I remember it had gotten to a point to where, like, you couldn't write stuff.
Like, if you would... if I would go up at a club,
the next day it'd be, like, in the paper that I was at a club
and what I was talking about, and they'd be critiquing it already,
and it'd be, like, something you just... a little piece of an idea.
And I remember I didn't like that feeling, so I stopped working out as much.
And then it just got bigger and bigger...
And before we knew it, you know, decades had gone by.
They got dudes at doctors' offices with symptoms like, "Excuse me, Doc,
what does it mean when you go to the bathroom and, um...
fire shoot out your dick?"
Every now and then, I'm flipping through channels, and I'll see something of mine.
It's like it's not me when I look at Raw or Delirious.
It's like... well, I know that's me 'cause I'm looking at it.
But it feels like a different person.
Everybody's, you know, constantly...
I heard somebody describe it like a... like a flame on a candle.
It's constantly changing.
And so are we.
I said if I ever did stand-up again, I was gonna get a Bill Cosby puppet
and a Richard Pryor puppet, and sit, and have them on the side,
and have, like, a conversation between the two, and be in the middle.
I'd get at least ten good minutes of jokes out of it.
Eddie never stops creating.
I walk through his house, and I see stuff written on pads.
So I'm like, he's thinking about it.
Whenever I got an idea, I would take the phone and go, "Oh, yeah... rah, rah..."
And over the years I got, you know, so much stuff, so many things, it's like,
all I have to do is go through my phone and go, "Yeah, that would be a good bit."
So it wouldn't be hard to do.
You're a comedian. You're not normal.
You're not seeing the world at all in the same way.
You're here, but you're either looking through things
or your perspective is above the terrestrial world,
and you're looking down at it.
Sense of humor is ultimately just an acute sense of proportion.
Uh, the... the funny person notices stuff first.
You walk in a room, the funny person will know,
"Hey, it's cold in here." Or "What's that smell?"
You pull a car in front of me, a brand-new car from the showroom,
and if it has a little scratch on it, you pull it in front of me,
my eye will go right to the scratch, "Hey, you got a little scratch here."
I used to have that OCD when I was a kid. I didn't know what it was.
I would go and check the stove in the kitchen
and make sure all the gas was off in the kitchen. Right?
And I'd lay down for about, you know, five minutes and I would get back up
and go back in the kitchen and look at the stove again and check all the gas.
Then I'd go back into bed and lay there for about five, ten,
and then get back up and go look at it and look at the stove
and make sure all the gas was off.
Then I'd go back to bed, lay for another ten minutes and get back...
And this went on for maybe, like, an hour.
And I did that every night.
Every night. And I'd just say, "That's just some weird shit that I do."
My mother, nobody knew this was going on.
And I used to make a goofy sound.
I used to go... uh-mm-mm, and do that all the time.
That's stupid.
Uh-mm, uh-mm.
You're sitting there watching TV, going... uh-mm, uh-mm.
Then one day I was watching the news, and they did something on OCD,
and it was like, "Oh, that's what I-- I be doing shit like that."
I said, "Oh." I was like, "Oh, mental illness?"
It was like, "What? I..."
And when I saw that it was, like, some mental illness shit,
I made myself stop doing it.
It was like, "I'm not-- I'm not doing it no more."
"I thought I was weird. I ain't know I had some mental illness. Fuck that."
"I ain't have no mental illness. Mental illness, my ass."
And I forced myself to stop doing it.
I check the gas every night still.
But every now and then, I'll check it twice,
and say, "No, motherfucker, you ain't starting that shit again."
"Take your ass to bed."
I guess I'm, uh... a little more paranoid than I used to be.
On every, I'm-- social, I'm a little more paranoid,
emotionally, I'm a little more paranoid and, uh...
Those things, you have a lot.
But success and power kind of, like, isolates you,
and you get confused 'cause you start thinking, you know,
"If I have this and that, and I can do this and that,
how come I'm not happy all the time?"
Then you realize nobody's happy all the time.
What are you missing?
I don't know. I'd like to have a family. I'd like to be married.
And I'd like to have some stability in my life emotionally.
I'm on the tour bus, and I just broke up with this chick,
and the conversation on the bus was, you know,
"It would be nice to meet a girl that didn't know I was one of the faces."
And yah, yah, yah.
And that's how that, uh, Coming to America idea started.
I want a woman that's going to arouse my intellect as well as my loins.
Where will you find such a woman?
In America.
Good morning, my neighbors!
Hey, fuck you!
Yes! Yes!
Fuck you too!
The idea was his life,
and the complications of finding true love on an honest plane.
Hey, boy. Why you so worried about how you look anyway?
Well, I'm trying to gain the interest of a certain young lady.
Ah...
I worked with Rick Baker for many years.
So when I wanted Eddie to play an old Jew,
I knew Rick could do it.
Who's the star of that picture?
It's this young guy named Eddie Murphy, I think it is.
Oh, Christ. I hate him.
The kid with the filthy mouth?
- Yeah, he's the one. - Oh, he's the worst.
He's the worst.
He can't act.
He has a filthy mouth.
And he's ugly.
When I get a voice or a character,
the way my voice sounds, I can lose it completely.
There's no sign of my voice.
You damn right!
Characters are like real people.
It feels so lovely to be here tonight. What a beautiful...
Give yourselves a round of applause. You're so lovely.
I've always been a fan of makeup movies.
