Eddie Murphy just confirmed what a lot of people have suspected about Hollywood for a long time: many of its stars have skin thinner than tissue paper. In his new Netflix documentary Being Eddie, the comedy legend reveals the real reason he avoided Saturday Night Live for 31 years. Spoiler alert—it wasn’t scheduling conflicts or creative differences. It was a joke. One joke.
Murphy joined SNL in 1980, when the show was on life support, and almost single-handedly brought it back to life. His high-energy characters became instant classics, and his career exploded after he left in 1984 for Hollywood. But from that point on, he steered clear of the program that gave him his big break.
As it turns out, a quick jab from David Spade in 1995 during the “Weekend Update” segment was enough to make the superstar swear off his old stomping grounds. Spade showed a picture of Murphy after the flop Vampire in Brooklyn and said, “Look, children, it’s a falling star. Make a wish!” It was standard “Weekend Update” fare. Spade made his living roasting celebrities—every week, every episode, whoever was in the headlines.
Watch (relevant portion at 2:46):
Spade in America: Hollywood Minute - Saturday Night Live
But for Murphy, this was apparently a personal betrayal. “I just had Vampire in Brooklyn come out,” he says in the documentary. “The audience there said ‘boo’ and hissed at him for saying it, right? So I was like, hurt. My feelings was hurt… The joke had went through all of those channels that the joke has to go through, and then he was on the air saying, ‘Catch a falling star.’”
He added, “So I wasn’t like, ‘F*** David Spade.’ I was like, ‘Oh, f*** SNL. F*** y’all. How y’all going to do this s***? That’s what y’all think of me? Oh, you dirty motherf***ers.’ I was like that. And that’s why I didn’t go back for years.”
It’s a strange confession coming from one of the greatest comedians alive. The man who built a career skewering everyone else apparently couldn’t handle a throwaway one-liner about himself. Murphy wasn’t singled out. That’s how the show works, and Spade’s jokes were just part of the routine. Yet in Murphy’s telling, the gag became an unforgivable insult—a reminder that even the biggest names in Hollywood tend to see every punchline as a personal attack.
Time and money eventually healed the wound. Murphy’s career lifted again with The Nutty Professor, Dreamgirls, and Shrek. He made cameo peace with the show’s 40th anniversary in 2015 and even hosted again in 2019. “I was like, you know what? F*** this. SNL is part of my history. I need to reconnect with that show because that’s where I come from,” he says in the Netflix film. “I don’t have no smoke with no David Spade. I don’t have any heat or none of that with nobody.”
Maybe not, but that 31-year grudge speaks volumes. The same industry that loves to tell the rest of us how to think and laugh can’t even take a mild jab from one of its own. And when a comic titan like Eddie Murphy admits that one Weekend Update joke kept him away for decades, it’s hard not to wonder if Hollywood’s biggest problem isn’t box office numbers. It’s egos.
Murphy has since returned to old roles, starring again as Axel Foley in the revived Beverly Hills Cop series and gearing up to voice Donkey once more in next year’s Shrek 5. You can stream Being Eddie now on Netflix.
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English (US) · 