Edward Regan, better known as “Eddie” Murphy’s high school yearbook photo featured the caption, “Future plans: Comedian,” and the talented young Murphy got down to business pretty quickly. He started doing his comedy in local youth shows. Then after graduating, he worked Long Island clubs like the Comic Strip, and his act proved to be so popular that within two years he was a full cast member on Saturday Night Live.
Murphy actually marks the start of his career on July 9, 1976. That night, he arrived at the Roosevelt Youth Center for a talent show wearing a white suit and green shirt and, as a record of “Let’s Stay Together” pumped over the loud speaker. He stepped on stage. He was ready. And the rest was history.
Murphy was a natural for SNL, where his impersonations included Buckwheat from the Little Rascals, Stevie Wonder, Bill Cosby, Muhammad Ali, James Brown and more. In the 1980’s, Murphy was earning an incredible salary that he had to learn how to manage quickly. “Give any 19-year-old kid $1,000 a week and he’ll freak out,” Murphy told People in a 1982 interview. That same year he had blown his previous year’s earnings on a Trans-Am and gifts for friends.
“Eddie’s the single most important performer in the history of the show,” Dick Ebersol, one of the people who conceived the show in 1975 said to People Magazine. “He literally saved the show.” And that’s true. The ratings were so bad before Murphy got there that NBC was considering canceling the show. It wasn’t until Ebersol told them to put Eddie in at least three skits in the first half of the show, that the ratings shot up.
From Saturday Night Live, it seemed like only 48 Hours later, he was a movie star, then a Beverly Hills Cop, then a Golden Child. Then Coming To America. The list goes on. He made a career flying from one character or impersonation to the next.
Even recently, he starred as the comic Rudy Ray Moore in Dolemite on Netflix in 2019 to rave reviews.
Murphy’s success with seven movies in less than six years grossing more than a billion dollars, brought problems. Problems with money, with women, with fame. Watching his idol, Richard Pryor, a few years earlier, he’d understood that “one of the disadvantages of doing standup comedy is that you gotta open up and expose yourself,” says Murphy. “That’s what a true comedian does.”
The first result was a 1987 concert film whose language and anger lived up to the movie’s title: Raw. Battered by business problems, hostile press, a paternity suit and a relationship gone bad, Murphy let his bitterness and disappointment hang out, offending women, gays and many of his fellow black entertainers in the process.
“…What made me successful was my boldness. That’s part of my humor. That’s part of my character.”
And yes, Murphy had a hit record too. His 1985 musical debut, How Could It Be, reached #26 on the Billboard 200. Although Aquil Fudge produced most of the album, it did have one Rick James-produced track in “Party All the Time.” The song was quite a hit; it even spent three weeks at the #2 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 behind topper Lionel Richie’s “Say You, Say Me.”
When MTV wanted Murphy to host the Video Music Awards that year, Murphy joked that he’d do it only if the channel would air his video. To Murphy’s surprise—he didn’t even have a video—MTV agreed. Murphy and James quickly threw together a video for the song (see below):
When Murphy’s single mother became ill, the eight-year-old Murphy and his older brother Charlie lived in foster care for one year. In interviews, Murphy has said that his time in foster care was influential in developing his sense of humor. Later, he and his brother were raised in Roosevelt, New York by his mother and stepfather Vernon Lynch, a foreman at an ice cream plant.
Around the age of 15, Murphy was writing and performing his own routines, which were heavily influenced by Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor.
His biological father, Charles, had died when he was young, killed by a girlfriend. When asked how that impacted his psyche, Murphy shrugs.
“I’ll tell you this, my mother and father broke up when I was 3,” he says. “My mother is with my stepdad when I’m 4 1/2 and 5 years old. My stepdad is the real deal.”
Lynch, who worked at an ice cream plant, tried to keep the boys in line. One brother stayed on the line, the other brother crossed it.
“They had two parks in our town,” says Charlie Murphy, then often in trouble, now hilarious comedian. “Roosevelt Park, you see the kids playing tennis, basketball and ducks in the pond. That’s the park Eddie used to hang out at. Then you had Centennial. People shooting dice, smoking weed, planning crimes. That’s the park I would be in.”
At 12, Eddie started repeating, out loud, that he was going to be famous. At school, Murphy did voices in the lunchroom.
“But I didn’t go, ‘I’m going to be a comedian’ until I’m 15 and I heard Richard Pryor’s ‘That Nigger’s Crazy’ album.”
And it’s not to say that Murphy hasn’t had his share of flops, because he has.
There was the $1 million for a week of shooting the instantly forgettable “Best Defense” in 1984. Murphy signed on to “Beverly Hills Cop III” knowing the script wasn’t working. “Meet Dave.” “Holy Man.” “A Thousand Words.” Murphy has confessed to doing them all.
“It’s very hard when you grow up in the projects to turn down the money they’ve been offering you,” Murphy says in a Washington Post interview. Even though he also wishes he could’ve been more selective.
But don’t count Eddie out yet. In a 2016 podcast interview, Eddie states:
“I had stopped doing standup because it had stopped being fun, and the reason it stopped being fun was it was harder to write — and this is before the internet — it was harder to write new stuff. It had gotten so crazy. Like if I went to the club and tried out a bit, the next day it could be like ‘Oh I saw Eddie was onstage at the so-and-so and he said yada yada’ and I’d be like ‘Man, I ain’t even finished that bit yet!’ And it’d be people talking about it: ‘What’d you think of that new joke?’ And it was like ‘What the fuck?’ And this was years ago it started, so it was like ‘Ehh, maybe I’ll take a little break from standup.’”
“And then the break just got longer, then the whole Def Jam thing started with those comedians, and the whole comedy scene just turned into this big other thing. For years I’d been procrastinating about it going “Oh I’ll do standup again,” and it just got to, all of a sudden, I’m this far away from it. But honestly, now I really am curious about doing it again because it’s been so long and so much has changed and I’m such a different person. I’m curious as to what it would be like if I got onstage. But, if I do that, whoever comes to see it has to sit through a bunch of my shitty songs.”
We’d sit through them. And be right there in the front row. 😉