Eddie Murphy on David Spade’s ‘racist’ joke on ‘Saturday Night Live’

Eddie Murphy said he was the target of “cheap shots” over the years — including a “racist” joke told by David Spade on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” where Murphy had once been a cast member.

Murphy, in one interview published by the New York Times, said Spade’s joke on “SNL” about his supposedly failing career after Murphy’s 1995 horror parody “Vampire in Brooklyn” flopped at the box office. The offensive joke was part of Spade’s “Hollywood Minute” skit from December of that year on the late night show, in which Spade — after a photo of Murphy appeared on the screen — said, “Look kids, it’s a shooting star.” Make a wish.”

“It was like, ‘Yo, it’s in-house! I’m a member of the family, and you’re fucking with me like this?’ It hurt my feelings so much,” Murphy told the Times.

Murphy said he thought Spade’s barb was “a cheap shot” and “racist.”

“This is ‘Saturday Night Live.’ I’m the greatest thing to ever come out of that show,” he said. “The show would have been off the air if I hadn’t gone back to the show, and now you have someone from the cast making a joke about my career? And I know he can’t just say that. A joke must go through these channels. So the producers felt it was okay to say that. And all the people who have been on that show, you’ve never heard anyone make a joke about anyone’s career. Most people who leave that show don’t go on and have these great careers. It was personal. It was like, ‘Yo, how could you do that?’ My career? Real? A joke about my career? So I thought it was a cheap shot. And it was a little bit, I thought, I felt it was racist.

After Spade’s Roast, Murphy did not return to “SNL” for 30 years. He appeared in the show’s 40th anniversary special in 2015 and returned as host in 2019.

“It’s all good in the long run,” Murphy told the Times. “It worked fine. I’m cool with David Spade. Cool with Lorne Michaels. I went back to ‘SNL.’ I’m cool with everyone. It’s all love.”

Variety has contacted Spade representatives for comment. Spade discussed Murphy’s angry reaction to the joke in his 2015 memoir “Almost Interesting.” Spade recalled getting a call from Murphy after the sketch and feeling terrible about his “stupid joke.” “I’ve come to see Eddie’s point on this,” Spade wrote in the book. “Everyone in showbiz wants people to like them. That’s how you get fans. But if you get reamed in a draft or online or whatever, that shit stays staaaang. And it can add up quickly.”

In the Times interview, Murphy also recalled that the press in the 1980s was “ruthless against me, and a lot of it was racist stuff.”

“Think about it: Ronald Reagan was the president, and that was America. You did interviews and you said, ‘I didn’t say that. I don’t talk like that,” Murphy said. “They wrote it in this weird ghetto – that used to be weird to me too [expletive] that would continue. Then I became very popular, and with that came a negative reaction. It’s like I was the only one out there. I’m this young, rich, black guy. Not everyone was happy with that in 1983. Even black people. You’d get cheap shots from your people.

Murphy will next be seen in “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” which will stream worldwide on Netflix on July 3. When asked why he wanted to return to the franchise, Murphy said he had been trying to develop a new “Beverly Hills Cop” film. since 1996; he said he thought the 1994 sequel “didn’t come out well.”

“There have been ten different scripts and a lot of different producers, and we tried for years, but it didn’t happen until we got Jerry. [Bruckheimer] back involved, the original producer,” Murphy told the Times. “Jerry, he understood it best because it’s his movie, and it all came together.”