From the Archives: Eddie Murphy Live

Editor’s note: This review originally appeared in the December 10, 1984, issue of New York. We’re republishing it to mark the release of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F this week.

In executive producer Dick Ebersol’s office, overlooking the Saturday Night Live set, the only thing hanging on the wall is a cork bulletin board. On that bulletin board, four days before the first S.N.L. show of the new season, Ebersol has blocked out the program by segments. Each segment is marked by an index card — “Opening montage” and “Talent entrance” and so on. Only one card bears just a first name. It reads, “Eddie.”

“That card,” says Ebersol, “means that he does whatever he wants to in that spot.”

He is Eddie Murphy, the only potential superstar to emerge from the new cast of S.N.L. Murphy’s an unlikely choice for the role. Just 21, he came out of Roosevelt, Long Island, only a few years ago. Yet, he has carried S.N.L. virtually by himself since the show lost the entire original cast of John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Glinda Radner, et al. His first album, Eddie Murphy, is selling well, and he has just finished acting in his first movie, 48 Hrs., for which he received co-star billing with veteran actor Nick Nolte. It’s not so surprising that Eddie Murphy is doing well. What is surprising is that he is now being touted as America’s major new comedian.

“The sky is the limit for Eddie Murphy,” says producer Ebersol. “No Black comic actor has come on the scene as fast since Bill Cosby 20 years ago. Richard Pryor is the hero, but people forget that Pryor has to go through hell to get any commercial acceptance. Eddie — boom! — three weeks out of the box last season.”

In an age of assembly-line, middle-class comedians who try to squeeze humor out of Quaaludes, Pac-Man, and the reigning TV commercials of the day, Eddie Murphy is an original, razor-sharp fast mouth. And that’s why he’s been noticed so quickly. When, in late September, Paramount Pictures could not get the team of Pryor and Gene Wilder for a movie called Black & White, Paramount offered it to Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd.

More remarkably, Murphy appeals to white audiences while doing routines that border on anti-white harangues. During the same act, he can play with hated Black stereotypes and keep a Black following. On national TV, he can ready — with barely controlled rage — a purported letter from Ronald Reagan saying, in effect, that the three things Blacks can’t get are black eyes, fat lips, and jobs. Then he can turn around and play the process-haired, oily-talking black huckster Velvet Jones hawking a self-help book titled I Wanna Be a Ho. “Ho” does not mean a garden tool.

Appearing with Tyrone Green on SNL.
Photo: Alan Singer/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Image

Unlike some of the former S.N.L. stars who worked only in roles, Murphy works as himself and in roles (which Ebersol says is one big reason for his success and his appeal). Besides being Eddie Murphy on the air, however, he has helped create a group of remarkably vivid characters.

There’s the menacing Tyrone Green, who first appeared last season in “Prose and Cons,” a skit inspired by Jack Henry Abbott. Green is an arrogant, Eldridge Cleaver–type convict-writer whose toughness is totally obliterated when he snarls “Kill my landlord” and then spells out “kill” as “c-i-l-l.” Laughter demolishes his menace. Tyrone is back this year, appearing at a radical-chic party, where he recites a poem titled “I Hate White People.” It ends with the line “I hate white people because they is white.” Then he spells out the word white: “w-i-t-e.” Laughter. No more menace.

Then there’s Little Richard Simmons, one of Murphy’s more inventive creations. A double parody, the character is a cross between the Little Richard of rock and roll and the Richard Simmons of exercise: double hysteria. Murphy’s Mister Robinson is a ghetto version of Mister Rogers: “Oh, here’s Mr. Landlord with an eviction notice,” he tells the audience in a singsong yet bitingly sarcastic tone.

There’s militant Black film critic Raheem Abdul Muhammad, who rants and raves about why serious actors like Isaac Hayes can’t get serious film parts. Murphy also does an adult version of the pickaninny Buckwheat from the old Our Gang series, and a wicked imitation of Black singer Stevie Wonder — both roles are bound to offend everyone, but not for very long.  
The only real controversy Murphy has sparked came from his Velvet Jones role. Comedian Franklin Ajaye, for one, thought it a bit demeaning to Blacks. Murphy, though, says that he sees no color lines in comedy and that he was just parodying TV hucksters.

The fact that Murphy has done so much so fast does not surprise Ebersol: “Eddie has no fear whatsoever of a television camera. None. Which is rare. No. 2: He’s got something that you can’t train anybody to have — he actually thinks of the television camera as just another person. So he’s just rapping to somebody. And the whole Black-and-white thing works because of his eyes. He never loses the charm in his eyes. In his eyes he never stops smiling. His eyes tell the audience he’s laughing. The only other person on S.N.L. like this was Chevy in the beginning. Eddie’s eyes are the eraser for any misunderstanding.”

