(Even if I had been watching these films at a younger age, as a high-schooler in the second half of the nineties in liberal New York City, this would still have been offensive.) Making it more off-putting still, this isn’t one joke stuffed two-thirds of the way into the routine, it’s the opening, crowd-killing bit. T is a faggot,” and ends with a riff about how he doesn’t really like women hanging out with homosexuals because what if they go home to their man “with AIDS on their lips.” Admittedly, 1983 was a different moment in the AIDS crisis, when transmission was still mysterious, but this is still unremittingly horrible stuff. Faggots aren’t allowed to look at my ass while I’m onstage.“ He then launches into a fifteen-minute bit of grotesque, aggressive homophobia that includes jokes like “I’m afraid of gay people,” “I have a nightmare I go out to Hollywood and find out Mr. ![]() The first joke that a 22-year-old Murphy tells when he gets onstage in Delirious is, “I got rules. The bad first, because it’s impossible to avoid. What did I learn from re-watching Eddie Murphy’s stand-up films? The really succinct assessment is this: Eddie Murphy’s jokes are bad, but Eddie Murphy’s performance is stellar. All to say, I liked Murphy quite a bit, and I definitely had a mental image of him in that red Delirious suit, but I’d only ever seen bits of these two films before watching them this week. I knew Murphy mostly from SNL reruns - his Buckwheat in particular stuck in my mind - and later from 48 Hrs., which I loved. There couldn’t be a better time to revisit his stand-up films.Īdmittedly, I was not an obsessive watcher of Delirious and Raw in my youth. Yes, he’ll be wearing a tux, not a red leather warm-up suit, but he’ll be onstage, with a mike, performing for a live audience that wants desperately to laugh. Come February, Murphy will, essentially, be doing stand-up for all the world to see. ![]() And this week, 24 years after Raw and with little to no stand-up appearances in between, Murphy went and got named host of the upcoming Oscars, making his comedy specials all the more relevant. He now has a reputation for being difficult and unlikable (one that interfered with his Oscar campaign for Dreamgirls), but in his early films and stand-up specials he’s boundlessly charismatic. He influenced a generation of comedians, but is too young to be paid the respect an older man might expect (Murphy is only 51, just four years older than his Tower Heist co-star Ben Stiller, though they’re from an entirely different comedic and movie-star generation). Once one of the biggest, funniest, edgiest movie stars around, he’s now best known as the guy who makes big, not that funny, family fare like Imagine That and Daddy Day Care, or for being the voice of a donkey. Nostalgia Demo: Anyone between their teens and 30s in the eighties who liked comedy, or going to the movies anyone born in the eighties who got wind of Murphy from older siblings, his comedy records, or Saturday Night Live reruns.įact Check: We had been kicking around the idea of doing a nostalgia fact check on Eddie Murphy’s stand-up films for a couple months. The first, 1983’s Eddie Murphy: Delirious, premiered on HBO the second, 1987’s Eddie Murphy Raw, which was released in theaters between Beverly Hills Cop 2 and Coming to America, grossed $50 million. ![]() Included among those successes were Murphy’s stand-up specials. Robinson’s Neighborhood, Murphy co-starred in 48 Hrs., a surprise hit that was followed by a string of movies that made Murphy one of the biggest, most bankable stars of the eighties. (Murphy and Joe Piscopo were the only members of the 1980 cast to make it to the 1981 season.) In the middle of his SNL tenure, one marked by a series of memorable characters including a full-grown Buckwheat and the host of Mr. With this week’s news that Eddie Murphy will be quasi-returning to live performing by hosting the Oscars, we decided it was time to revisit his classic stand-up films, Delirious and Raw.īackground: Eddie Murphy was all of 19 when he was cast on Saturday Night Live in 1980, the year Lorne Michaels left the show along with all the original cast members. Now, years later, we will take a look at these classics in a more objective, unforgiving adult light: Are they really the best ever? How do they hold up now? We’ve already reconsidered a number of once-beloved entertainments. The Nostalgia Fact-Check is a recurring Vulture feature in which we revisit a seminal movie, TV show, or album that reflexively evinces an “Oh my God, that was the best ever!” response by a certain demographic, owing to it having been imprinted on them early.
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