Here's the David Spade Joke That Kept Eddie Murphy Off "SNL" for 20 Years

This David Spade sketch offended Eddie Murphy so much he didn't return to "SNL" until the 40th anniversary.

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If you read Norm Macdonald's epic Twitter explosion about his crazy week helping make Saturday Night Live's 40th anniversary special happen, you might be wondering: What the hell did David Spade actually do to piss off Eddie Murphy?

We know that Eddie made the Bill Cosby-approved decision not to appear in Macdonald's sketch, but he did return to the show for the first time in decades, something he'd refused to do since 1995.

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Well, we found the remark. Here it is (at around 2:50):

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Murphy actually addressed the joke in an interview with Rolling Stone back in 2011.


"Yeah, because they were shitty to me on Saturday Night Live a couple of times after I’d left the show. They said some shitty things. There was that David Spade sketch [when Spade showed a picture of Murphy around the time of Vampire in Brooklyn and said, “Look, children, a falling star”]. I made a stink about it, it became part of the folklore. What really irritated me about it at the time was that it was a career shot. It was like, “Hey, come on, man, it’s one thing for you guys to do a joke about some movie of mine, but my career? I’m one of you guys. How many people have come off this show whose careers really are f*cked up, and you guys are shitting on me?” And you know every joke has to go through all the producers, and ultimately, you know Lorne or whoever says, [Lorne Michaels voice] “OK, it’s OK to make this career crack…”


I felt shitty about that for years, but now, I don’t have none of that. I wouldn’t go to retrospectives, but I don’t let it linger. I saw David Spade four years ago. Chris Rock was like, “Do you guys still hate each other?” and I was like, “I don’t hate David Spade, I’m cool with him.”

UPDATE: It's nice that Eddie squashed his SNL beef, but why get so mad about a career joke, especially since it turns out that you cracked a very similar joke about OG cast member Garret Morris during a "Weekend Update" segment in the '80s.

Here's the clip:

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Some might call that a tad hypocritical. And by the way, none of this explains why Murphy couldn't at least crack a single joke during his appearance on SNL 40

[Via Uproxx]

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