By now, we all know the story behind Eddie Murphy‘s much heralded appearance on the sprawling Saturday Night Live 40th anniversary special.
The original idea called for Murphy to appear as a surprise guest on the Celebrity Jeopardy sketch – in character, as Bill Cosby. But the actor/comedian/performer single-handedly responsible for saving SNL in the late 1980s turned it down.
As Norm Macdonald put it (in honestly one of the must-read showbiz behind-the-scenes stories of all time):
“Eddie decides the laughs are not worth it. He will not kick a man when he is down. Eddie Murphy, I realise, 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.”
As it turns out, Eddie isn’t totally above putting a playful boot in to a man when he is (rightfully) down.
Murphy accepted the highly prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humour at Washington D.C.’s The Kennedy Centre, and marked the occasion by delivering his first on-stage comedy material since 1987.
The award itself has previously been given out to a veritable who’s who of American comedy, with previous recipients including Richard Pryor, Lorne Michaels, Tina Fey, Will Ferrell, Billy Crystal, Steve Martin, and even Bill Cosby himself – a fact that Eddie swooped on.
Alluding to Cosby’s recent uh… “controversies,” and the fact that calls have been made to have Cosby hand back awards such as the Twain Prize as a result, Murphy slipped into his iconic, bang-on impression of Cosby – the one that’ll be intimately familiar to any of you who watched the 1987 concert film Eddie Murphy: Raw with even half as much regularity as this particular writer – and delivered a caustic rendition of Cosby demanding to talk about people wanting him to hand his trophies back.
He mightn’t have told jokes in nearly three decades. But the man still very much has it.
via Uproxx.