There's some makeup, they turn into another person.
I always gravitated to stuff like that.
And I watched that stuff over and over and over and over again.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a movie I watched all the time as a kid.
"I'm not a man."
"I'm not a beast."
"I'm about as shapeless as the man in the moon."
This is beautiful. What is that, velvet?
When we did the original Coming to America,
at the after-party, Jesse Jackson came up to me,
and he was like, "Hey, I want to say thank you
for putting... looking out for some of the older Black actors,
putting them in the film and giving them a shot
because those guys are gonna become stars."
I was like, "What you talking about?" He said, "Those guys in the barbershop,
they're funny, and those guys are gonna get famous because of this."
I was like, "Motherfucker, that was me." He was like, "What, that was you?"
"Now I got to go see the movie again."
If a man wants to be called Muhammad Ali,
God damn it, this is a free country,
you should respect his wishes, and call the man Muhammad Ali.
I remember him walking around the Paramount lot,
and him as the old man,
and no one was bothering him or coming up to him,
and he could be free.
It's very difficult to survive the kind of fame
that Eddie had and has.
I've experienced it now three or four times with people,
um... where they're guys,
and then boom, they're superstars.
That superstardom, you're just worth so much money,
and people are coming at you from so many directions.
Who do you trust, you know?
"Murphy has solid middle-class values,
but in another way, he's too vain to destroy himself." John Landis.
That's true.
That's a lot to... no way I could just... have a hand in my destruction.
I think the celebrity...
he had a love-hate relationship with it.
He loved the energy of fans,
but you also become vulnerable.
Fame is bigger than any drug.
Hearing nothing but how much you love me
and how great I am,
that can rock most, and it has.
Michael and Prince and Whitney,
there was... have a self-destructive nature.
My biggest blessing...
My biggest blessing is not my comedic talent.
My biggest blessing is, uh...
that I... love myself,
and I knew what I wanted to do really, really early.
And that's why I didn't fall into any traps or anything
'cause at the... at the root...
at the root of it all, I love myself.
You know, the best rappers like Biggie, Tupac, those guys died in their twenties.
No telling what they could have been. You know, the...
The biggest success in show business, first and foremost, is surviving the shit.
No matter what, you got to... you got to survive it.
You can't kill yourself, you can't let nobody kill you.
- How you doing? - Good. How are you?
Being able to navigate this minefield that you have to navigate,
just being on the physical plane, you know, and then you add to it,
you're one of the faces, there's a higher power that's at hand.
There's some other shit going on.
And when shit is all fucked up, well, you get centered, pray.
It's like a tuning fork.
You hit it and it's vibrating, and you can take it
and run your fingers down and make it, you know, stop vibrating.
That's what, like, prayer is like.
Hey, man. I don't want to sound, you know, all guru-ish and shit.
People sitting out there going, "This motherfucker is a guru."
There are many times when I've been around Eddie in a work situation,
and it's like he's stepped out of his body into the white light,
and he's looking back at us humans and helping us understand.
I've done a movie, Harlem Nights, where he directed, where you realize,
he knows what works and doesn't work.
Only way you going home is shot, motherfucker!
I was doing a scene
where I have to die.
And he said, "I want you to die."
"And then, I want you to just come back to life for one second and say..."
Asshole.
"...and then die."
I did it, and it's still funny.
There were days when I wasn't working, and I would just go over and hang
and watch him direct Redd Foxx and fucking Della Reese, man.
I'd tell you to kiss my ass too, but you probably can't find it,
you blind motherfucker.
Fuck you, bitch.
But directing Richard, easily a dream come true,
because you know how much he respects and loves Richard Pryor.
- Who is that? - That's the cop I was telling you about.
To work with somebody you idolize... on the outside, I'm unflappable.
On the inside, I was like... Ahh!
Now, when we were doing Harlem Nights,
I wanted to do a movie with some of my old heroes.
You put your head back and go, "I don't feel no different."
Redd was just funny effortlessly.
You look good.
I don't feel no different.
I love Redd.
Then he was a cautionary tale, too, because we've got drugs,
that shit going on, sniffing blow and all that.
Then his paper was all fucked up,
'cause when Redd kicked out, I had to bury Redd.
I had to bury Redd. I had to bury Rick.
I brought Buckwheat a tombstone.
Buckwheat didn't have no tombstone.
I'm always burying... burying these people.
I mean, it tripped me out, these people you...
Show business and all that, then when they pass away,
there's not even the money to bury these people?
Where are their families? Where are these people?
It's a lot of people like that.
One of the quiet agendas that Eddie has
is... "Hey, Black people haven't had a movie like that."
There hadn't been a Black romantic comedy before.
Love should've brought your ass home last night.
"We need to do that so other people can do that."
"And if I can use my clout to open that door, that's a good thing."
Don't you think it's about time we talked promotion?
Because we showed Black life in a way that had never been put on screen before,
there were these really extreme reactions.
This is from the LA Times. This review, it says...
It says, "The most intriguing aspect of Boomerang, turns out,
not its story but its racial composition."
It says, "This takes pains to create a reverse world
from which white people are invisible."
Oh, yeah, this cat and the LA Times was tripping
because there was... there were no... well, there are white people in the movie,
but there were no, like, you know, like, white leads in it.
And you take a picture like Boyz n the Hood,
no one tripped about that because it was a movie
that dealt with, like, a violent thing.
