Eddie Murphy

That guy, when I was in my early 20s, he’s not listening to advice…. [There’s] this story I’ve told before: I might have been about 18, and I was playing the Fort Lauderdale Comic Strip, and Rodney Dangerfield shows up. And he bumps everybody. So I go, “Mr. Dangerfield, can you stay and watch my act?” He’s like, “Uh, yeah, sure, kid.” So he does his show [and] I go up after Dangerfield—everybody’s scared to go up. And I fucking killed after Dangerfield, right? Then I came backstage and was like, “Hey, what did you think?” And Rodney was like, “Eh, I don’t know, kid, you talk that language, where are you going to go with that, talking about race stuff?” I was just shattered! Rodney had just s...[Read more]

Michael sat in the same hot seat Elvis was in, the biggest star in the world… how can I put it? It’s like you’re not a person, your human-beingness is compromised. The stuff that everybody has to deal with, take that and magnify it by 1,000 – that’s where Michael and Elvis are sitting. It’s madness swirling around them all the time. On the surface, you’re coming off like you have it all the way together, and behind the scenes, you’re completely unraveling. Michael was the first artist that jumped up into the canvas and became part of it, where every waking moment is part of the show. Who can live up to that shit?

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 f*ck?” And this was years ago it started, so it was like “ Maybe I’ll take a little break from stand-up.” And then the break got longer, then the whole Def Jam thing started wi...[Read more]

We were so different that people would see us and be like, “Y’all are brothers? I didn’t know you was brothers.” And Charlie was in gangs, and even now, Charlie’s like extra ultramacho – piranha, pit bulls, hatchets, axes, machetes. He has a black belt in karate. I got through a lot of school because the kids knew I was his brother, nobody was fucking with me. “You don’t fuck with Eddie, his brother will kill you.” Charlie was a really tough guy.

The big myth in the African-American community was that he said that the only thing black folks could do for him was shine his shoes and buy his records. People liked him when they were young, then said, “I don’t like him because he said that,” and I said, “He never even said that.” Truth be told, you go back far enough, you go back to your black-and-white footage, everybody’s a racist, every star you’re looking at, every star you loved was some kind of racist, straight-out racist, no black folks in their movies, all that shit, but you love them, look at their work. And you can’t fault them – that’s the times.

Is it any consolation? This whole period of documenting an artist’s work, movies, records, all this shit, it’s 100 years old, if it’s that. It’s brand-new. Beethoven and those fuckers couldn’t even listen to their shit, do you know how hard it was to find a mother­fucker with a violin that worked back then? And his stuff went through the ages. Technology has it to where they gonna play this stuff forever. But the reality is, all this shit turns into dust, everything is temporary. No matter what you do, if you’re around here long enough, you’ll wind up dribbling and shitting on yourself, and you won’t even remember the shit you did. I saw this documentary on Ronald Reagan, and it was like, “W...[Read more]