The unlikely TV show Eddie Murphy compared to the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky: “Crazy imagery”
Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of the maddest people to have ever lived.
A Chilean-born filmmaker who emigrated to France and is the result of Russian Jewish immigration, his output is as varied as his heritage, and as anyone who knows anything about his planned version of Dune will tell you, no idea was too big or too outlandish, breaking new ground in surrealism, performance art, and cult cinema. There is no one word to describe his work, but if I had to try, I’d probably go with “insane”.
Given how unique his output is, it’s not surprising that Jodorowsky has amassed an array of famous fans: John Lennon donated $1million to the production of The Holy Mountain, having been impressed with his previous film, El Topo, and other musical admirers include Kanye West and Lady Gaga, while fellow directors Nicolas Winding Refn, Darren Aronofsky, and Guillermo del Toro have all expressed their fondness.
One of the least likely comparisons to his oeuvre was made by Eddie Murphy in an interview with Collider in 2025, where the comedian spoke about his love for the MTV show Ridiculousness, which first aired in 2011. A clip show that collates a number of viral videos from across the internet in a You’ve Been Framed-style carousel, it’s not something you’d immediately associate with Santa Sangare, but according to Murphy, the two are closer than you’d think.
“The audience is the star of the show,” he said. “It’s no stars, no needle, no anybody’s names, you can’t make any judgments, and it’s all around the world. You see something, and it’d be like, ‘What the fuck was that?’ Then they’re on to something else. It’s like you can’t beat it. I likened it to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s movies…. He’s a really avant-garde director, and Ridiculousness makes me think of his movies with similar and crazy imagery.”
At first, it seems as if Murphy has completely lost his mind. Here we have one of the most visionary filmmakers of all time, a man unbound by conventional logic or taste, and a cheap-as-chips highlights show in which two co-hosts show you videos of people falling off skateboards. Your first instinct is to dismiss this comparison out of hand, but if you put on your best ‘Media Studies’ hat, you can find the links.
First of all, there’s the unpredictability of both entities. You never know what you’re going to get in a Jodorowsky film. The same goes for Ridiculousness, the very concept of which thrives on eclectic variety. Secondly, there’s a word we used earlier – ‘taste’.
Gene Siskel described El Topo as “a violent, would-be erotic freakshow”, a tagline that could easily have come from a write-up about Ridiculous. Neither is considered particularly mainstream, but both have accumulated a dedicated fanbase that sees them as postmodern art. As Murphy says, the audience is what makes both of them what they are.
Of course, this could all just be hogwash written by a guy desperately trying to hit his word count. Regardless of how you feel about either Jodorowsky or Ridiculousness, you have to admire Murphy’s mental gymnastics in finding a common thread between the two.
