Norm Macdonald tweeted last night to talk about his experience as part of the recent Saturday Night Live 40th anniversary show, including the bombshell that he and the other writers had intended for Eddie Murphy, on his first appearance on the show in 30 years, to play Bill Cosby as a drink-mixing bartender during their supersized Celebrity Jeopardy sketch.
The “video daily double” would have been taped six months earlier, before the latest round of sexual abuse allegations against Cosby began, and wouldn’t have directly referenced the scandal. Nonetheless, it would have, as Macdonald suggested, been huge – the sketch partly rested on the idea that the audience would have laughed so hard, there was no need to write real jokes.
Despite his attempts to convince Murphy to play the part, Macdonald wrote: “Eddie decides the laughs are not worth it. He will not kick a man when he is down.” It was a principled decision that many would disagree with; in the end, current cast member Kenan Thompson revived his Cosby impression to notably less effect. But there’s a messy, complex history behind Murphy’s choice.
Murphy’s fractious history with Saturday Night Live began when he was hired as a featured player in 1980, the show’s first season without creator Lorne Michaels. Within a year, he was the breakout star of an otherwise flagging show and, as Chris Rock pointed out in his tribute on Sunday, was the main reason the show wasn’t cancelled in those dim years.
The show launched Murphy’s movie career, which blossomed through the 80s but wavered in the early 90s, causing David Spade to refer to him as “a falling star” during a Weekend Update bit. The jibe offended Murphy, who felt that the show he saved shouldn’t have been taking stabs at him, and refused to return for the show’s 25th anniversary in 2000. Michaels has since said the crack was a mistake.
The tale of Murphy’s complex relationship with Cosby dates back to the 80s as well. Cosby was one of Murphy’s regular impressions as a cast member on SNL, in sketches sometimes skewering Cosby’s then-reputation as a squeaky-clean family man – like a commercial parody featuring Cosby serving beer to children. In his 1987 stand-up special Raw, Murphy talks of being chastised by the sitcom star for his profane language. (Cosby has always refrained from swearing on stage, while Murphy was known to use the word “fuck” hundreds of times in an hour-long show.)
As he recounts in the bit, Murphy turned to Richard Pryor for advice ; Pryor dismissed Cosby as a “Jello pudding-eating motherfucker” and encouraged Murphy to ignore Cosby’s judgment. Two decades later, Cosby vigorously denied Murphy’s account, calling Murphy a liar and saying he had advised Murphy that his arrogance would turn off audiences.
But as Murphy seems to have forgiven Spade for the barb, so Cosby has come around to Murphy. “I am very appreciative of Eddie and I applaud his actions,” said Cosby – via a spokesperson – about Murphy’s decision, according to NBC News.
Macdonald ended his epic tweet-a-thon with the reflection that Murphy “is not like the rest of us. Eddie does not need the laughs. Eddie Murphy is the coolest, a rockstar even in a room with actual rockstars.”
Not needing laughs surely played into Murphy’s decision – at the moment, he’s promoting his new reggae single, and one imagines he was partly trying to avoid this very media storm analyzing his relationship to Cosby. And in his interview with the Guardian, published earlier today, he discussed his relationship to Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, both of whom he had poked fun at in his comedy. “Michael and Stevie were people that I knew, and they were part of my social circle,” he said. “I was able to play around and poke fun – they would never get mad. If you look at it and compare it to the stuff that people are doing now, it’s totally not mean-spirited.”
Having been hurt himself by a stinging SNL barb, Murphy’s decision to avoid mocking Cosby, whatever their back story, becomes clearer. Throw in Murphy’s own checkered history with women (he fathered three children with different women between July 1989 and November 1990) and the scorn poured on most of his recent movies, and his bland speech on the anniversary show probably reflects his desire to separate himself from the world of celebrity-mocking comedy entirely. Yet again, he may be SNL’s proudest achievement, but the show isn’t his.