But regular thing, and it was business, "Where are the white people?"
"Who's running that office?" You know, that kind of thing.
It's the type of thing where people say they're not used to seeing Black artists
in these roles, so... it seems odd to them. But I was seeing--
Well, you better get used to it 'cause I ain't going no place.
Yeah.
I ain't going no place.
Hollywood back then, and to this day,
there's a lot of negative forces.
Black movie stars always had to break through all these obstacles,
but those obstacles were the default.
Hi, I'm Eddie Murphy.
Every now and then, somebody will see it and be like, "Wow."
"Eddie was talking shit at the Oscars way back then?"
I even said right before, I said,
"I'll probably never get an Oscar for saying this."
And I'll probably never win an Oscar for saying this,
but, hey, what the hey, I got to say it.
And I went... I went and did it.
I just want you to know, I'mma give this award,
but Black people will not ride the caboose of society,
and we will not bring up the rear anymore, and I want you to recognize us.
He said, "Fine, it's done." I said, "When do I have to be there?"
He said, "You don't have to get there till about 9 or 10
'cause it's the last award of the evening, so..."
The next day, it was like I didn't say anything.
There were no pictures of me at the Oscars.
There was no coverage of me. There was no mention that I said that.
It was like I wasn't at the Oscars.
And I haven't gotten an Oscar.
I haven't got an Oscar, and I've done everything.
I've played everything and done everything.
And I haven't got an Oscar.
But I don't think it's because of that.
I think I'm in a transitional period as a comedian.
I feel like there are other things that I want to do,
and I don't want to do things that I've done before,
and I want to do different types of movies,
and exploring where I am at this part of my life
because so much has happened to me in the last couple of years,
between marriage and kids and personal life.
Yeah.
Again.
I need my baby I need my baby...
My kids are the center of everything.
Before kids, it's just about you.
Then once you have kids, it's all about them.
I used to stay up maybe two days sometime before I would go to bed.
When I met Paige, I got more on her schedule.
Now, we watch two episodes of Seinfeld, and then right after that, go to bed.
Paige and I have been together 14 years.
No dogs?
We had dogs.
- And now we have cats. - Now we have cats.
We'd never have thought we'd have had cats.
Never, ever, ever thought in a million years.
The cat don't give a fuck. He'll just be sitting there.
I have... I have more in common with the cat than the dog.
Sometimes you walk in a room, the cat just be sitting there looking at the wall.
I'm like, "I do shit like that."
Hey, that's... that's what I do.
Wow.
'80s trunks.
'80s everything.
Somebody asked me once, you know, about movies.
You know, about my legacy.
Real food.
- Good. How are you? - Good, Dad.
I said, "My legacy? My legacy is my children."
"It's not what I did at work."
I really feel like that.
"If you could feel all the flavor of love in each morsel."
- You can taste the love. - You can taste the love.
- See what you... - I bet nobody gets sick tonight.
Nobody ever gets sick.
This... This time.
I bet you nobody gets sick this time.
I heard somebody say it in a song...
- I think I've heard-- - ...and it was, like, a fashionable dude.
I'm saying, I heard it on their Instagram.
If you put your kids first...
you'll never ever make a bad decision.
...played it with his teeth while it was on fire.
Flaming guitar on his face.
Hey, Joe
Twenty-seven.
Gone at 27.
And the world's still buzzing.
Watch this, how he does this. It makes it feedback. Listen.
That. Crazy.
That's feedback. He used the feedback like a note on the guitar.
Yeah, that's crazy.
Come on, man.
I was real proud of what my brother had accomplished.
I remember the old days before any of this happened.
To go from the apartment to the house in Long Island
to, you know, having this brother that became a star.
But because he was so good at it, and I was so proud of him, I was, like--
If you didn't laugh, I was real emotional.
I probably would fuck you up for not laughing.
That's how... That's how I felt.
There's nobody like Charlie.
Nobody was funnier there.
And some of my biggest laughs in my life are Charlie.
Yeah.
I miss my brother.
I have this thing with death, and when people would pass away.
Like, I'll just touch it for a sec-- Every now and then, a memory will pop up.
And I touch it.
And then I'll feel it... this stuff bubbling up.
And then I'll go, "Oh, okay." So it's a lot of--
I just touch little memories. I don't be going and... and wallowing in it.
I don't believe that it ever stops.
I don't believe, like, that, like... like, death is like this...
like, you die and then you come back from the dead.
I don't think you ever die. I think, you know, it just keeps going.
And everybody is it.
Whatever the... the force is that's, you know, at the center of everything,
everybody's that, you know.
So this physical body will die,
but at the center of it, you know,
that... whatever's at the center of you and him and her and everybody,
that goes on and on, that just keeps going and going.
You know, most people think of the world as being out here,
and it's really happening on the inside.
Did you tell them you're running for mayor?
The first thing I would change if I was mayor,
certain people would be in certain places.
That'd be your first law?
"And now certain people would be in certain places."
I met Val when we got snowed in at Rick's house.
Rick had a bunch of artists that he was developing,
and Val was one of the backup singers.
And then she just became part of the circle.
Most of the people that became part of the circle over the years are characters,
and Val is a character.
I'm drawn to people that are characters.
But Val is kind of the last of the characters.
Over the years, the characters have either passed away or been banished.
Banished from the circle.
Hey, look at "Party all the Time." It's up to 123.
What?
- 123 million? - That's crazy.
