Episode 1207 - Eddie Murphy
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what's happening you all right you holding up you okay you locked in if you're new to this show this is a good day to be here eddie murphy is here well i talked to him and the recording of that is here a couple of things before we get to eddie before i set that up i uh i don't know if i won or not
Marc:Okay, I'm recording this the day before the Critics' Choice Awards.
Marc:So today, those results would be out.
Marc:So what I'm going to do now is tell you how I'm feeling heading into that because I have to do that show from my dining room.
Marc:Here's how it's been set up to me.
Marc:And if any of you watched it, you'll know.
Marc:Maybe.
Marc:I don't know what the fuck.
Marc:I could have a heart attack shortly after I record this.
Marc:But it was going to be, I think it was me and Patton and Hannah and Fortune and Michelle, Jerry Seinfeld.
Marc:Do you need last names?
Marc:Patton Oswalt, Fortune Feimster, Hannah Gatsby, Michelle Bateau and me and Jerry Seinfeld.
Marc:I'm nominated for End Times Fun.
Marc:I'm proud of that.
Marc:Took a long time to put it together.
Marc:It's a beautiful special, collaborative effort by me and the late, great Lynn Shelton who directed it.
Marc:But I never win anything.
Marc:I'm going to be doing stand-up comedy professionally.
Marc:That means making a living at it one way or the other for 33 years come August.
Marc:This August.
Marc:So add another three or four to that-ish from starting out.
Marc:So 37 years, 36 years I've been doing this.
Marc:And the only real award I can remember winning for my stand-up comedy was coming in second place in the WBCN's Comedy Riot in 1988.
Marc:And that's what started me working.
Marc:That was the last time I think I won a prize for my stand-up of any value.
Marc:I'm prepared to lose, and I'll be there on camera losing.
Marc:So you will have seen that.
Marc:And if I win, it would break a historical losing streak for me and any sort of award.
Marc:So that's where I'm at.
Marc:I'll let you know how I feel after the show on Thursday.
Marc:So look, Eddie Murphy, there was a time when we were younger, all of us, and there was nobody, nobody bigger than Eddie Murphy.
Marc:Eddie Murphy was the biggest star in the world for a long time.
Marc:Nobody bigger.
Marc:was bigger than Eddie Murphy.
Marc:And I don't even think we remember when the media and entertainment universe was smaller, what that meant.
Marc:But those first few movies like Beverly Hills Cop, 48 Hours Trading Places, SNL, Delirious, the comedy special.
Marc:Huge global domination.
Marc:And the truth is, he has stayed a vital part of show.
Marc:He's had a career in show business for, what, 40 years or something?
Marc:But the interesting thing about him...
Marc:outside of him being naturally fucking hilarious.
Marc:And then there was those years where people were always like, is he still funny?
Marc:Is he going to be funny?
Marc:Is he going to act funny?
Marc:They'd see him on shows.
Marc:Would he act funny?
Marc:Even back in the day, he would make a choice whether he was going to act funny or not, what he would and wouldn't do, however he felt.
Marc:Sometimes he was sort of dickish about it, and sometimes rightfully so.
Marc:I mean, I watch a lot of stuff just to get Eddie in my head.
Marc:It was just very interesting to see him on old Johnny Carson clips where his talent and his sort of demeanor was so huge.
Marc:He was so effortlessly funny and he was so sort of at odds just naturally and for personal reasons and probably for racial reasons with the entertainment industry in a way.
Marc:Just to see him with Carson and to see Carson trying to goad him into...
Marc:doing a Bill Cosby impression, just Eddie's sort of like, not going to do it.
Marc:And deciding he wouldn't do it just because he didn't feel like it.
Marc:He didn't want to be told what to do.
Marc:It really was reflective.
Marc:of this sort of weird expectation.
Marc:He definitely played with the racial expectation of black entertainers at that time on several appearances on Letterman, on Carson, where they would constantly get him to try to do impressions or they would ask him what he does with his money.
Marc:And he brought to their attention that these were specifically questions that were unique to black guests.
Marc:And why him?
Marc:But it was also, I don't think anybody knew what to do with a guy who became that big a star so quickly.
Marc:But the bottom line is, man, is he had the goods.
Marc:He had effortlessly had the fucking goods, man.
Marc:I mean, he could riff like Robin.
Marc:He was quick.
Marc:He could do voices.
Marc:He could mimic.
Marc:He could do quick jokes.
Marc:He had a long sort of deep reservoir of references.
Marc:And he just wouldn't play the game if he didn't want to.
Marc:He didn't give a fuck.
Marc:Zero fucks.
Marc:And it was sort of fascinating to see him kind of arc and just sort of continue to be part of show business, but not be as necessarily himself as he used to be or what we knew him to be when he was young.
Marc:He's only a couple of years older than me.
Marc:He's got 10 kids.
Marc:So heading into this thing, I didn't know how I was going to do it.
Marc:Because it's a big it's a big, big career, big personality.
Marc:And you don't really know.
Marc:I didn't really know, you know, who is Eddie really?
Marc:And and is he going to be funny?
Marc:Is he going to be funny?
Marc:Is he going to be detached?
Marc:I didn't know.
Marc:So the way that I dealt with Eddie was.
Marc:was I was going to deal with him as a comic.
Marc:He was a comic.
Marc:He was a real comic.
Marc:He was a guy that wanted nothing more than to do comedy all his life.
Marc:And although his two comedy specials, Delirious and Raw, are definitely very different in tone and different in terms of where he was with his ego and with his success, but he was the real deal.
Marc:And he was doing comedy when he was like 16 years old.
Marc:So I thought, I talked to Chris Rock years ago about him.
Marc:And just about, you know, his time at the comic strip, his time doing those gigs in New York and Long Island, Florida.
Marc:You know, he was a 17 year old kid who had a gift as a comic.
Marc:He had a depth to it that was almost a prodigy like.
Marc:And he knows who his heroes are.
Marc:This is a kind of an amazing conversation about people we both knew, people that, you know, he revered, you know, Richard Pryor specifically and his experience around that.
Marc:But, you know, just also just kind of.
Marc:Yeah, I did.
Marc:I'll be honest with you, before we head into the interview, I did try to, you know, kind of figure out what he was, why he had a chip on his shoulder when he was at the top of his game.
Marc:But, you know, he didn't really see it that way.
Marc:So there is a little bit of persistence on my part around that because, you know, I like to connect around the anger.
Marc:You know, this is a great conversation.
Marc:And I was just so thrilled, to be honest with you, like you never know.
Marc:Like I said, I think I told you this the other day, you know, back in the day when we were doing this at the house, you know, I'd get to talk with the guys, talk with the ladies, whoever was on, he, she, them.
Marc:And, you know, they'd come to my house.
Marc:We'd warm up a little bit and then we'd get into it.
Marc:But you never know with the Zoom.
Marc:You get on, you do the tech thing, make sure everything's tight, and then you get into it.
Marc:So how do you connect?
Marc:And I tell you, man...
Marc:Eddie got on and he was in his house.
Marc:He's in a room with wooden, beautiful wooden walls.
Marc:There were some candles behind him and he was in this red seating arrangement and he was just sitting there and it looked very specific to me.
Marc:So what I'm referencing at the beginning of this is because that was the image I was looking at.
Marc:Eddie sitting in a red upholstered seating situation that I couldn't see the edges of behind him.
Marc:Just this stained, beautiful, old looking wood wall of wooden panels and candles.
Marc:And that's that's how he came in.
Marc:And and and this is how I came in.