Those who have seen rushes of 48 Hrs. say that Murphy is a very good film actor as well. Murphy portrayals a convict named Reggie Hammond. Nick Nolte, as tough cop Jack Cates, springs Hammond from the slammer for 48 hours to help him track down two cop killers. Predictably, Murphy says that making the shift from TV comedy to a serious acting role was not all that difficult for him. “I’ll probably stay with Saturday Night one more year and then do movies and try to do TV specials,” he says.

Within a picture-perfect two-story house in Roosevelt, Long Island, where he grew up, Eddie Murphy is still a pure suburban kid. Neighborhood youngsters cruise by the house to check if Eddie is home. (He recently moved to an apartment in Hempstead and, in November, will move again, to a nearby house in a location he does not want revealed.)

Three years ago, Murphy was earning about $30 a week in Long Island clubs. This year, he should make a million. But he still goes home to Long Island and is still very much its product. He does Yiddish jokes better than some of the Jewish comedians from whom he learned them.

In that immaculate two-level shingled ranch house out in Roosevelt, Long Island, Lillian Lynch, Eddie Murphy’s mother, welcomes me into her home. (Her first husband, who was Eddie Murphy’s father, was a New York City transit policeman who died some years ago. Her current husband is Vernon Lynch, a boxing instructor who works in the shipping department at the Breyers ice-cream plant.)

Lillian is an ebullient, charming woman who looks and acts ten years younger than her admitted age of 41. It’s about 9 p.m., and she’s waiting for Vernon to come home from the afternoon shift at Breyers. She bustles about her lime-green-carpeted living room wearing a flattering olive-and-white sweater and olive-colored trousers. There are framed photographs of her three sons on the coffee table. Eldest son Charles is in the Navy, middle son Eddie is now justifying his claims of being a comedian, and youngest son Vernon (currently down in the paneled basement playing records) is still in high school.

Eddie Murphy’s success has come too fast for the family to fall into the show-business syndrome. In fact, no one, including Eddie, seems to want anything at all to do with the celebrity game. True, Eddie’s “Z” and Trans Am are in the driveway, but Vernon has put canvas covers over them, and teenage fans would have a tough time trying to locate the house by locating the cars.

Lillian serves me coffee in the white-brick dining room. She is a proud mother, and her pride shines through even as she claims that Eddie Murphy’s comedic talent must have been inherited rather than nurtured. Despite Lilian’s bubbling sense of humor, she denies that she had any influence on Eddie, other than telling him to stop talking dirty. When he was 15 years old and playing such clubs as the Blue Dolphin in Uniondale, Lillian was shocked by his four- and six- and 12-letter-word jokes. Like Richard Pryor and Jimmie Walker and many others, Murphy did rely heavily on profanity. Lillian did not like to hear all that from her teenage son. Vernon, however, behaved as a normal suburban father. He kicked ass. 

While I am having coffee with Lillian, Vernon comes home from work. He’s a wiry, no-nonsense man who speaks his mind. He disciples all his sons by taking them down into the basement (which he paneled), putting on boxing gloves, and teaching any errant son a lesson with a strong right to the chin. Vernon remains a good fighter.

“I could still whip Eddie,” he says calmly as we sip coffee. “Eddie respects his parents. I used to be a professional fighter. And I believed in me; I believed nobody could whip me. Eddie always had that; he always believed in himself, even from a little kid. I will still take Charles or Eddie downstairs and put on the gloves with them. Toughen them up a little bit, show them how tough they can be.

“If Eddie wanted to be, I think he’d be a dynamite middleweight boxer. Yes, I’m telling you that he don’t like to be hit, but he’s quick to learn, his reflexes are good, terrific. But he said, ‘Pop, no good. Don’t want to fight nobody.’ But he can defend himself.”

Part of Murphy’s club act is a bit he calls “Drinking Fathers.” It’s a scathing bit of humor about fathers who come home drunk and roust their kids out of bed for some cockeyed, drunken lectures about life.

“That was me,” Vernon says, admitting that he used to take the occasional drink. “True, true, true. I’d come in here, three o’clock in the morning, get him up. I don’t think I was as bad as he makes out. But I rolled him out: ‘Get up, get these dishes washed, get with it.’ And I always kept two pairs of boxing gloves around. And Eddie doesn’t like no kind of violence. All I had to do was tell him, ‘Let’s go, just you and me, downstairs.’ No problem.”
Lillian shakes her head at a memory: “Well, I used to cover up for him, clean up after him. I was thinking about that today. You ever noticed how often he washes his hands? He would never take out the garbage; he didn’t want his hands to touch the garbage.”