"Red Light." It's gonna be 80 million next month.
Now here your karma come
With a knock, knock, knock On your door, oh
Red light, stop right...
On set, he'd be like, "You have YouTube?"
I'm like, "Yeah, I have YouTube." He's like, "I love YouTube."
He goes, "I've seen all the videos on YouTube."
Anytime I would come to set, he's just blasting music
and vibing, and everyone gets really, really excited.
Welcome back to Ridiculousness.
Three, two, one!
Ridiculousness, guilty pleasure show I watch all the time.
I think it's actually the best show on television.
You know what that show reminds me of?
It's like... you know the director, Jodorowsky?
His movies are, like, shocking images, like, back-to-back-to-back.
It be like, "What the fuck?"
You don't even get a chance to go... He's on to the next thing.
Ridiculousness is like a kid TV version of a Jodorowsky movie.
I love it. I love that he's sitting around watching Ridiculousness.
That's fucking hilarious.
That's so funny.
He just has a sieve of a brain. Like, is that the right word? Sieve?
- Like, it just takes everything in? - Yeah, sponge.
Sponge. He's like a sponge brain.
That's the way I would describe Eddie. He's a sponge brain.
I'm not a stand-up comedian.
Like, I'm...
You know, I'm funny, and I can do that.
But I don't see-- I don't go, "I'm a comedian."
Like, I don't go, "I'm an actor," or "I'm a musician."
I'm an artist that can express hisself a bunch of different ways.
Sensitivity is the gauge, not how much talent you have.
The most sensitive one will be the artist that's most in tune.
I don't want to get too artsy.
I could get really artsy if you let me.
I don't force anything.
I'm not rowing a boat.
It's not a rowboat. It's a sailboat.
I'm not... "I got to go over there."
I'm like...
I'm on a sailboat, and this--
Let me catch this breeze and go this way.
I'm not trying to be or trying to get to.
I just am.
Interesting.
If you could be in this business for 40 years,
you're gonna make something that's not gonna work.
That's when you know you've gone really far away from stand-up.
You got fangs, and you biting Angela Bassett.
I'm like, "Okay now, I think we got a little off-track here."
Because the...
Spade in America with David Spade.
David Spade did a sketch on Saturday Night Live at the News Desk.
I had just had, uh... Vampire in Brooklyn had come out.
Look, children. It's a falling star. Make a wish.
Yeah. Yes. That's right.
The audience there said "woo" and hissed him for saying it, right?
So I was, like, hurt, my feelings was hurt.
It was like, "Yo, I'm from the same--"
It was like your alma mater taking a shot at you.
At my career, not how funny I was...
Called me a falling star.
Like, 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 producers would look at it, "You're not saying that joke."
So it... the joke had went through all of those channels a joke has to go through,
and then he was on the air saying, you know, "Catch a falling star."
So I wasn't like, "Fuck David Spade."
I was like, "Oh, fuck SNL, fuck y'all. How y'all gonna do this shit?"
"Y'all-- That's what y'all think of me? Oh, you dirty motherf..." I was like that.
And that's why I didn't go back for years.
With show business, you receive the greatest flattery
and the greatest venom, and they're both lies.
They're both lies.
And so you're left kind of with nothing, you know.
You're left with, "Well, I think I gave that my best."
And that should be it.
Right? What--? That should be it.
Consciously, I'm going, I want to do something where I show them that...
that I'm not like anybody in this town,
and I want to do something nobody else... that only I will be able to do it.
Nutty Professor shows pretty much everything.
It's up there, all those different characters, and...
The movie is funny, but it has this sweet thing in it.
All the elements are there.
I would like to volunteer to take this old bird out of her misery.
Cletus! Don't you dare say something like that about Mama.
No, hold on. You ain't got to protect me from Cletus.
Come on, Cletus. Come on.
What Eddie's doing, all those other characters,
he's hearing them in his head.
He's also getting their timing right.
I mean, 'cause they all have different vocal rhythms and different volume.
He's a little Hercules. Show me your muscles again.
Oh, Hercules! Hercules!
We ain't passing out Oscars.
We not-- Hold on, goddammit. We not passing out Oscars.
He-- Every character should have got nominated.
Those characters start out in the makeup chair.
There was no prep.
When Rick had the makeup, like, halfway through,
he would just start asking me questions.
He'd just start a conversation with me, asking,
"How many kids you have? Where'd you grow up?"
And I'm trying different voices to see what voices come out of it.
Like, while he's doing it, you start figuring out
what looks best coming out of that makeup.
And by the end, you'll have, like, the right voice and the right everything.
There was a lot of hoops to jump through. The studio said, "Look, we love Eddie."
"We think he's really talented,
but I don't know if he could play all those characters."
"How would he define these characters so they're different from one another?"
He had to work to get the role.
Well, he had to audition.
Then I was thrilled. He just said, "Yeah, I'll do it."
It is at least four hours plus in makeup
each time you gotta put that character on.
There's a reason why no one else does them.
Like, no comic wants to do that shit.
He wants to do that shit.
Excuse me, I'm going to use the restroom.
I'm hot tonight!
Sorry about that, ma'am. Let me pick that up for you.
Whoo-ooh!
That was the first time I ever met him.
On the set of Nutty Professor. In fact, he walked by me,
and I didn't recognize him because he was dressed as Sherman Klump.
He walked, then he stopped and goes, "Hey, man, you're real funny."