Marc:So.
Marc:This is me talking to Eddie Murphy.
Marc:The movie is that he's promoting is Coming to America with the two coming to number two America.
Marc:That's the sequel.
Marc:It's now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Marc:Also, toward the beginning of this, I mentioned Richie to him.
Marc:And that's his old manager, Richie Tinkin, who just passed away last week.
Marc:And here we go.
Marc:Enjoy me and Eddie Murphy.
Guest:What's going on, Mark?
Marc:How you doing, Eddie?
Guest:I'm good, man.
Guest:How you?
Marc:I'm okay, man.
Marc:It's nice to see you.
Guest:Yeah, same here.
Marc:I've noticed in some of your other interviews that the candles were lit behind you, but I guess not today.
Marc:It's okay.
Guest:Did you turn the candles off?
Guest:He made mention of it.
Guest:He said, I noticed the candles were lit in the other day.
Guest:I don't need the candles.
Guest:I don't need them.
Guest:It's not video.
Guest:Now you're going to put them on.
Guest:We have to put them on.
Guest:Because if you didn't want them, you wouldn't have said anything.
Marc:I just didn't know if they were real.
Marc:Someone said that they were like a light, but it's a real candle, huh?
Guest:Yeah, they just burnt down really low.
Marc:Isn't that petty of me?
Marc:I'm like, hey, you know, I saw you on Fallon and the candles were lit.
Marc:What the fuck is that about?
Guest:The candles were lit.
Guest:What am I?
Guest:Nothing?
Guest:I don't even get a candle?
No.
Marc:Where's my fucking candle?
Guest:What's with the dry candles?
Guest:What's with the dry candles back there?
Guest:So we're going to make it back for you, Mark.
Marc:It's beautiful.
Marc:It's beautiful.
Marc:Two more?
Marc:Two more.
Marc:Do you have a, what kind of, where are you sitting?
Marc:Do you have a steakhouse at your place?
Guest:You know, he just asked me, he said, where are you sitting?
Guest:Do you have a steakhouse at your place?
Guest:No, this is the lounge.
Guest:There's a bowling alley here.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And this is the lounge right by the bowling alley.
Guest:So booths and stuff.
Marc:How many lanes you got?
Guest:Two lanes.
Marc:Open to the public or just private or?
Marc:nice little prize private do you have to rent shoes over there what do you got going up the shoes come uh complimentary with the with your steak how you feeling what's going on with the um how much material did you have in place before you had to you know put the kibosh on that tour you were going to do how much material
Marc:I mean, were you working shit out or what?
Guest:But we have to use the word material loosely.
Guest:It's not like I write.
Guest:They have a conversation.
Guest:You say something funny.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Working out.
Guest:Just go try it out at the club.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, now I'll just, you know, when that happens, I just say it in the phone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I have, you know, so I probably got, you know, two, three hours of, you know, one, two, three line premises.
Guest:I have to give some structure to.
Marc:I don't want to be presumptuous.
Marc:I think you should just release those phone memos.
Marc:I mean, I, I think that.
Guest:just have you going is uh dogs and uh you know what i'm saying dogs and mayonnaise you ever get so far away from those notes notes where you don't even know what the fuck you're talking oh yeah when you find it what the perfect example mayonnaise that's five years late i found something said mayonnaise what the fuck was mayonnaise
Guest:It was important at the moment.
Guest:Yeah, it was going to kill.
Guest:That was going to be my killer bit back then.
Guest:To the point where you wrote it down.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Marc:I do that, too.
Marc:I just make the outlines.
Marc:I don't write the jokes.
Marc:I just do the trigger words, you know, the button words.
Marc:Now, like, oh, okay, I'm going to remember that.
Guest:That's from doing stand-up for years and years and years.
Marc:Well, yeah, but that's always how I did it.
Marc:I was sorry to hear about Richie.
Marc:I don't know how close you guys were, but I was sorry to hear about that.
Guest:Oh, yeah, I heard about that the other day.
Guest:Yeah, man.
Guest:He's part of my, you know, my history, Richie.
Marc:For sure.
Marc:Yeah, right?
Marc:Do you remember meeting that guy?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I remember, you know, back in the early 80s, the late 70s, the comic strip.
Marc:So you grew up where?
Guest:I grew up, I was born in Brooklyn, lived in Brooklyn until I was 11.
Guest:Then I moved out to Long Island, Roosevelt, Long Island.
Marc:So what was the deal out there?
Marc:I mean, when did you start getting involved with knowing that the comedy was a thing?
Guest:Comedy wasn't a thing back then.
Guest:It wasn't no thing.
Guest:It was like in New York, you had Catch a Rising Star, the improv, and the comic strip.
Guest:And that was in the city.
Guest:Out on Long Island, you didn't have nothing.
Guest:It was no comedy clubs.
Guest:There was one club called, remember a dude back in the 70s, this Richard Nixon lookalike named Richard M. Dixon?
Guest:It was a guy.
Guest:He had a comedy club on Long Island.
Guest:It was Richard M. Dixon's White House Inn.
Guest:And on Wednesday nights, he would have comedy nights.
Guest:And I started working out there.
Guest:You did?
Guest:When I was about 16, yeah.
Guest:And that was the only joint?
Marc:Governors wasn't there yet?
Guest:There was no Governors.
Guest:There was no Eastside Comedy Club.
Guest:None of that stuff was out there yet.
Marc:Man, I remember going to Governor's.
Marc:The last time I played Governor's, you could still smoke in there.
Guest:Yeah, I never played Governor's.
Guest:What was the other one, too?
Guest:It was a rap place we used to play.
Guest:My father's place.
Guest:Spirogyra was there every week.
Yeah.
Marc:They had had their time.
Marc:So it was just you and Charlie?
Guest:No, Charlie wasn't doing stand-up back.
Marc:But I mean, he's the only sibling, just the two of you?
Guest:Oh, no, no.
Guest:I have one.
Guest:I have a younger brother who's like six years younger.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:What's he do?
Guest:We have different dads.
Guest:So his name is Lynch.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:What's he do?
Guest:He's a bunch of different stuff.
Guest:He's a martial artist.
Guest:He trains his son.
Guest:His son is a boxer.
Guest:He trains him.
Guest:You know, he does a bunch of different things.
Marc:So Lynch, Vernon Lynch was your stepfather.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But I don't like to say that because he kind of raised me.
Marc:From when you were a kid, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's your father.
Guest:Yeah, he's my dad.
Marc:And how close is that version of him that you did on Delirious?
Marc:How close is that?
Guest:Hey, you know, it's a trip.
Guest:My dad was like that when we was young.
Guest:And because of that...
Guest:Whenever I would do that hymn on stage, nobody would be laughing harder than my mother because it was true because my dad had a drinking problem.
Guest:It could be like 10,000 people and my mother would be screaming.
Guest:And because of that, my dad stopped drinking.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Actually, he stopped drinking because of those bits.
Guest:Well, that's funny.
Guest:But yeah, he was a lot like, he was just like that when he was.
Guest:oh my god so you had to deal with all that insanity the volatility all the time not all the time just every now and then oh yeah right and you knew it wasn't every night you knew when it was gonna happen right you knew the tone yeah but when it would happen it was it wasn't funny it was like you know serious you know scary yeah scary but when you get for a comedian that turns into you know
Marc:yeah your best bits exactly and also like when you grow up in that shit you know there's two ways to go either you make it funny and you learn how to figure out how to survive and manage it or you know you get fucked up yourself and you chose the other you chose the i'm gonna make this funny and survive this shit yeah i don't i don't i don't i never drank i don't drink
Marc:Well, I mean, I imagine if you grow up with someone like that, why would you?
