Bill Murray’s infamous brawl with Chevy Chase on the set of Saturday Night Live back in the ‘70s has taken on almost mythical proportions. Everyone from Animal House director John Landis to Billy Joel seems to have witnessed the incident, which Landis later described as a “huge altercation.” Although Murray and Chase buried the hatchet shortly afterward, their careers will forever be linked due to the brief clash they had before going on the air that night. But that wasn’t the only altercation Murray had with a fellow comedian in those days; in fact, during one encounter that doesn’t come up nearly as often, Murray actually tried to choke another comedy legend for talking too loudly while he was performing.
Prior to joining the cast of SNL in 1977, Murray had been touring with The National Lampoon Show. Produced by Ivan Reitman, the Off-Broadway revue also featured the likes of John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and Murray’s older brother, Brian Doyle-Murphy. At a show in New York one evening, one other rising star by the name of Martin Mull happened to be in attendance, roughly a year before making a name for himself on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Mull sat in the front row next to his buddy, Young Frankenstein star Peter Boyle, with whom he spoke for the duration of the performance.
After the show ended, Mull went backstage to congratulate everybody. Murray, who’d heard Mull talking to Boyle the entire night, went ballistic upon seeing him. Grabbing Mull by the throat and trying to choke him, Murray yelled, “I’ll kill him! I’ll kill that f—-r! He talked through the whole thing! I hate him!” From what Lampoon and future SNL writer Michael O’Donoghue remembered, it was Belushi who stepped in to restrain Murray.
Murray also apparently kept yelling “medium talent!” at Mull, which he appears to have been fond of saying back then because it’s the same thing he screamed at Chase when they got into their big scuffle a few years later. As for Mull’s thoughts on things, he later said, “I feel very bad about that show.” “I’d had a bit to drink, and quite frankly, it was more amusing at that point to talk to Peter, whom I hadn’t seen in a long time,” he continued. “I confess to having been extremely rude, but not quite as rude as Bill Murray for trying to strangle me afterward.”
Murray and Mull both later appeared in Steve Martin’s 1982 TV special, Twilight Theatre, albeit in separate segments that were shown back-to-back.
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