And I heard his voice-- "Oh!" And then I... "Oh my God, it's Eddie Murphy."
Boy so fat, every time he turn around, it's his birthday!
Then we go through take after take. The first takes were him as Sherman.
By the next few days, by the time we were doing the Buddy Love scenes...
Man, like, literally the crowd was... you could feel it in the room.
You mind waiting for the punchline first, brother?
I'm sorry, man. It's just that you so funny!
They would erupt in applause.
When they said, "Cut," they'd erupt into applause.
Like, everyone knew, like, man, this is special.
Look at Reggie's gums and teeth.
Look like his mother had an affair with Mr. Ed.
Nobody knew I was gonna be a comedy legend.
Everybody knew he was a comedy legend.
But that shit was really special.
He is very easy to work with...
Oh damn!
...if you're sharp and prepared.
If you come on there, and you're bobbling around,
that's when he goes to the trailer.
Go to the office and make some calls. Go call Arnold and Sly,
and Van Damme, and Jackie Chan,
and tell them the spearchucker said hello.
Bowfinger, he plays a couple people,
and there's no latex on his face.
There's no costume to hide behind.
He finds the essence of the other character,
and he plays it.
Would you be willing to show your naked rear end in a movie?
Yeah, I guess so. Yeah.
Steve Martin, when he came to talk to me about Bowfinger,
we were in San Francisco. He was like, "Let's go get some lunch."
And I was like, "Oh..."
I almost said, "I don't have any security here. Well, I..."
I almost said that. And I didn't say anything.
I was like, "Oh, okay."
And then we walked to some restaurant,
like, you know, ten blocks from the hotel.
You know, and people was like, "Hey."
You know, every now and then say, "Hey Eddie, hey Steve." And that was it.
It was like, "Hey, you don't need bodyguards."
You could just walk, and, you know, no one's gonna chase you
and tear you apart or none of that shit.
Anytime you see somebody getting chased down the street
and the screaming and all that, it's just almost, almost always
some young person in their twenties, and a teenybopper or a kid is screaming.
When you get-- Very rarely do the 30-year-old fans
chase anyone down the street and scream and do all of that shit.
But you be in your 30s thinking, "They're gonna still come chase me."
No, they're not chasing you now.
Now they're moms, and they're not chasing you at all.
When he came back
and was doing, like, family-friendly movies,
it also was a cue that we can grow up.
He's really, really, really, really smart about knowing how to connect
to a whole brand-new audience every ten years.
Him being a father is part of what shifted his...
choice of material.
He went from being the Raw guy
to the family guy, but this... the magic remains.
You know what else everybody like? Parfait.
Have you ever met a person, you say, "Hey, let's get parfait,"
they say, "Hell, no, I don't like no parfait"? Parfaits are delicious.
No!
Eddie Murphy, Donkey...
It's one of the greatest performances of all time.
Like him going, "I'm making waffles." Like, all that shit is hilarious.
Sorry, the position of annoying, talking animal has already been taken!
Let's go, Shrek!
Shrek?
It's fun being in a good movie
'cause nobody ever set off to do a bad movie.
So when you do one, and it works and it's good,
nothing's more rewarding.
Okay, you don't have to worry about anything.
Your identity is completely concealed. Just want to ask you one question.
Who gave you the cocaine?
Shrek.
Shrek!
I would have a massive headache after all those Shrek sessions.
Doing all that screaming and being at 100.
All that shit, doing that was exhausting.
Yeah, I never look forward to working 'cause I'd rather not...
I'd rather just be home doing nothing.
Hey, it's getting cold in here. I'm closing this roof.
When I built this house, I was tired of renting houses.
I would come out and make movies and you'd have to rent a house.
I started needing bigger places, and the rent was crazy in these houses.
So I was like, I should just build a house out there.
This is a great house to haunt.
Like, 100 years from now, people be like, "I heard him in here."
I'm gonna be around this motherfucker like...
"I heard him. I heard him doing that laugh upstairs."
When I first got divorced, and I'd be in here by myself,
and it was like, you know, these big ceilings, and I was all sad,
and I was like, "This is like Dracula's house."
I was like, "I-- I am... I am Dracula."
That was a funny, little three-year period
after I got divorced, and you don't know what to do.
I was probably, like, 45... Forty--
And you be like, "Okay," and you'd say, "I'm gonna go back out to the clubs."
And you call all the old crew, the old guys together.
And we all were all middle-aged
and tried to go out to the clubs like we used to.
I was at a club in Vegas.
I walked through the crowd, and some girl felt my ass.
So I turned around,
and it was, like, this young... girl, like 21, 22.
And I was like, "Hey."
"Hey, young lady... Watch... Hey, young lady."
I went there.
She was, like, younger than my daughters. It was like, "Hey, don't be fresh now."
I said, "Okay, maybe it's time to not go to the clubs anymore."
"Hey, there'll be none of that. Which one of you did that?"
I never would have thought, ever, that I would live in California
because I was... I'm just such an East Coast guy. I was so East Coast.
But I love it here.
Maybe I seem like a California person.
You know, all the talks about the spiritual plane.
"The spiritual plane is internal."
I said, "You can't talk shit like that on the New York streets."
"They say the spiritual plane is intern--"
"You better get the fuck out my face with that shit."
He had that piped-in scent that they have at the Bellagio.
I said, "This is too nice."