Marc:You're scared of it.
Guest:Yeah, but you're either going to do... Some people wind up drinking or not.
Guest:I went the other way.
Marc:You were like, nope.
Marc:Yeah, nothing.
Marc:I want to stay in charge of me.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And so when you were... Who were the first comics that you were looking at that made you... That brought you some... Because I imagine it's the same with you.
Marc:You watch the comics and it made you feel better about life.
Guest:For me, it was the...
Guest:The first person I looked at going, okay, this is,
Guest:I'm into this, and this is somebody doing comedy, was Richard Pryor, that first album, not his first album, it was in 1972, he did an album called That Nigga's Crazy, 72, 73.
Guest:That album just changed everything for me.
Guest:I used to sit and listen to it every day over and over and over and over.
Guest:And the first six months, I was laughing.
Guest:And then you just sit and just listening to it over and over and over and over and over.
Guest:right and what was the big bit on that record which was the bit that made you like that you couldn't get out of your head the whole album the whole album the wine the wino and dracula you ever hear that one yeah yeah yeah no he's gonna say hey you fool you peeping in the windows people in the windows people's window you with the cape what you doing peeping in the people's window what's your name fool dracula
Guest:Y'all, you an ugly motherfucker.
Guest:Yeah, what kind of name is that?
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:What kind of name is that for, nigga?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Where you from, true?
Guest:Transylvania?
Guest:Yeah, I know where it is, motherfucker.
Guest:You ain't the smartest motherfucker in the world, but you his ugliest.
Guest:Oh, yeah, you ugly motherfucker.
Guest:Why don't you get your teeth fixed, nigga?
Guest:Shit hanging all out your mouth.
Guest:Why don't you get your orthodontist?
Guest:That's a dentist, you know.
Guest:That laugh.
Guest:So that was it, man.
Guest:That was the thing that blew your mind.
Guest:Blew my mind.
Guest:And I had seen, you know, watched Sullivan and seen, you know, Colin and seen all that stuff.
Guest:Flip Wilson.
Guest:I loved Flip Wilson when I was a kid.
Guest:Everybody loved Flip Wilson.
Guest:Geraldine.
Marc:He had his own show, man.
Marc:He had his own show.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:One of the biggest shows.
Marc:Yeah, it's great.
Guest:But everybody would be on that show.
Guest:I loved him.
Guest:I thought he was hysterical.
Guest:But I never thought of, you know, when I would see him do stand-up, it wasn't like I was like, oh, yeah, that's when I saw Richard.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's when it was like, yo, I'm that.
Guest:I'm him.
Guest:I'm this.
Guest:I'm this thing.
Right.
Marc:It always amazes me, too, like when I watch Richard now, like the vulnerability of the guy.
Marc:Like the guy was so, like when you learn about him, about his, like, you know, there was always, his broken heart was always right under the surface, you know?
Marc:And you could always feel the humanity of the guy.
Marc:It's kind of, it's amazing.
Marc:It doesn't matter what the bit was.
Marc:It was just like, he was all in, man.
Marc:Yeah, man.
Guest:real deal and when did you start like what did what else did you start putting together to to start thinking about how you were going to approach it other than Richard well when I first started doing it it was it was mostly impressions that's the easiest that's the easiest way to to get on stage right is doing do impressions if because if you sound like that's it you may have to have a personality you have to have any jokes just sound like the person that you're doing yeah so I was always a good mimic and
Guest:So that's how I, when I first, I used to do, I would do Richard.
Guest:I would do Muhammad back then.
Guest:This is how long ago it was.
Guest:I would do Jimmy Carter because he was the president.
Guest:And I would do Ali and Cosell, all that stuff that they would do on the wide world of sports.
Guest:I would do all of that stuff.
Guest:Al Green and shit.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I was always really, really good at doing voices.
Marc:And that's how you started to do the... That's how I started getting on stage.
Guest:The open mics.
Guest:Actually, there wasn't no open mics back then.
Guest:Back then, they used to have... Remember the gong show in the 70s?
Guest:Well, the bars used to have gong show night.
Guest:So you would find different gong show nights.
Guest:I would go to the gong show nights.
Guest:Win $25.
Marc:But you got some chops.
Marc:So when do you head into the city?
Marc:I mean, how does that take place?
Marc:And what's your parents thinking about it?
Guest:Well, my parents don't really know how much.
Guest:They don't know the extent of it.
Guest:They know that I'm doing some stuff, but they don't know that.
Guest:Okay, by 11th grade, I'll go say I'm staying over at my friend Clint's house and I'll go to the comic strip at night.
Guest:And then the next day, miss school and shit.
Guest:By 12th grade, I was like, she didn't know to the extent of it.
Guest:But they never were tripping about it because they didn't know about it.
Guest:Then when I started making some paper, it was all good.
Guest:And I started making money from it really early.
Guest:I got on SNL when I'm 19, but the year before that, I'm kind of like a working comic.
Guest:I'm like working regularly, all the little, whatever little spots they were back then.
Marc:Doing one-nighters with Joey Vega?
Marc:Maybe Fred Stoller?
Guest:Fred Stoller, yes.
Guest:Yes, absolutely.
Guest:I did the comic strip in Fort Lauderdale with Fred Stoller.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He went jet skiing.
Guest:You and Fred?
Guest:Yeah, he went and fell off the jet ski.
Yeah.
Guest:Because it was making him nauseous.
Marc:Who were the other guys that were there?
Marc:Was Dennis Wolfberg there?
Marc:Who was there?
Guest:Dennis Wolfberg.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Dennis Wolfberg.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:He used to crush every night.
Guest:Wolfberg.
Guest:Steve Middleman.
Marc:Steve Middleman.
Marc:No chin.
Marc:He has no chin.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I have no chin.
Guest:That was just killer bit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That was the whole bit.
Guest:I actually was in Big Laugh Off in the 1980s.
Guest:80, 79, 80 with Steve Middleman.
Guest:He won.
Guest:I came in fifth.
Guest:I came in fifth.
Guest:Middleman came in first.
Guest:I think Carol Leafa came in second.
Guest:And Mark Schiff.
Guest:Mark Schiff.
Guest:He came in third.
Marc:Won't work on Fridays.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Is that true?
Marc:Yeah, he became orthodox.
Marc:Mark Schiff is orthodox.
Marc:There was a couple orthodox guys back then.
Marc:So you came in fifth, but you were like 17?
Marc:18, yeah.
Marc:So at 18, you're doing those one-nighters in Jersey and shit and running around?
Guest:Yeah, and by the time I'm 18, there's a little bit of a circuit.
Guest:When I started, there was no... When I'm 15, there's no... There's like gong show night in bars.
Guest:Then by the time I'm 18, you got...
Guest:A lot of places are having comedy nights, and there's a little bit of a circuit that you can go, and there's clubs you can go to.
Guest:You can go to Philly and work the Comedy Works, or you could go to DC and work Garvin's Grill.
Marc:So you're doing all that at 18.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So you're meeting all the guys.
Marc:You're meeting all the old weirdos, and you're becoming a comic, so you're learning about all the... But you know what?
Guest:It wasn't like... It was like a...
Guest:There wasn't a lot of comics.
Guest:Smaller communities.
Guest:Yeah, it was such a small community.
Guest:And it was like now being a comic is like a mainstream thing in show business.