“I would tell him,” Vernon recalls, “‘You better become famous or rich, because, boy, you are the laziest kid I’ve ever seen.’”

Vernon and Lillian reflect for a while on Eddie’s childhood. On how he would watch TV and mimic cartoon characters. About how he was always pretty quiet and private. They still aren’t sure how he got his gift for comedy, but they are sure that once he knew he had it he wasted no time making it work for him. He was an average student who made himself popular through his sharp tongue. He was performing as a comedian on Long Island before he could drive. Vernon would take him around to the clubs, where customers were amazed to hear some of the words this 15-year-old kid used. Then he broke into some of the Manhattan clubs and, says Lillian, had a severe ego problem for a time until he came around, on his own, to a realization of who and what he was.

“But,” she says, and her eyes mist over a little at the memory, “Eddie was always a good child. I’ll never forget when he was 6 or 7 and I would spank him and he would just say, ‘I know why you spanked me, Mommy. You spanked me because you love me. ’Cause if you didn’t care you wouldn’t spank me.’ You read about these things in ‘Dear Abby,’ but for that to happen in real life, to me?”

Robert Wachs is sitting in a fern bar near his Upper East Side apartment, knocking back a large white wine and laughing about the memory of his first meeting with Murphy. Wachs and partner Richard Tienken operate the Comic Strips in Manhattan and Fort Lauderdale, and they manage Eddie Murphy. They don’t manage anyone else and they have no plans to manage anyone else. They manage Eddie Murphy because he asked them to.

But Wachs is remembering his first meeting with Murphy. “Two and a half years ago. I get to know a guy name of Bob Nelson, first-rate stand-up comedian. He starts working the Comic Strip, and we get to know Bob, he starts telling us about his friend Eddie Murphy, that we ought to see Eddie. At the Comic Strip, we’re kind of a family situation. Our acts are with us for years, so if an act needs a favor, we help him out. So I tell Nelson to have his friend Eddie Murphy come in on Monday, audition night, and we’ll take a look at him.

“So I’m there Monday night, all of a sudden this kid comes in, announces that he’s here and that he’s gonna go on. I say, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m Eddie Murphy. I’m ready to go on.’ I say, ‘Wait a minute. We have systems around here, procedures. You don’t just walk in and say, “I’m here and I’m going on.” Get the hell out.’ So I threw him out of the club.”

Wachs laughs and drinks his wine. “Threw him out. So he goes back to Nelson and tells him what happened and says that maybe he better cool down his act.

“So Eddie comes back a week or two later — no problems. Make a long story short, Eddie started doing very nicely taking a late-night bit for us. Now, this is the beginning of the Jean Doumaninan era at Saturday Night Live. And I get word through the grapevine that S.N.L. would like another male cast member and they would not object at all if that person happened to be Black. Long story short, he gets a job as featured player, not as a regular.

“Not must for him until the middle of the season on S.N.L. One night they ended the show five minutes short—five minutes to fill because there had been no laughs that night. So they get Eddie to go out and do his stand-up club routine. Much of his stand-up is peppered with four-letter words. Remember simultaneous translation? Eddie did simultaneous editing. He edited his routine as he did it live, and it was brilliant. I knew and he knew that it was just a matter of weeks before he became a regular cast member.”

Murphy portraying James Brown playing Annie.
Photo: YouTube

Murphy, In fact, was the brightest spot in a dismal S.N.L. year. His fast mind, faster mouth, and smooth self-confidence produced some funny bits and some moments where live TV comedy’s limits were tested. But Murphy made it through — he and Joe Piscopo were the only players retained when Ebersol replaced Doumanian as executive producer.

That Eddie Murphy is a star is indisputable. That he’s neither a household word nor a face the paparazzi love to chase is also indisputable. On a recent Saturday afternoon, he arrived in Atlanta only a few hours after wrapping 48 Hrs. in Los Angeles. He’s had almost no sleep and is here to perform — only a few hours from now — at “Jack the Rapper’s Family Affair ’82,” a Black-music convention. Jack the Rapper puts out a Black-music tip sheet, so CBS Records has decided that it’s important for Murphy to be on the scene.