Comedians work from when things aren't perfect.
At my house, I call it Black Mansion because shit is just... terrible.
Like, I got a faucet in the bathroom. I just let it--
It sprays out. I just leave it that way.
'Cause it keeps me funny. I see people come out the bathroom,
"What the fuck is Foxx--"
And the game room-- His game room was fucked up.
I know he don't know what I'm talking about either, because all the games work.
All your games can't work in your game room.
Ms. Pac-Man gotta have a knob knocked off or something in order for you to be funny.
When we did Dreamgirls, I would come in hot.
I think sometimes I'd be too excited.
Hey, man. Who is this guy?
I just wanted that knowledge.
And when you watch Dreamgirls, it was a flawless performance.
And you could see some of the...
pain, you know... wherever he was getting it from.
I was doing the movie right after I got divorced.
So I was going through this emotional shit.
On the screen, I think a lot of stuff was real,
and it was... it was, like, right there.
So I was... I really experienced some real pain.
So some of that comes off in the movie.
Eddie Murphy walks away with his first Golden Globe,
for Best Supporting Actor, after four previous nominations.
I mean, I thought that there we saw the real Eddie Murphy.
- The real me? - Yeah, you can act, you can sing.
You're getting it done, my friend.
That was a fun movie. I got to do a lot of different stuff.
But that wasn't me.
- That's not the real me. - Not the real you?
I've never been the real me ever on screen.
Well, what is the real you, for God's sakes?
Uh...
He came to me, and he said...
"Um, I wrote this crazy script."
"It's called Norbit."
And he was gonna play multiple characters.
He was the male lead. He was the female lead.
Dammit, Norbit! How many times I gotta tell you,
when you drive my car, don't adjust my seat!
I haven't touched your seat.
Because it's comedy and makeup, people don't look at the technical side
of how much work really goes into it.
But they laugh, and that's what we're trying to get them to do.
It came out right at the time when you would be campaigning for your Oscar.
It just, you know, shittied up the water.
And the Oscar goes to...
Not winning the Oscar or not winning anything is not the mindfuck for me.
The mindfuck for me is that I get dressed and come to the thing
'cause I would usually not go to award shows.
That's... Whenever I lose, I'm like,
"These motherfuckers made me come all the way down."
"I could have fucking lost at home. I'm all in the fucking tuxedo."
"What a... a waste of time." I'm never like, "Oh, I didn't win."
I'm like, "Hey... make me come down here for nothing."
It's always wonderful to win stuff.
But if I don't win, I don't give a fuck.
I still come home and it's-- I'm still Eddie in the morning.
I had stopped making movies in 2011.
I was like, "Let me take a break from movies."
I was making these shitty movies.
I want my goo-gaa!
I mean, it was like, this shit ain't fun.
They giving me Razzies.
I think the motherfuckers gave me a Worst Actor Ever Razzie or some shit.
I was like, "Hey, maybe it's time-- Maybe it's time to take a break."
I realized it was like, "Hey..."
"People don't realize that I've taken a break."
So I was like, "Let me get off this couch to remind them that I'm funny
and that I have not fallen off."
I'm on the couch by choice.
And then I was like, "Hey, you know what? Fuck this. SNL is part of my history."
"I need to reconnect with that show 'cause 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 any of that with nobody.
And it was like, "Hey, let me go to SNL and smooth that all out."
And I did.
This is Eddie Murphy.
Back at you.
It was surreal 'cause I had been at that meeting so many times.
I'm in that meeting. I was meeting everybody.
I was thinking, you know,
"Wow, this office feels smaller."
He knew when he was coming back to SNL what that meant to the world.
He just knows what he means to all of us.
We were talking about monologue at first.
And I think Lorne wanted him to do something that was a bit more personal,
because people just wanted to hear him talk.
I think he was a little, not worried, but cautious of doing a monologue.
Incidentally, I just had a baby. I just have a new son.
I have ten kids now.
I don't want to say that...
Eleven, if you count Kevin Hart. What the fuck?
I'm teasing. I love Kev.
I love Kev. I do love Kev.
I love it. It was comedy. It's great.
It's a... it's a great bit. Great joke.
I remember Lorne calling me, "Come down."
I thought he was about to tell me Eddie had--
Eddie had canceled, and they wanted me to host.
- Hey, man. - It's Chris Rock, ladies and gentlemen.
- Hey, come on. - What are you doing here?
You thought I was gonna miss this show?
Come on, man. My daughters love Lizzo.
It's even written by hand. How about that, Alice?
I didn't know you knew anyone who could write.
See, a white woman?
He was doing Jackie Gleason, man. He was doing Archie Bunker or something.
And believe me, that's plenty, you big baboon.
Did you hear that, Alice?
Remember when "baboon" was a punchline?
Rich Little's gonna come in, and he's gonna go... do something,
and says, "You're a baboon, aren't you?"
He's gonna call him a baboon.
What's up? How you doing?
I had a huge burst of nostalgia. That "good old days" feeling.
Every now and then, you sit around with your friends or relatives,
be reminiscing about something and you'd be talking,
and then you'd get that little feeling, that, oh... that good, that...
"those were the good old days," kind of burst-of-nostalgia feeling.
I had that for a solid week.
Because the show is done the exact same way it's always been done.
I hadn't been back there in 36 years.
So it was literally, like, you know,
somebody saying, "Okay, you're gonna go back to 12th grade,
and here's your schedule for that day."