Guest:There's thousands of comics.
Guest:But back then, it was just a handful.
Guest:Back then, it was like being a magician or a mime or some shit.
Marc:It was you and Stoller and Middleman.
Guest:It was a few more than that.
Guest:Gilbert Gottfried.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:He was the genius of that period.
Guest:He was the one with it.
Marc:all the comics would go watch him every time he was up did you like him absolutely still he makes me laugh he was like uh and that's also it was specifically new york there was definitely a new york thing and then people eventually came out to la but i imagine like i guess most of the guys who started like belzer was already gone and those guys were already yeah belzer had left so just a year or two just a year or two before i got out there belzer and
Guest:so when when you were doing the work you know people were saying like oh that guy used to be at the club here now he's in la everyone kind of go to la right richard lewis all those people yeah those guys were those guys were older than me so i was gone i know that that those group of guys and those guys were established comics back like those guys were serious real deal comics we didn't even think of ourselves like
Marc:You remember Lucian?
Guest:Lucian Ho, yeah.
Marc:I remember when I auditioned at the comic strip, he says, oh, I already have enough angry white guys.
Guest:He told me, your material's horrible, but you've got very strong stage presence.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:Your material's horrible.
Marc:So how did it unfold?
Marc:So you're doing comedy, you're paying your dues, and you got, what, you got an hour in 1980?
Marc:When you're 17, 18, you got an hour?
Guest:No, they didn't.
Guest:Back then, people weren't doing it.
Guest:The hour Richard made that popular.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Before then, it wasn't half an hour.
Guest:You had a tight 10 and you had your shit that you had to work in front of, you know, if you got on The Tonight Show or if you got the Merv Griffin or something like that.
Guest:But, you know, nobody was doing an hour.
Guest:A big gig back then was opening for people.
Guest:So you needed 10, 15 minutes to kill her shit.
Guest:So nobody's doing an hour.
Guest:Like Richard Pryor is Richard Pryor in concert.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That kind of changed the whole comedy landscape.
Guest:That became the standard way.
Guest:The headline comic is bringing an hour of shit.
Guest:Richard started that.
Marc:I remember seeing that when I was in high school.
Marc:It changed my entire life.
Guest:Jesus Christ.
Guest:Yeah, man.
Guest:Richard is what Marlon Brando is to acting.
Guest:Richard is to stand-up comedy.
Marc:How did you end up being managed by Richie and then getting SNL?
Marc:Was that all through the comic strip?
Guest:Well, yeah, I started work.
Guest:The comic strip was the easiest club to get in because it's still real cliquish with comics.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And back then, all the comics kind of booked the clubs.
Guest:So it was really, really cliquish.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was impossible.
Guest:It was impossible to get on and catch.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Tell me about it.
Guest:The improv was kind of snooty.
Guest:And so the comic strip was the easiest place to work out.
Marc:That's funny because it's still like that.
Marc:The comic strip was always kind of the working class.
Marc:It wasn't the celebrity hole.
Marc:It wasn't like an old-timey New York hole.
Marc:But it was for new young guys.
Marc:It's always been like that, the comic strip.
Guest:It's still like that?
Guest:I haven't been there in years.
Marc:It was just a place where a lot of guys from the island, a lot of working class comics could work.
Guest:Well, that's how we got in there.
Guest:I literally went down and got online and got the ticket and did the whole thing and auditioned.
Guest:And Lucian told me, you know, my act is terrible, but you have presence.
Guest:I was hanging out at the comic strip, getting those two o'clock spots.
Guest:Two o'clock spots?
Guest:Yeah, those 2 a.m.
Guest:spots.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Those kind of spots never bothered me to go up really, really late when it was silly.
Guest:Nine people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you're playing for whoever you're hanging out with in the back.
Guest:I was doing those spots enough.
Guest:When the original cast left, they would put a cattle call and they were looking for everywhere.
Guest:One day I went to the comic strip and Tinkin was like, yeah, Saturday Night Live is looking for a black guy.
Guest:He should go down and set up an audition for you.
Guest:They need a black guy.
Guest:what's he your manager then no no back then he just owned the club he just owned the comic strip yeah and uh him and him and bob wax yeah bob wax yeah i went down and got got this show and
Guest:Maybe a year into it, they started managing me.
Marc:And did you do that just because, like, all right, well, you know, these guys know me.
Marc:I work at their club.
Guest:No, I was 19.
Guest:I thought, you know, Richie was, you know, one of the major players back then.
Guest:He owned the comedy club.
Guest:And Bob Wax was a lawyer.
Guest:I was like, I'm going to need a lawyer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My lawyer and my manager together.
Marc:So with SNL, everything turned around really quickly, right?
Marc:Like you became big quick.
Yeah.
Guest:Hindsight being 20-20, yeah.
Guest:But back then it didn't feel quick because I was 19.
Guest:So, you know, it just felt like, you know, how can I even... It didn't feel quick.
Guest:But it just felt like... This is how it happens.
Guest:Yeah, this is how it happens.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Marc:You had nothing to compare it to.
Marc:So you're like, I do comedy.
Marc:I'm funny.
Marc:Let's go.
Guest:And then I got that.
Guest:And again, this is what happened.
Guest:That's exactly what it was made.
Guest:It totally took it for granted.
Marc:So when do you decide, like, because I immersed myself in some stuff because I was watching some stuff, some appearances that you made on different shows.
Marc:And it was sort of interesting.
Marc:to see like what was the pressure that you felt almost immediately you know from you know once i guess it was um 48 hours which was the the one that kind of blew it all open that's the first one 48 hours yeah so on snl you become this huge hit with all these characters and people love you and then you do the movie
Marc:And I have to assume that pretty quickly you realize you miss doing comedy for strangers.
Guest:No, what happened was that was the way it was, that was the way that it was with that show.
Guest:It was like, I think Chevy Chase was on there first.
Guest:It was like, you do this show and then you can get to do movies.
Guest:You build up a fan base and get people in the day and go off and make movies.
Guest:And that's what I thought the blueprint was.
Marc:Oh, so you knew that?
Marc:So you thought like— Well, I didn't know that.
Guest:I was looking like, okay, now it's time to— I got offered these movies.
Guest:The movie was a big hit.
Guest:I had the other one, Trading Places, was coming.
Guest:I had been on the show three years.
Guest:It was like, okay, I could go make movies now.
Guest:So I was moving on because I was like, that's what you do, right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:In your mind, and I think rightfully so, you're like, this is how show business works.
Guest:This is exactly— Well, this is how it works when you're on Saturday Night Live.
Guest:That's what I was thinking.
Marc:And you were, like, the biggest star, like, in the world.
Marc:And I was just, like... I can't... Like, it's so weird to me.
Marc:Here's what I got to bring up, only because it sort of bothered me.
Marc:That, like, early on, when you became huge and you were doing, like, Carson...
Marc:And there was something about your confidence and your knowledge of who you were and what you were capable of that kind of rose above.
Marc:It transcended that format.
Marc:But it was just sort of interesting that these guys, you kept bringing it up over and over again on these talk shows.
Marc:Why are you asking me these certain questions?
Marc:Why are you asking me how did I get big so quickly?
Marc:Why are you asking me about what I'm doing with my money?
Guest:Oh, about my watch.
Marc:Yeah, that it was there specifically this list of black questions that these guys and what I found when watching it is that there was sort of a weird kind of innate bias.
Marc:It just happened in the questions they were asking.
Guest:And it wasn't weird.
Guest:It was the 80s.
