For decades, Eddie Murphy stayed away from “Saturday Night Live,” the show that first made him a superstar and that he helped keep afloat during some of its leanest years in the 1980s.
The rift between one of America’s biggest stars and the comedy institution became one of the most famous show business feuds as it went on for years then decades.
Murphy, who returned to host the show in 2019 after a 35-year lapse, has discussed the origins of his ire in bits and pieces over the years. He offered his most detailed reflection in the new Netflix documentary, “Being Eddie,” which captures the scope and influence of his lengthy career.
Ultimately, Murphy was upset that the show took a shot at one of their own. He had joined the cast at 19 years old in 1980, when the show was searching for a new identity after the departure of all of the original cast members. He helped “S.N.L.” do just that before finding even greater success as the star of many box office smashes. His 1995 film “Vampire in Brooklyn” was not one of those, grossing under $20 million domestically.
That was the context for the moment that started a decades-long beef. On “Saturday Night Live,” the cast member David Spade showed a picture of a smiling Murphy during his Hollywood Minute segment on Weekend Update.
“Look, children, it’s a falling star,” he said. “Make a wish.”
The joke drew a mixture of laughs and shock from the audience. “Yeah, yes, that’s right. You make a Hollywood Minute omelet, you break some eggs,” Spade said before moving on.
The few seconds it took Spade to make the joke generated a generational standoff. Murphy was not only upset at Spade, but also aware that any joke on the show needed to run through a certain chain of command before being greenlit.
“It’s like your alma mater taking a shot at you,” Murphy said in the documentary. “At my career, not how funny I was. Called me a falling star.”
Murphy was notably absent from the show’s 25th anniversary special in 1999. He returned for the show’s 40th anniversary special and hugged Spade backstage.
Last year, Murphy told The New York Times that he found the joke racist.
“Most people that get off that show, they don’t go on and have these amazing careers,” he said. “It was personal. It was like, ‘Yo, how could you do that?’ My career? Really? A joke about my career? So I thought that was a cheap shot. And it was kind of, I thought — I felt it was racist.”
Spade addressed the joke in his 2015 book, “Almost Interesting.”
“I try not to think of the casualties when I do rough jokes, but there are consequences sometimes,” he wrote. “I know for a fact that I can’t take it when it comes my way. It’s horrible for all the same reasons. I’ve come to see Eddie’s point on this one.”
The documentary captured Murphy’s long-awaited return to Studio 8H on a night he revisited some of his most memorable characters like Buckwheat and Gumby.
In the documentary, former “S.N.L.” cast member Tracy Morgan recounted an interaction backstage, telling Murphy: “Your life just came 360. This is where it all started.”
Murphy recalled that Michaels came up with the idea of fellow Black comedians Morgan, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle and Kenan Thompson joining him for his monologue.
“It was one of the greatest ‘S.N.L.’s ever,” Rock said in the documentary. “And I walked over to Lorne Michaels when it was over, and I said: ‘You should quit right now. It’s not going to get any better than this.’”
Michaels is still at the helm, of course, and Murphy appeared at the show’s 50th anniversary special.
“That little friction I had with ‘S.N.L.’ was 35 years ago,” he said in the documentary. “I don’t have no smoke with David Spade. I don’t have heat with any of that or nobody. I was like, ‘Hey, let me go to ‘S.N.L.’ and smooth it all out.’ And I did.”
Jonathan Abrams is a Times reporter who writes about the intersections of sports and culture and the changing cultural scenes in the South.
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