"You're... you have gym at eight."
"Here's your old locker."
"That's my old locker. The combination is still the same."
15, 26, 34.
That was my locker in high school.
Eddie doesn't seem to age at all.
It seemed like maybe he left the show five years ago,
or ten years ago or something.
It didn't seem like a long departure,
just because he jumped right back in with both feet.
And he just took his shoes off and respected the house, if you will,
kind of thing, and just jumped in.
"Y'all think I stole it 'cause I'm Black" is opened up too?
- Slightly. - I don't even mind. Look at camera--
"Y'all think I stole it 'cause I'm Black?"
- Then straight to camera again. Exactly. - Yeah.
One, two, three, four.
Oh, ting a lady
Oh, ting a lady, oh, ting a lady
Whoa-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh, oh...
Otay!
And he did promos. Like...
Eddie Murphy did the promos on Tuesday.
He's going through it like it's nothing.
Hi, I'm Eddie Murphy.
And I'm hosting Saturday Night Live with musical guest Lizzo tonight.
- Strong. - Can I do one that is not as crazy?
- Tonight! - Tonight.
And Lizzo was making him laugh. And then I heard him do his new laugh.
And it was, like, a real hard laugh.
He must be relaxed enough to be enjoying himself.
Hercules.
But I did notice at that moment, I was like, "Oh wow."
Like, he put that laugh away and has a new one.
He was like, "Yeah, my laugh was becoming a gimmick."
"And I didn't want people to put me in a box."
He's a very, you know, leveled kind of a person.
So whenever something is overshadowing that,
he'll pivot, it seems like.
This book is called,
Ass for Cash.
They all wanna know. Who are you?
Take it off! Take it off!
Take it off!
Hi, I'm Buckwheat. Uhmember me?
Seeing Eddie Murphy in Studio 8H,
it's like, I can't explain.
It's like being on safari and seeing a lion in the wild.
Thank you very much.
Wow, it is so great to be back here hosting Saturday Night Live for Christmas.
Yo, Ed Murph.
Oh, Tracy Morgan.
- Welcome home, brother. - Yeah, man. Yeah. What's up, man?
Lorne actually had the idea to bring in Chappelle and Chris and...
Tracy, and have that sort of moment.
And I thought it was really cool.
When we start to rehearse the monologue, when I look down the line,
I see Dave Chappelle, Eddie Murphy,
Chris Rock, and then Kenan.
All four of them, the four horsemen,
kind of up there together, it was just an iconic thing to witness.
Even being in the sketch, it was just like,
"I can't believe..."
Like, "I can't believe this is happening."
If you're watching this right now, you're looking at half of Netflix' budget.
Thanks, Netflix.
Not me. I made all my millions on the road.
- You mean touring? - No, I got hit by a truck.
There was a moment, like, in the rehearsal,
my dressing room had Chappelle and Chris Rock.
They were calling their moms to tell them that they was doing the Eddie Murphy show.
Like, in my dressing room, watching them kind of geek out.
See that? This is why I love coming back to Saturday Night Live.
Having moments like this.
When was the last time we were all together?
Last Thursday, at Sinbad's house.
Now, which is funnier, Sinbad, Arsenio, or my house?
Your house seems like the most plausible place for that to actually happen.
Your house is the most plausible place.
There's something funny about the word "Sinbad."
Now, when's the last time we were all together like this?
Last Thursday, at Arsenio's house.
Y'know, I've never been to Arsenio's house to this day.
- What kind of friend are you? - No, what kind of friend is he?
- What kind of friend is he? - Oh, you...
Shut it down.
This is one of the most exciting things I think I've ever done.
- Yeah. Yeah. I agree. - Yeah, honestly.
I agree.
I told Obama, in order to stop crime,
we need to get that government cheese program up and running.
Slow niggas down. I'm telling you, I told him at the correspondents' dinner.
- I never had government cheese. - Eddie, you had government cheese.
- You from Brooklyn. - But we never had government cheese.
Yes, you did. I'm not gonna buy that.
I did take a picture.
You had Combos. That's made of government cheese.
I remember as a child eating Swiss cheese.
I remember having a ham and Swiss--
I ain't discover Swiss cheese until I was at least 20.
I had a ham and Swiss cheese...
You ever tell them the James Brown story?
- Which one? - Where no one's got a million dollars?
Oh, and he told me to bury my money.
He told me, "Bury your money in the yard."
He said, "If you don't bury your money, government gonna come take your money."
He said, "You think you got a million dollars?"
I said, "Yeah." He said...
And his wife walked through. He said, "Hey, he think he got a million dollars."
And she did like this.
He said, "Ain't no Black man in America got a million dollars."
"Only person in show business got a million dollars is Sylvester Stallone."
Then he said, "If you do have a million, whatever money you got,
you need to go down to the bank."
"And you call the bank, you get that money out the bank, and you bury it."
I said, "Why would I bury it?" He said, "The government gonna take your money."
I said, "Where do I bury the money?"
He said, "Get you a good piece of land and bury the money under there."
I said, "Can't the government take your land?"
He said, "They won't know about the money though."
"They won't know where the money's at."
Then years later, I realized he was on angel dust when we had that conversation.
The Eddie Murphy show was the most tense start to a show I've ever been a part of.
And it was like, scary almost, like, this had to go well.
And we would be letting down Eddie Murphy if it was bad.
It's 11:27 right now.