Guest:It was a whole different world back then.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was the old world back then still.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like the 70s and the 60s, it wasn't that far removed from that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it's like sensibilities and, you know, perceptions and what you could say and what you could.
Guest:There was no politically incorrect.
Guest:You could say whatever.
Guest:You could do jokes.
Guest:You could do the Polish jokes and you could say all kind.
Guest:You could do everything back then.
Marc:But did you feel like they were trying to box you?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Go ahead.
Guest:Not boxed in.
Guest:It was, you know.
Guest:I was saying, I was calling for what it was when they would do something.
Guest:I never felt boxed in.
Guest:But I was like, I wasn't surprised by it because those were the times.
Guest:And I was an anomaly.
Guest:It was like, the reason I blew up in films was because I'm the first African American
Guest:to like the character in the movie to go into the white world and take charge in the world.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because usually the black character up until then, the black character is the sidekick.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The black sidekick.
Guest:But my character shows up in the first movie.
Guest:I'm written like it's written like the sidekick.
Guest:But if you watch the movie, he's not the sidekick.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:The whole move.
Guest:Nick Nolte's going.
Guest:Now what do we do, convict?
Guest:What's our next move?
Guest:Where do we go now?
Guest:Tell it our way.
Guest:What happened now?
Guest:I'm going, we go this way, we go that way.
Guest:And they found that funny.
Guest:Like that was some shit that we just stumbled onto.
Guest:It wasn't intentional.
Guest:It was like back then they used to say, he stole the scene.
Guest:He stole the scene.
Guest:Literally, this is not written for him to be like that.
Guest:He stole the scene.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But they thought that was really, really funny.
Guest:And that's what made me... They accused you of stealing.
Guest:They accused you like that kid.
Guest:Well, they know it wasn't written like that.
Guest:It's like you got Nick Nolte, six foot three, you know, blonde hair, blue eyed, you know, leading man.
Guest:And they're watching me in the scene.
Guest:So he must have stolen it.
Guest:It wasn't written like this.
Marc:Do you think that perception was racist?
Guest:Not at all.
Guest:They hadn't seen it up until then.
Guest:They hadn't seen it.
Guest:So it was this new thing.
Marc:So you carved this zone for yourself.
Guest:I didn't carve it.
Guest:That's the way it worked out.
Guest:I wasn't carving it.
Guest:It's not like the path that you wind up on, you carve the path.
Guest:It's much more like that feather in Forrest Gump where you're floating around and wherever you go.
Guest:So this is where I blew in this direction.
Guest:And it turned out like that.
Guest:when did you first when did you start having a like a friendship with richard when did you meet richard we never had a friendship richard's like like my dad's age yeah and uh and richard i didn't do i didn't drink i didn't smoke i didn't do any drugs i didn't do any of that stuff so we would not in the same right zone social you know orbit yeah but when i met him
Guest:He was just as an artist.
Guest:He was super, super nice to me.
Guest:I met him coming from Atlanta and he was on the plane and he was on the seat in front of me.
Guest:And the stewardess told me when I was getting on the plane, she was like, Mr. Pryor is on the plane.
Guest:I was like, Mr. Pryor.
Guest:I had my first comedy record.
Guest:on a cassette, I went up to him and I said, Mr. Pryor, I'm Eddie Murphy, I'm a comedian.
Guest:He said, oh yeah, I know who you are.
Guest:I said, here's my record.
Guest:Will you listen to it?
Guest:And he was sitting up and he had headphones on and I was in the back watching his head and he would go, ha ha ha.
Guest:And I'm in the back like... Oh, that's great.
Guest:Then I go up to him and he said, you are very funny.
Guest:And he said, you remind me of me.
Guest:You make me think of me.
Guest:And I was like...
Guest:I did it.
Guest:Then when the plane lands, he goes, where are you staying?
Guest:And I was like, I'm staying up in Mandeville Canyon.
Guest:And he was like, how do you get your lift home?
Guest:He took his car.
Guest:The guy drove his car, met him at the airport.
Guest:He had a white rose.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he drove me, drove me up to the place I was staying.
Guest:And,
Guest:Imagine that's the first time you meet your idol.
Guest:You meet him like that.
Guest:You meet him like that.
Guest:He listens to you.
Guest:He's laughing at your shit.
Guest:And then he drives you home and he's nice to you.
Guest:That's how I met Richard.
Marc:To get that sort of validation, like you remind me of me.
Marc:And then you kind of look back at, you know, you're kind of the next in line, right?
Marc:It turns out.
Guest:I wasn't thinking of it like that.
Guest:No, no, I know, I know.
Guest:And I wasn't thinking, I was just thinking, like, I made Richard laugh.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And oh, shit.
Guest:And he actually drove me home.
Guest:I was, like, fucked up.
Guest:Like, I was, like, floating from it.
Guest:And then he, we just, like, back then, Richard was the biggest, you know, biggest comedy star in movies and all that stuff.
Guest:And like I said, he was older than me, so we didn't really hang out or anything.
Marc:But did you have sort of multiple, before Harlem Nights, did you have like a lot of time did you spend with him?
Marc:Were you able to spend time with him at all?
Guest:Well, Richard used to, when Richard would go at the, play down at the comedy store, all the comics would come down, you know, and sit in the back and watch.
Marc:Did you used to do the comedy store?
Guest:When I was in L.A., absolutely.
Guest:If Richard Pryor was at the comedy store, everybody goes, you know, just in the back.
Guest:And I had a bunch of nights like that.
Guest:Then afterwards, he'd be in the big in the main room, late, you know, holding court and all the comics are sitting around late.
Guest:So I did a bunch of that.
Marc:I was a doorman there for a couple years back in 86.
Marc:I used to see Mooney all the time.
Marc:And Pryor started coming in after he burned himself up, trying to put it back together.
Marc:And I got to see him a couple times.
Guest:I met him after he had went through all that shit.
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, I didn't meet the... I met him after he was burnt up and was getting it together and all that.
Guest:I never met that Richard.
Marc:Right.
Marc:No, when I saw him, it was rough because, like, he would... You know, it was amazing about him, and I'm sure you know it.
Marc:It's like you would see him struggle.
Marc:I mean, he would go up there sometimes and just, like...
Marc:have a hard time for like a half an hour.
Marc:And then he'd just chip away and build that shit out.
Marc:Like, you know, he would just take the hit and take the hit until it started to make sense.
Marc:It was kind of amazing.
Guest:I think that it was like that after he burned up and was trying to like still do it and do it sober.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I think it was harder to put it together when he was sober.
Guest:It was harder to do.
Guest:And when he wasn't sober, that's when it's like...
Marc:Yeah, right.
Guest:When it's like, what the fuck?
Marc:Yeah, where's it coming from?
Guest:Yeah, but that's when it was effortless.
Guest:Before he was sober, it was effortless.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's when people, you would see Richard and they would say, oh, you'd see him do an hour, and then you'd see him a week later, and he'd do a whole nother hour of shit you'd never hear.
Guest:Back then, he was like that guy.
Marc:So when you did Delirious and you worked out that hour and a half on the road, you did it Richard style.
Guest:Well, I had been doing stand-up.
Guest:What's funny was when I got on SNL, people didn't, like I said, there's no real comedy circuit back then, where you're on TV and all that.
Guest:So people didn't know I did stand-up.
Guest:So when I popped up,
Guest:in delirious that was like i didn't know that was like out of nowhere yeah whoa what the is this really absolutely it was like we i he does stand up no one had a clue oh my god it's like a secret weapon yeah it was out of nowhere i showed up in a red leather suit doing all this
Marc:Oh man.
