The 1983 Eddie Murphy joke that inspired ‘Get Out’: “It’s one of the best bits of all time”
It’s hard to put your finger on it exactly, but comedy and humour went through a seismic shift in the 1980s, wherein much of what was funny previously in the ‘60s and ‘70s didn’t hit anymore, so it’s a sign of how influential Eddie Murphy was that his stuff stands up even more than 40 years later.
Although his incredible work on TV and movies in an explosive seven-year period between 1982 and 1989 will probably become his legacy, to best experience just what an unbelievable talent he was then is to watch his two HBO stand-up specials, 1983’s Delirious and 1987’s Raw, recognisable thanks to the red and blue leather outfits he wore in each and due to the fact that they still, as Jordan Peele has shown, influence what people are doing even now.
It was a section of Delirious that stuck in Peele’s head when he began to put together the 2017 horror mystery Get Out, a film that has become a cultural phenomenon and which regularly ranks among the top movie scripts ever written. It’s the story of a young Black man accompanying his new white girlfriend to meet her wealthy family for the first time at their sprawling house in upstate New York, only to encounter genuine horrors there.
Peele was only too happy to give credit to his comedy hero in terms of where the idea came from for the film, which featured a unique mix of social commentary, comedy and terror, saying, “Absolutely. I mean, Eddie Murphy is talking about the difference between how a white family and a Black family would react in a haunted house. It’s one of the best bits of all time. So yeah, I’m hip.”
Get Out, which stars Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams, was Peele’s directorial debut after he had found fame over several years writing and performing comedy alongside Keegan Michael-Key. It was a monumental success, bringing in $260million against a budget of just $4.5m and was nominated for four Oscars, winning ‘Best Original Screenplay’ for Peele.
Within two years, he had made another film that was almost as good, 2019’s Us, starring Lupita Nyong’o, another horror thriller about security within the home, or rather a lack of it, at its heart, and he completed the trilogy with the sci-fi horror Nope, again starring Kaluuya, in 2022.
Since then, it has been a frustrating waiting game for audiences to find out what Peele has up his sleeve. He was originally scheduled to have a new film out at the end of 2024, but that was delayed, then it was pencilled in for October of this year, but vanished from schedules.
While any details are closely guarded, the script for Peele’s fourth film is supposedly complete, and the only projects he has put out in the last couple of years are as a producer on the sports horror Him and a video game with Hideo Kojima.
Murphy, meanwhile, is currently filming on the long-awaited Shrek 5, plus his own spin-off from that franchise, Donkey, and he’s also expected to play a major part in the remake of the Peter Sellers classic detective comedy The Pink Panther.
