Eddie Murphy’s four-year run on Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s literally saved the show from cancellation. During that time, the up-and-coming comedy star regaled audiences with his spot-on impersonations of such iconic celebrities as James Brown, Muhammad Ali, and Stevie Wonder. One of the most beloved characters he portrayed in those days, of course, was Buckwheat, the now-grown child actor from the Our Gang comedies (or as the series is sometimes known, The Little Rascals). First appearing on SNL in October 1981, Murphy’s version of Buckwheat quickly became a fan favorite, in addition to being his most requested character.
In the 2002 book Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, production assistant Robin Shlien recalled typing up the first Buckwheat sketch and not being able to contain her laughter. “They nailed it. This is going to be huge,” she remembered thinking. “It was ‘Buckwheat Sings,’ and they had bothered to put the mispronunciations in the script. So it was ‘Untz, tice, fee times a nady.’” Take a look at the character’s introduction below.
SNL Eddie Murphy…once he sings a song is eternally his….(10-10-1981) #snlsketch #eddiemurphy #universalplus
According to executive producer Dick Ebersol, Buckwheat was one of the hottest characters on late-night TV at the time. However, by early 1983, Murphy had decided he’d had enough. Late one evening, he went to Ebersol’s office and told him, “I want to kill Buckwheat.” Murphy went on to say that he couldn’t stand doing it anymore. “Everywhere I go people say, ‘Do Buckwheat, do this, do that,’” he explained. “I want to kill him.”
Trusting Murphy’s instincts, Ebersol sent him to meet with writers Barry Blaustein and David Sheffield to come up with a plan for the character’s death. By two or three in the morning, they came back with a two-part segment called “The Assassination of Buckwheat.” The first portion, which they filmed twice (with and without blood), shows Buckwheat getting shot outside of 30 Rock. The following week, Murphy appeared as Buckwheat’s assassin, John David Stutts, who in turn gets assassinated himself:
Although Murphy’s opinion on the Buckwheat character might have soured, it didn’t affect how he felt about Billie “Buckwheat” Thomas, the actor who originally played him on-screen. In his 2025 documentary Being Eddie, Murphy revealed that he actually paid to have a tombstone placed on Thomas’s grave following the actor’s death in 1980.
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