Eddie Murphy recently reflected on what he called “cheap shots” that have been aimed at him throughout his career.
In an interview with the New York Times, the actor and comedian recalled one in particular, when David Spade made a negative comment about Murphy’s career on Saturday Night Live in the 1990s.
According to Entertainment Weekly, the pair fell out after Spade’s “Hollywood Minute" segment, where he showed a picture of Murphy after his Vampire in Brooklyn movie flopped at the box office. “Look, children, it’s a falling star. Make a wish,” Spade quipped at the time.
Murphy didn’t take kindly to the remark at all, viewing the bit as “racist.”
“When David Spade said that shit about my career on SNL, it was like. ‘Yo, it’s in-house! I’m one of the family, and you’re fucking with me like that?’ It hurt my feelings,” Murphy said.
He went on to call himself “the biggest thing that ever came off that show," and added that it "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 Shrek star explained that SNL scripts have to go through certain “channels” to be approved and that the “producers thought it was okay to say that."
"And all the people that have been on that show, you’ve never heard nobody make no joke about anybody’s career," Murphy continued. "Most people that get off that show, they don’t go on and have these amazing careers. It was personal."
That's when Murphy said there was more to the joke than meets the eye.
“It was like, ‘Yo, how could you do that?’ My career? Really? A joke about my career? So I thought that was a cheap shot. And it was kind of, I thought—I felt it was racist," he added.
Despite his feelings about the joke, it seems that Spade and Murphy later ironed out their issues. “In the long run, it’s all good,” Murphy told the NYT. “Worked out great. I’m cool with David Spade. Cool with Lorne Michaels. I went back to SNL. I’m cool with everybody. It’s all love.”
Spade commented on the two's fallout in 1997, telling EW, “Chris Rock told me, ‘Spade, Eddie’s got his biggest movie in 10 years, a beautiful wife, and he still can’t shake the fact that you took a swipe at him. ‘I said, ‘Tell him three words that’ll change his life: Let it go.’”
But in his 2015 memoir, Almost Interesting, Spade shared that he finally got why Murphy had a problem.
“I try not to think of the casualties when I do rough jokes, but there are consequences sometimes,” Spade wrote. “I know for a fact that I can’t take it when it comes my way. It’s horrible for all the same reasons. I’ve come to see Eddie’s point on this one.”
