“I thought that was a cheap shot”: the reason Eddie Murphy spent 35 years turning down ‘Saturday Night Live’
Between 1980 and 1984, Eddie Murphy became the biggest comedian in the world thanks to his stint on Saturday Night Live and an early string of hit movies. Although his time on the legendary live sketch show was brief compared to the rest of his nearly five-decade career, fans still associate him with SNL and have often clamoured for him to return. That was always a no-go area for Murphy, though, thanks to a joke a cast member made at his expense in the mid-1990s. In fact, it led to him repeatedly turning the show down for much of the next 30 years.
It goes without saying that 1980 was a tumultuous year for SNL. The show had been on the air for only five seasons yet had already gone from the wonderfully creative hotbed of comedy talent that produced stars like Bill Murray and John Belushi to a slightly staid collection of often-repeated gags. Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator and producer, thought the writing was on the wall – so he left his creation behind.
In 1992, Michaels explained to Playboy, “Fellini said that when you’re making a picture, the director is like a father. Everybody — the actors, actresses, and designers — eats at one big table daily. They’re like the children. ‘But the moment the picture is over,’ he said, ‘you must leave the picture. Or the children, they will eat you.’ I kept from being eaten by leaving.”
Michaels stayed away from SNL for five years, but a new star emerged during that period. This star was Murphy, and according to most observers, he actually stopped the ship from sinking entirely. Murphy’s gift for creating hilarious characters like Gumby, Mister Robinson, and an adult version of The Little Rascals’ Buckwheat delighted audiences at a time when few other sketches truly caught on. In Live From New York, producer Dick Ebersol confessed, “It would have been very difficult, I think, to have kept the show on the air without Eddie.”
During his time on SNL, Murphy made movies like 48 Hrs, Trading Places, and Beverly Hills Cop, which cemented his position as the biggest comedy star in Hollywood. For the rest of the ’80s, his star only rose thanks to movies like Coming to America and The Golden Child, as well as his incendiary stand-up shows. By the mid-90s, though, Murphy’s grip on the comedy crown had begun to slip, with Beverly Hills Cop III disappointing most fans and Vampire in Brooklyn suffering the ignominy of being an out-and-out flop.
At the time, Murphy expected some slings and arrows from critics and maybe even the moviegoing public – but he didn’t expect them to come from SNL. In December 1995, cast member David Spade made fun of the failure of Vampire in Brooklyn in his regular “Hollywood Minute” sketch. When a photograph of Murphy flashed up on the screen, he quipped, “Look, children, it’s a falling star. Make a wish.”
An irate Murphy didn’t see the funny side of Spade’s gag and felt a huge sense of betrayal from an institution whose lights he almost single-handedly kept on. In 2024, he told The New York Times, “It was like: wait, hold on…I’m the biggest thing that ever came off that show. The show would have been off the air if I didn’t go back on the show, and now you got somebody from the cast making a crack about my career?”
The thing that truly pissed Murphy off was that he knew Spade wouldn’t have gone off half-cocked and made the joke of his own accord. Instead, it would have gone through multiple layers of approval to make it on the air, and that meant the producers felt he was fair game. He raged, “All the people that have been on that show, you’ve never heard nobody make no joke about anybody’s career. Most people that get off that show, they don’t go on and have these amazing careers. It was personal.”
Ultimately, Murphy wasn’t just annoyed that his peers were kicking him while he was down. In truth, he thought he was part of a fraternity that would always look out for him, and his feelings were hurt. He admitted, “It was like, ‘Yo, it’s in-house! I’m one of the family, and you’re fucking with me like that?'”
Over the next three decades, Murphy only returned to SNL twice: once for the 40th anniversary special in 2015 and once as a host in 2019. He insists it’s all water under the bridge now, and he has no ill will toward Spade. What happened? Well, perhaps a mea culpa Spade made in his 2015 memoir Almost Interesting helped smooth things over.
The comic wrote, “I’ve come to see Eddie’s point on this one. Everybody in showbiz wants people to like them…But when you get reamed in a sketch or online or however, that shit staaaangs.”