Murphy, in blue Nike jogging suit and Porsche shades, is unrecognized in the airport but draws a crowd of one when he arrives at Dunfey Hotel. The crowd is disco singer Richard “Dimples” Fields, who wants a picture with Murphy. The limo radio has just run a Jack the Rapper commercial and announced that Stevie Wonder would be at the convention. “S—,” says Murphy. “I thought I was here. Hmm. Maybe I’ll do my Stevie Wonder routine tonight. I wonder what Stevie thinks about it. I could alway outbox him, if I had to.” He says that with a wink.

In Room 3004, Murphy eats a room-service dinner, watches Ragtime, and mimics Coalhouse Walker Jr. perfectly. “Remind me sometime,” he says, “to do a Meineke-muffler commercial like Coalhouse.” Murphy’s eyes flare, and his voice booms menacingly: “I wants my car fixed. Now!” He laughs. “But if anybody put s— in my Benz, I’d do the same thing.”

He puts on black leathers for the show. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do tonight,” he says as he carefully studies himself in the mirror. “It’s hard to make the brothers laugh. ‘Your mutha got a wooden leg with a kickstand.’” He shifts to an ominous tone: “‘Got off mutha f—in’ stage! That ain’t funny!’”
He goes back to being Eddie Murphy: “White audiences are more accustomed to seeing stand-up comics. White people go to clubs. Blacks go to movies and to discos. I meet Black people who’ve never been to comedy clubs. They didn’t know such places existed. Blacks are just a harder audience. Whites just sit down and expect a good time. Blacks say, ‘Let’s see if this is funny.’ I know that I can go out in front of a white crowd and say ‘Do you smell s—?’ and they’ll laugh, but that would take five minutes with a Black crowd.”

Murphy heads downstairs to do his first stand-up routine in months. The audience is mostly Black. He goes onstage after a CBS vice-president, who has spoken at a great length about the perilous state of the record industry. Murphy aggressively thanks CBS for signing him to do an album just when “things are all f—ed up.” Cheap humor, but the crowd loves it. Murphy zips through his routines (“Guy who shot the pope wants to go straight to hell”) and then puts on sunglasses and staggers sightlessly around the stage, doing a cruelly accurate — and funny — impression of Stevie Wonder, complete with a rendition of the blind singer’s wandering smile.

Murphy finally sits back down at his table and is astonished when Stevie Wonder is led over to meet him. They have never met before. Murphy rises. Wonder shakes his hand but then throws a right fist at Murphy and says, “Mutha, you do me one more time and I’ll whip you!” But he’s laughing and so is Murphy.

It’s 11:30 at night and Murphy begs off several party invitations. It’s been a tiring day, and now all he wants to do is go up to his room to watch an S.N.L rerun. This particular show contains a skit in which he portrays Wonder, and Joe Piscopo, Murphy’s close friend, does Frank Sinatra. In Room 3004, Murphy removes his shirt, begins sipping a can of 7-Up, and watches himself intently on TV. He doesn’t laugh at all. When the segment is over, he sits up and says, “That’s good. That’s my favorite piece. I’m sorry I didn’t write that.” The rest of the show is abysmal, and Murphy says so.

There is no bigger Eddie Murphy fan than Joe Piscopo, the fellow survivor. Piscopo in this dressing room at NBC vividly recalls the first time he saw Murphy: “I was outside Jean Doumanian’s office. They needed a Black guy, and Eddie was up for it. I hadn’t heard of Eddie. He had worked the Long Island clubs, and I worked the Manhattan clubs. We sat down and talked, and I immediately saw the vulnerability of this guy. That and his confidence. I read with him for his audition. We did the Chevy Chase–Richard Pryor word-association piece, and Eddie took charge of that. So I said, ‘This guy is great.’”

Piscopo takes a phone call, dismisses it, and plucks a grape from the fruit plate that has mysteriously appeared. He talks about how bad his first year at S.N.L. was and how the show didn’t work, but he says that he and Murphy were a bit fortunate, because they were surrounded by bad company.

“The first thing on TV I did with Eddie I’ll never forget,” Piscopo says. “It was the first laugh anyone got on the show. I was the sports guy and we did a reverse-discrimination thing about a school that wouldn’t let whites on the basketball team. Eddie hadn’t been on-camera yet, but he came out to explain the difference between Blacks and whites. He held up a huge radio and said, ‘If God created us equal, why didn’t He give you one of these?’
“Eddie is brilliant. He’s a step above everyone else. Here’s a kid, 21, and I’m 31, and I look at him and can’t believe how he comes up with the emotion he gets in ‘Solomon and Pudge’ [a routine Piscopo and Murphy do about two old men reminiscing]. I get tears in my eyes.”

