The worst career advice Eddie Murphy ever received came from Rodney Dangerfield: “Who knew?”
Due to the passing of time, which none of us can do anything about, annoyingly, there will be many people who, when asked about Eddie Murphy, will instantly fire back, “Oh, he did the voice of the donkey from Shrek!”, which is slightly depressing, but to some degree understandable.
There are three reasons for that; firstly, the Shrek films were absolutely massive, and also fantastic, or at least the first two were, before, rather like Jamie Oliver’s Italian restaurants, they made far too many of them, and they weren’t very good anymore. Secondly, in said tales of ‘Far, Far Away’, Murphy, even in CGI jackass form, completely steals the show.
And thirdly, a lot of time has been and gone since the 1980s, when it is impossible to overstate how Murphy arrived on unsuspecting American TV screens like a jaw-dropping, culture changing, 20 year-old incendiary device, not just completely dominating Saturday Night Live, but selling out live stand-up shows; releasing videos of those shows that not only had to be released in cinemas but grossed over $50million, and on top of that making hit movie after hit movie.
This was all achieved by Murphy in a manic period of activity that saw the kid from New York with a murdered father become one of the most talented and in-demand stars in the world. In just a five-year span, he went from a debut movie opposite Nick Nolte in the crime comedy 48 Hours to making some of the funniest and most popular films of the decade: Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop (three of those), and Coming to America.
All were essentially two-hour-long vehicles for Murphy to showcase his barely-containable talent. Often, as with Coming to America, Murphy wasn’t content with playing just the lead role, but also three other completely different characters as well, including, in one scene, a long-suffering barber shop owner and an elderly white Jewish patron of said shop. To watch an Eddie Murphy movie around this time is to witness a generational artist at the absolute peak of his powers.
But to really understand the effect he had on audiences, you need to go back and watch the perfectly named Raw from 1987, that live performance that had to be released into cinemas to meet demand, and that still stands as the highest-grossing stand-up comedy release of all time. Clad in a full leather jumpsuit, Murphy goes all-out for a riotous crowd that can barely contain itself, performing a routine that resulted in the movie outdoing Scarface as the largest recorded number of “fucks” in history and was duly handed an “X” certificate by the movie ratings board.
Murphy shows over an unrelenting 90 minutes that he has completely mastered his craft at an age before most of us have had a first proper job, and it was a skill he had honed when he was barely out of his teens, full of arrogance and anger and ambition, as he recalled to W Magazine a few years ago, remembering a brush with an established comedy legend.
He said, “I remember some bad advice I got years ago. I played the Comic Strip in Fort Lauderdale, and I was maybe 17, 18 years old. And Rodney Dangerfield comes in… I was really full of myself back then, so I would say, ‘Mr. Dangerfield, after the show, will you watch my set?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure kid.’”
Murphy, who had been inspired to start trying stand-up after listening to Richard Pryor’s groundbreaking, volatile comedy albums of the mid-1970s, was performing routines that were designed to mirror the upbringing of young black men in America, mirroring the injustices and frustration encountered on a daily basis.
He added: “Back then, I was really dirty and did edgy racial stuff,” Murphy continues. “And so, afterward, Dangerfield sees me and he’s like, ‘Hey, kid, I don’t know where you’re gonna go with that, you know? The language, and the race stuff,’ and I was crestfallen.
“Cut to two, three years later, I got on Saturday Night Live, and had gotten really successful. And I was in Vegas in the bathroom at Caesars Palace. I was at the urinal, and Rodney Dangerfield comes to the urinal right next to me. And I look over, and he looks at me and says, ‘Hey, who knew?’”