Marc:And then, and so, so now you've got, now you, that profile just raises.
Marc:So now you're this movie guy, you're SNL guy.
Marc:Now you're the standup guy.
Marc:And it seemed like there was a point, like what was your, what was the thing with Dick Cavett, dude?
Marc:Were you guys really friends?
Marc:It seems like you really had some weird relationship with Dick Cavett.
Guest:Yeah, I used to hang out with Dick Cavett a lot.
Guest:I've done a lot of stuff with Dick Cavett.
Guest:What?
Guest:He would pop up.
Guest:I don't even know when that was the first time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he would just pop up like you would like be, you know,
Guest:you know, backstage SNL and Dick Cavett would just pop up and say, how are you?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You say, Hey Dick.
Guest:And you start talking.
Guest:And he would do, he was always, he's a guy, if you dare him to do anything, he will do it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So we, I got into, I got into these things where I was daring him to do, like we went to go see, uh, uh, Diana Ross at the garden.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:And Dick Cavett, I said, I dare you to go up on the stage and grab Diana Ross's ass.
Guest:He just says, why are you doing this to me?
Guest:And then he gets up and walks and goes, and you're sitting, and then you see Dick Cavett coming from the side on the stage.
Guest:And then Diana Ross said, oh, Dick Cavett.
Guest:And he came in and he started hugging her and dancing.
Guest:And then he put his hand on her ass and he came back.
Guest:So he was that guy.
Guest:And so that became my relationship.
Guest:I dare you to do this.
Guest:I dare you to do that.
Guest:Once we were at SNL, and that dude, Eddie Grant, he made that song.
Guest:We're going to rock down to Electric Avenue.
Guest:Yeah, all the dreadlocks.
Guest:So they come to Saturday Night Live, and the whole dressing room was all people with dreadlocks.
Guest:It was back in the early days before dreadlocks was popular.
Guest:So everybody was kind of scared.
Guest:And Dick Cavett was like, well, look at their hair.
Guest:And I was like, yeah.
Guest:He says, how did they get their hair like that?
Guest:I said, I don't know.
Guest:He said, someone told me that they use goat shit in their hair to get it that way.
Guest:And I said, hell no.
Guest:I said, I dare you to go into the dressing room and ask them, does he put goat shit in his hair?
Guest:And he goes, why are you doing this to me?
Guest:He walks down the hallway and he goes, and I'm standing in the doorway.
Guest:He goes into the makeup room and all these Jamaicans are standing around.
Guest:And he walks up to Eddie Grant and he goes, he stands next to me.
Guest:Eddie Grant is here.
Guest:He goes, he starts a little conversation.
Guest:He goes, you're here.
Guest:It's so interesting.
Guest:He said, how do you get your hair like that?
Guest:And he goes, the guy tells him, we just do this, whatever he says, how we do.
Guest:He says, really, because someone told me that you use goat shit to get your hair like that.
Guest:And the room goes quiet and he looked at him and said, no, man, that's not true.
Guest:Then Cavett looks at me and says, why'd you tell me that and walked away and left me staring at the fucking door?
Guest:So he said he would pop up.
Guest:He'd come to my house and stay for the weekend.
Guest:Really?
Guest:He would just pop up.
Guest:Yeah, he would just pop up and be like, hey, then you're hanging out with Dick Cavett.
Guest:It's so funny that you had this weird relationship with Dick Cavett.
Guest:Yeah, he would pop up.
Guest:I've been around Dick Cavett quite a bit.
Guest:I've been to concerts.
Guest:I've been to a sumo match with a sumo match with Dick Cavett.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Do you talk to him still?
Guest:Is he all right?
Guest:I wonder if he's all right.
Guest:I haven't seen Dick Cabot in about 10, 15 years.
Marc:Who do you keep in touch with from the old days?
Marc:Anybody?
Guest:You know, I found the older that I get, the smaller my circling friends get.
Guest:And the friends that I do have, the few friends that I still do have, they're like friends from 30, 40 years.
Marc:Is Fruity still around?
Guest:Nah, he been out of the picture.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I'm sorry.
Marc:I was watching old TV shows.
Guest:That's the dude I went to high school.
Guest:I went to high school with him.
Marc:But some of the cats you hang out with their old time.
Marc:Like I noticed in the new movie, you pulled back everybody.
Marc:You got everybody back in there.
Guest:Sweetwater, the dude, one of the barbers in the show, the guy that's not Arsenio, the other guy, Sweetwater.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's my best friend from high school.
Guest:Really?
Yeah.
Guest:We're not still like that, but when we were in high school, we were like best buddies.
Guest:He was in a bunch of stuff.
Guest:He was on Saturday Night Live, sketches.
Guest:He's in the very first movie in 48 Hours when Nick Nolte comes and gets me out of the cell.
Guest:That's Sweetwater in there.
Guest:And Trading Places when I'm in the cell, I'm saying, I'm a karate man.
Guest:Sweetwater's the one that goes, yeah, it's a phone, his limo is busted.
Guest:What are you, Ignat?
Guest:yeah yeah that guy so yeah that's the guy he's in coming to america he's the other barber and he was in this one too and also uh louie anderson i noticed his back yeah louie anderson in the dashiki yeah the movie is the movie is worth seeing just to see louie anderson in the dashiki
Marc:Well, you know, honestly, I was thinking about the first one, you know, and trying to put it together.
Marc:Because it seemed to me that, like, over a period of time, even though, you know, everything was going good for you and you were amassing a lot of leather clothes.
Marc:But, like, it seemed to me like the original, the first...
Marc:Coming to America like could have been I always got the feeling as I watched the appearances over time that you were you started to to be resentful of being trapped by not your own success, but just that you just seem to be sort of angry about maybe the visibility or the expectation or what?
Marc:What do you what do you look at when you look back?
Marc:What do you think you were pissed off about?
Guest:I don't know that I was ever pissed off.
Guest:I've never been pissed off.
Marc:You don't feel like you were pissed off?
Guest:No.
Guest:How old was I?
Guest:When I'm in my 20s?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:It just felt like by the time Raw comes out, I imagine it would have to be hard to know what you were really, if people were just reacting
Marc:to your celebrity or to what you were doing.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:I imagine... Oh, absolutely.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:That's one of the reasons why I stopped doing stand-up because it'd become like... It was like you couldn't really tell how funny.
Guest:It was like, am I funny or is this like, you know, some Pavlovian shit?
Guest:Yeah, right, right.
Guest:You just think you're laughing.
Guest:So it was like... I remember one night I was at, I don't know, a comedy store or a comic strip and I get on stage and the audience is like, just before you do anything...
Guest:And I was like, what the fuck?
Guest:And it was like, what the fuck?
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:And I was like, so I don't have to do nothing.
Guest:I can just stand here, you fuckers, and just laugh.
Guest:And I just stood there for like 10 minutes.
Guest:And I killed, just didn't say anything.
Guest:I was just standing there.
Guest:People were like, oh, it'd be a little quiet.
Guest:And then I'd look around, and then a laugh would come again.
Guest:And for 10 minutes, I was able to just look around and just make a stupid face and go.
Guest:And I was getting laughs doing that.
Guest:And I was like, hey, you know what?
Guest:It's time to take a little break.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's time to take a little break from it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Hey, you know what?
Guest:I tell you what.
Guest:Now, everybody has that.
Guest:Now, doing comedy is so mainstream.