What, I wonder, strikes Piscopo as the reason Murphy has stood out so much? Piscopo thinks about it for a while, swiveling in his chair. “It’s a ‘Don’t f— with me’ attitude,’ he finally says. “I would love to be like that, but I’m not. But you know why he gets away with it? It’s because he has enormous vulnerability. When he smiles, you want this kid to be your son.”

Eddie Murphy has not seen his beloved New York for three months, and he’s happy to be on the Atlanta–to–La Guardia flight. He’s wearing white leather and gold jewelry. Clothing and cars, he says, are his vices. No drugs, alcohol, or tobacco. He does not particularly care for Manhattan, and when he’s not working he sees old friends in Roosevelt and goes to discos.

Like most comedians, Murphy is not funny 24 hours a day; he is actually fairly serious most of the time. He is not impressed to hear that many people are very impressed that he has done so much so quickly.

He sips a Coke and says, “I think it will be really good to see where my talents are five years from now. I’m not astounded by myself; I’m not astounded by my talents. I think that I came along at a time when the industry and when Black people reached out for heroes. It’s like I have a warped sense of humor. Every couple of years this country’s sense of humor changes. Hipper people are into comedy, not into silly things. On S.N.L. in the old days, you could come out and say ‘Let’s have sex’ and get a big laugh with it. If I did that, they’d cancel that show.” He adds that the Coneheads were funny then, but comedy demands something beyond that now. And what does he think that is?

“Well, our bit with Sinatra and Stevie Wonder is a perfect example. Another perfect example is the two old men that Joe Piscopo and I do. Two of the most loveable … the Black character is like … if you’ve even been around old Black guys, it’s exactly like that. Joe’s character is the guy that puts up with his bull. When I looked at it, my eyes swelled up with water — ‘That’s beautiful!’”

Murphy becomes silent for a while. The plane’s pilot comes out to apologize to me for the fact that my seat has no serving tray. The pilot thinks that I’m Eddie Murphy, a famous person on this plane. Murphy likes that.
“I have a mean sense of humor,” he says. “Lovely person, but I like to see stuff like Kung Fu Classroom — kicking little girls through walls. But you can’t beat children on TV.” He laughs, a little shamefaced.

“Who can you beat up?,” I ask.

Murphy replies with glee, “Old people. If you beat up regular people, our age, it’s not funny. Can’t beat up cripples. But if you beat up old people, like 90, people go into hysterics. I’m writing a sketch where Mr. T meets E.T. I’m writing a thing called the ‘Homo-mooners,’ with Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton living together, Ralph saying, ‘Well, Norton, we finally got married!’ [There follows a fairly explicit description of what would happen if Ralph and Ed got married. Murphy says he fully intends to carry it as far as the NBC censors will allow.]

“I saw a guy get stabbed in my hometown a couple of years ago, lying on the ground. I went and looked at the guy: His stomach was bleeding, and it was like it wasn’t real. Like watching Starsky and Hutch. My children or my grandchildren will destroy us. Society is getting more and more …” He looks off into space. He is serious.

“People are getting warped senses of humor now. All these kids playing video games — boy, I’ll tell you, in 20 years we’re gonna have a race of destructive kids who are stupid because they didn’t go to school. But they’ll have great reflexes. I’ll tell you, in 100 years this is gonna be a messed-up place. I don’t care, ’cause I’ll be dead and gone.

“My experience is what I share with the audiences,” he continues. “ I don’t look at them and say, ‘Boy, aren’t you funny.’ I’m looking at them, saying, ‘My, aren’t we all messed up.’ Like when I do a sketch like Buckwheat, I’m laughing at how ridiculous it was. Buckwheat was so absurd, it had to be parodied. Half of the laughter is the absurdity of what I’m doing, and the other half is ‘Wow, the country’s messed up!’ All that about the good old days and the cities and all that stuff — Happy Days, bull!”

Murphy’s getting ever more serious. “Black people, we didn’t have no malt shops like Fonz. I’ll tell you, I was so serious onstage last night [in Atlanta] about the reckless-eyeball charge. Used to be a Black man go to jail there for ‘reckless eyeball,’ looking at a white woman. Happy Days! We got one hero — Martin Luther King. He’s the only hero we have. And they killed him. We ain’t been having no happy days.”

He falls silent. At La Guardia, Eddie Murphy is mobbed by three beautiful teenagers who recognize him. He smiles. A lot. Comedy, he says, has its ups. And its downs.

Like most comedians, Murphy is not funny 24 hours a day; he is actually fairly serious most of the time. He is not impressed to hear that many people are very impressed that he has done so much so quickly.