Eddie Murphy still harbors anger over what he considered a racist joke made by David Spade on Saturday Night Live episode in 1995.
Murphy spoke of the incident in an interview with The New York Times. The 63-year-old recalled how Spade made fun of his career during a sketch, going after Murphy’s 1995 film Vampire in Brooklyn failing at the box office. In Spade’s “Hollywood Minute” segment, the comedian showed a picture of the star and joked, “Look children, it’s a falling star. Make a wish.” Murphy felt the sketch had racist intentions and was a “cheap shot.”
“It was like: ‘Yo, it’s in-house! I’m one of the family, and you’re f*ck*ng with me like that?’ It hurt my feelings like that,” explained Murphy, who became a superstar and resurrected SNL in the early 1980s. “This is Saturday Night Live. 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?”
He added, “And I know that he can’t just say that. A joke has to go through these channels. So the producers thought it was OK 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. Most people that get off that show, they don’t go on and have these amazing careers. It was personal. 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.”
Source: Eddie Murphy Reflects On David Spade’s ‘Racist’ SNL Joke About Him From ’90s
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