Guest:The audience knows, you know, it's like you're the comic.
Guest:Think how many times you see somebody doing shit and they're not funny or they're not kidding, but the audience knows this is where I laugh.
Guest:It's never...
Guest:silent.
Guest:I don't care how bad the comic is.
Guest:It's never silent.
Guest:They get something.
Guest:They say something, laugh.
Guest:So everybody has that problem now.
Guest:That's why you gotta go by what you think is funny and what your gut is and if it makes you laugh.
Guest:But if you try to figure these fuckers out.
Marc:because they're just laughing at whatever you say right and then it's fundamentally like the one thing that used to be satisfying because you you know you know you did something you can't trust it right so that's got to be fucking frustrating you know what i mean like you know if i can just sleep through this and you guys are gonna laugh i mean what the am i doing up here exactly so i stopped doing it but i didn't get frustrated by it i was like hey you know
Guest:Yeah, this is not what it was.
Guest:I'm going to talk to animals now.
Guest:I'm Dr. Dooley.
Guest:It felt like there was a couple moments in Raw and a couple moments on TV shows where you were trying to push them a little bit, trying to defy them to laugh at you.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:I'm going to act this way to see how much you guys will take.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:If I came across like that, I was just being a real asshole at the moment.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You gotta remember, my shit jumped off really, really big, and I'm a really young guy.
Guest:So, you know.
Guest:There's a lot of stuff that I have to navigate.
Guest:Literally have to go through this minefield to get to this moment.
Marc:To get to the moment you're at now?
Guest:Just to get through, you know, that whole being in your 20s and being famous, you know, that's sort of it.
Guest:It's amazing that carious journey.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you've held it.
Marc:You've held the vessel together.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that's what I was going to say, though.
Marc:It seemed like at that time where you like stand up, you've had enough of it.
Marc:It seemed like coming to America.
Marc:The first one was almost like a like a personal fantasy film.
Marc:The idea that maybe, you know, I could go someplace where no one knew me and just be a regular person.
Guest:Yeah, that's the premise of the movie.
Guest:On the tour bus, I got the idea.
Guest:And it's a fairy tale.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Wouldn't it be nice?
Guest:But it was a passing thought.
Marc:This new one, who wrote it?
Marc:Who wrote it with you?
Guest:When I got the idea, I went back and got the original writers, Barry Blousey and David Sheffield, who wrote the original one.
Yeah.
Guest:And we talked it and got like a structure.
Guest:They're really good at getting me a story structure.
Guest:And so we got that together.
Guest:Then I got, we brought in Kenya Barris from Black-ish.
Marc:Yeah, I talked to that guy.
Marc:He's a smart guy.
Marc:He's funny, huh?
Guest:Yeah, we brought him in and he made it a coming to America-ish.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because we got the older writers with the structure and he was like the new hot shot and I was in the middle.
Guest:It took four years when we got a good script.
Marc:The story's great.
Marc:I mean, it's almost like an all-ages kind of movie thing.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:Yeah, man.
Marc:It could almost be like a classic fantasy movie.
Guest:Yeah, but it took four years to get that script like that.
Guest:And it was different.
Guest:It was a bunch of different stuff.
Marc:How did it evolve?
Marc:What was the problems?
Guest:It wasn't problems.
Guest:It was, you know, originally when I was writing, when I got the idea, Tracy Morgan was going to be my son.
Guest:So we were writing for Tracy Morgan.
Guest:And an original script, it wasn't...
Guest:that I had a son.
Guest:It was what what happened was I was going, I think we wanted I wanted to take other wives.
Guest:Yeah, it was like we picked up with a story and I want to take other wives.
Guest:And it was like, oh, no, I make them hate him.
Guest:And so he wrote a version with a version like that that we didn't like that.
Guest:Then we wrote like kept, you know, every time we finished a draft, we'd be like,
Guest:this isn't right, but this little chunk right here, it works.
Guest:And we kept doing that to where, you know, we had a bunch of chunks that worked.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And what really made it, what really made it was, I saw, this is when the narrative came together when we saw, I saw, I think it was one of those Schwarzenegger movies, the Terminator movie where he, they made him look young and he showed up and it looked like, like, like the old Schwarzenegger.
Guest:Everybody was like, what the fuck?
Guest:That looks so real.
Guest:And I was like, yo, that's when I saw that.
Guest:You could take that make you look young shit and we could go and make another scene where, you know, back in that scene, we were out in the club looking for chicks.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We could say later on that night, we use that young special effect.
Guest:That's when the whole story clicked together.
Guest:And we got that little piece.
Marc:Oh, technology.
Marc:Open the door.
Guest:Open the door to the story.
Marc:It's so funny that you even got you got those twins back for a couple for 30 seconds.
Guest:And we got them, and that's the original sexual chocolate.
Guest:Those are the original sexual chocolate members.
Guest:Oh, the band?
Guest:Randy Watson's band.
Guest:That's all original members.
Guest:That guy.
Guest:You know that guy.
Guest:Yeah, he makes me laugh the most of all the characters.
Guest:I have a lot of that in movies.
Guest:I have a lot of movies where I'm singing stupid.
Guest:The donkey in Shrek is always singing.
Guest:I got a lot of scenes in movies where I'm singing bad things.
Guest:And I've kind of worn that joke out, but it always makes me laugh when someone's doing that.
Guest:And Randy Watson is the king of it.
Marc:Well, Randy Watson is like, as a character, it's almost like somebody you know from show business.
Marc:I mean, there's plenty of Randy Watsons out there, man.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Especially locally.
Guest:You know, every local town has it.
Guest:What do they say?
Guest:You know, what do they introduce them in the first?
Guest:You know them as Joda Policeman from the What's Going Down episode of That's My Mama.
Guest:You know, it's a bunch of guys that had little roles like that.
Guest:And now they're in the local town, local celebrity.
Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, it's like comedy is full of those fucking people, man.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I really like the movie, and I thought Leslie and Tracy were amazing.
Marc:Amazing.
Marc:I mean, Leslie Jones, she is like... Amazing.
Marc:So raw and natural, and when she can just do her thing, it's like, holy shit.
Marc:Man.
Marc:So funny, man.
Marc:And Tracy's such a... It's nice.
Marc:You kind of got... He controlled himself for that movie.
Marc:He was very happy.
Guest:He focused...
Guest:Well, he has a, like I said, we worked on that script for four years.
Guest:So he's got a script.
Guest:Everybody that's on it has a, you know, they got a well, you know, worked out character and good words.
Guest:And he got, and Craig Brewer, the brilliant director.
Guest:So you got a, it was easy to focus and to do it.
Marc:And your daughter's in it?
Guest:Yeah, my baby girl is in it.
Marc:Was that the first time you worked with her as an actress?
Guest:That's the first time any of my kids have been in any of my stuff.
Guest:And yeah, that was the first.
Guest:And I can't even put into words what's that like.
Guest:If you have kids, you know, you go see your kid at something at school.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it'll fill you up.
Guest:You know, your kid could paint something and you put it on the refrigerator and eyes get wet from that.
Guest:So imagine going to work and your baby girl is at your job with you.
Guest:And she's contributing to what's going on.
Guest:And she's doing a good job too.
Guest:And she's got fight scenes and doing all those karate fight scenes.
Guest:Every day I was just filled up every day.
Marc:That's beautiful.
Guest:Every day.
Guest:Yeah, man.
Marc:Can I ask you about when you talk about Randy Watson and we talk about these movies, what was it that made you want to tell Rudy Ray Moore's story?