The best thing to pray for, instead of money and everything...
pray for peace of mind.
Ten seconds...
Pursue peace of mind. If you get that, then you got it all.
Ladies and gentlemen, Eddie Murphy!
It was one of the greatest SNLs ever.
And I walked over to Lorne Michaels when it was over,
and I said, "You should quit right now."
"It's not gonna get any better than this."
I said, "Eddie." He looked at me and said, "What's up?"
I said, "Your life just came 360."
- Yeah, man. Killed that shit. - Thanks, bro.
This is where it all started.
Going back to Saturday Night Live...
- That was awesome. - Amazing.
...it was a great experience.
My creative energy, everything had been turned back up to ten.
It was like, "Hey, I wanted to work."
I think a lot of times we expect comedians to just walk around telling jokes,
being funny all the time.
And when they don't, you are, like,
reminded that this is their profession.
He's so quiet with his preparation.
Hatch, match, smatch and scratch.
Whack, jack, smack. Crack-- Hoo--
I'm sorry. Can we go again?
All of a sudden he just comes back, and he just gears up and bang, bang, bang.
I was really blown away by the Dolemite movie.
It made me just so happy. Like, that's right, dude.
You can do it anytime you want.
He still looks like this awesome leading man.
But I also feel that he's going to have a Sean Connery period,
like late Sean Connery,
where he's gonna do stuff in his seventies and eighties
that's gonna be incredible.
I'm doing George Clinton next.
This is going to be a hard one.
I'm Inspector Clouseau in the next Pink Panther.
Wait, what?
It's a lot of stuff, and I got to get lost in it.
The question of the century is, will Eddie ever touch the stage again?
Will he ever do stand-up again?
The level at which he did it, when he did it, was branded onto people.
And the comedians that were young, that were teenagers,
or maybe a little younger when he was really hot...
um... he's it for them.
He is it.
If it struck me one day, I would do it again.
I think the reason people be tripping about it, 'cause it's kinda like,
you know, if you, like, was a Jimi Hendrix fan,
you know, Jimi Hendrix didn't die,
but he just puts his guitar down and stops playing one day.
And then he goes off, and he starts making, you know, movies,
Dr. Dolittle and all of this shit.
And you'd be like, "Hey, Jimi, you going to play your guitar again?"
He said, "Oh, yeah, eventually." And then he just never picks it up.
It's like, so you know he can play.
"I know he can play. Why won't he play?"
Especially if you out there trying to play all the time, going out there playing.
He be like, "Why don't you come play too? Come jam with us."
It's like, "I'm good."
The guy's been famous for longer than I've been alive, you know?
It'd be really interesting to hear what he has to say.
What the world looks like to him.
What do we look like to him, you know?
Oh, I know what this is. Those are ventriloquist dummies.
Wow!
There's a long history of comedians that we thought were funny
when they were young.
And then we found out later they're much funnier when they got older.
Did you put that pill in the chocolate?
Now, see, how you gonna ask me did I put the pill in the chocolate,
when you know that I put the pills in the chocolate?!
Hey, man, y'all went all out.
You know, it would be different for Eddie than any other comedian in history.
He's one of, you know...
two, three guys... one guy,
that was given that big a bag of gold to start out with, you know?
Goddamn, this your place?
Well, I'll be damned.
I put the pill in my motherfucking mouth.
Motherfuck the chocolate.
Yeah.
And it's Paul Mooney, homie.
We've got Paul Mooney, Richard Pryor, and Bill Cosby.
"This nigga has lost his mind."
That's what Mooney would say.
"In the documentary, he broke out three nigger puppets, homie."
"Nigger, I spun around in my grave, homie."
I want to put them in here.
To have them all three together.
That's Richard eyes.
Yeah, he really made a good Richard.
- Look. - You're upstairs in the drawer.
Now why am I in the drawer, and they are out?
- Here I am. - Here she is.
You got me in the drawer. And look, ooh, who's that?
- Look at Val. - Ooh, look at Val.
Ooh, what's this?
Who are these motherfuckers?
Ooh, y'all see Richard Pryor over here?
They don't even know who Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby, Paul Mooney is.
Oh, they should.
From this angle, it looks like, uh...
Like what? Like who?
Like, Bill Cosby is... shooting game at you.
Like, trying to talk to me?
- Uh-huh. - What are you saying, Bill?
"Don't go by what you've heard."
I'm capable of tenderness and kindness to you...
I'm going to show you my Jell-O pudding pop.
Look at him.
I'm going to show you my Jell-O pudding pop.
I know a lot of people that survived a lot of weird shit in their lives.
But surviving being Eddie Murphy is a hell of an accomplishment.
What do you say to your mother
when she gives you a bowl of Jell-O pudding?
I don't give a fuck.
No, because, you see, I didn't put a pill in the people's chocolate.
Nigga, you know you put that pill in the chocolate, nigga.
Lord, have mercy
Hear me, Lord
Hear me, Jesus
Hear me, Lord, well
Hear me, Jesus
Hear me, Lord
Hear me, Lord, well
Lord, have mercy
Hear me, Lord
Lord, have mercy
Hear me, Lord
Hear me, Jesus
Hear me, Lord
Hear me, Lord, well
Yeah, that's all I got so far.
I'm gonna work on it.
Come up with a second verse.
And a... bridge.
And a... breakdown section.
For the kids to have something to dance to.
What you think?