Yeah.
Guest:I thought from the – first of all, I used to watch his movies all the time.
Guest:You did?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Because I watch a lot of stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I don't watch just the classic stuff.
Guest:I watch the classic stuff.
Guest:And I love the stuff that's so bad it's good.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Those movies.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The movies that are like so bad.
Guest:I love movies like that.
Guest:And Rudy Ray Moore was that.
Guest:As a kid, even before I thought like that, like I love So Bad It's Good, I was a fan of Rudy Ray Moore's movies because of that when I was a kid.
Guest:And when his movies were coming out, we would all go and we would laugh at seeing the microphone come into the shot and the certain way you would hit certain lines.
Guest:We thought it was a stare.
Guest:We knew it was bad back then.
Guest:As kids, we knew it was horrible.
Guest:But it was funny.
Guest:And we would argue, even as a kid, I would argue that
Guest:that he's trying to be funny yeah and they would say no no he's not trying he's serious and i'll say no that he's not serious he's that he's trying to be funny and that's why we're laughing and they would be like nah he's he's serious they were laughing thinking that he was serious it was so bad i was like no we're supposed to be laughing there's no way that we're not supposed to be laughing yeah even as a kid yeah so i was always a
Guest:A fan of his.
Guest:And then I thought he had this great stranger than fiction story.
Guest:So we tried to get it done.
Guest:It was back in the 90s when I first tried to get it done.
Guest:I went to Rudy.
Guest:But no studio was making no Rudy Ray Moore movie back then.
Guest:It was like not happening.
Guest:Then, you know, enter Netflix 10 years, 15 years later.
Guest:And then it was a place where to make the movie.
Marc:So it was really about a guy who was committed to his vision and made it happen.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Rudy Ray Moore is another reason why he's a kind of fascination for me is his career is like the exact polar opposite of my career.
Guest:Like the way he came on and what he had to do and how hard it was for him to get in.
Guest:And, you know, it's like we did the same the same thing.
Guest:We're both doing comedy.
Guest:We both do music stuff.
Guest:We both, you know, went to the movies.
Guest:But he had such a hard time getting in there.
Guest:And I was the sensation.
Guest:And he was, you know, struggling and everything.
Guest:So he was, you know, fascinating in that respect.
Guest:And then I had, once I got into the movie business, I had a newfound appreciation and respect for the, when I found out that he put his movies together and that, you know, they would finance out of his own pocket and that, you know, it was, he was like this guerrilla filmmaker.
Guest:So he wasn't just a nut.
Guest:This guy really was, you know, trying to get it done.
Guest:So I was like, this guy's a great movie.
Guest:it was like just like just like ed wood is a great movie about this in an ed woodsian kind of way yeah i thought his story story would be great so i literally went and got the writers that wrote ed wood to write the really dolomite yeah that those guys wrote it yeah i thought it was great man and you didn't but you didn't really you didn't know rudy nah different world different different universe i met him a couple times i didn't know where'd you meet him
Guest:The very first time I met him was on downtown LA where he was doing 48 Hours.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I heard somebody say, get your hands off me.
Guest:And then somebody said, that look like Rudy Ray Moore.
Guest:And I said, that is Rudy Ray Moore.
Guest:And he was real.
Guest:He must have been smoking or something.
Guest:He was like really skinny and looked like a homeless person.
Guest:And I took some pictures with him and shit.
Guest:I was like, wow.
Guest:Then I would see him.
Guest:He would do little gigs in LA, like at the lingerie every now and then he would play there on Sunset.
Guest:And the last place I seen him was Stevie's on the Strip in Ventura Boulevard in the 90s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So whenever he was another one, we would go see Richard because it was Richard.
Guest:Whenever he was in town, all the comics would go and sit around.
Guest:And Rudy Ray Moore was the same.
Guest:With the black comics, we would go, me and Kenan and Arsenio and Robert Townsend.
Guest:When Rudy Ray Moore came to town, we would go to wherever he was and sit in the back and be fucking screaming.
Guest:It was funny.
Guest:It was Rudy Ray Moore.
Guest:He would go up to a woman and say, girl, close your legs before I eat off your drawers.
Guest:And then we'd go, I'm going to eat off your drawers, woman.
Guest:We'd be like, ah!
Marc:What about, did you ever see Red Fox?
Guest:Not live.
Marc:He was something, huh?
Guest:Yeah, but yeah, he was something on the set of Harlem Nights.
Guest:On the set of Harlem Nights, you got Red Fox, Richard Pryor, me, Robin Harris.
Guest:Oh, Robin.
Guest:Yeah, my brother Charlie, my Uncle Ray, and it was just raucous, Arsenio, just raucous laughter.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like the funniest shit happened off camera.
Guest:We're always laughing.
Guest:Red Foxx is at the center of it.
Guest:Red Foxx is the funniest, just naturally funny sit in the room.
Guest:just naturally funny, not trying to be funny, but just funny.
Guest:Everything that comes out of his mouth is funny.
Guest:He just reeks it.
Guest:That's Red Foxx.
Guest:He just reeks funny.
Guest:He exudes it.
Guest:Effortlessly.
Guest:He could be mad.
Guest:And everything he does, he says it turns into comedy.
Guest:The whole room is screaming.
Guest:He was that guy.
Marc:I love that, like, you know, that, you know, you're so rooted in stand up, like, you know, because because I love that.
Marc:I know that you met Rodney early on.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:He gave you that.
Marc:I heard about that to me is the greatest story because.
Marc:Every old comic, if you're dirty, some old comic's going to come up to you and go, hey, what are you doing, kid?
Marc:You got to clean it up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Rodney, that was weird for him to be like that with me because he wasn't like that.
Guest:People like Kenison, those guys, he championed them.
Guest:When he saw me, he was like, hey, kid, you know, you got to clean your show up, kid.
Guest:And then you ran into him later?
Guest:Yeah, it was before Saturday Night Live.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I ran into him after like three years after that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:At the bathroom at Cesar's Palace.
Guest:Well, the first night it happened, when he told me, you know, like, you know, I went to the comic strip in Fort Lauderdale to do this a weekend.
Guest:And Dangerfield pops up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's like, Dangerfield's bumping everybody.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's like, oh, Dangerfield goes up and bumps.
Guest:And I'm like, Mr. Dangerfield, will you watch my set?
Guest:Because I want to go up because I knew I was going to kill.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I go up after Dangerfield and I crushed it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Dangerfield's like, yeah, you know, kill us OK, but, you know.
Guest:You know, you say that nigger stuff, you know, you use a lot of foul language.
Guest:Where you gonna go with that, kid?
Guest:You know, clean it up and stop using that word.
Guest:I was like, wow, thanks.
Guest:Then I, you know, forgot about it.
Guest:Then a year later, I got Saturday Night Live.
Guest:Two years go by.
Guest:Then I'm in Caesar's Palace in Vegas, and I'm at a urinal, and Dangerfield comes in, and he's right next to me, and I look over.
Guest:It's Dangerfield.
Guest:He looks at me and says, hey, who knew?
Guest:It was like perfectly timed, like a perfectly timed joke that he even remembered.
Guest:That he even remembered.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That he told, because I'm just one of a thousand comics, you know, that he even remembered.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he didn't think much of my show back then, but he even remembered.
Guest:Hey, that's that kid.
Guest:Oh, yeah, he's the one.
Guest:And that he would come in and hit that.
Guest:Like it was written.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Tagged it three years later.
Guest:Perfect.
Guest:Perfect.
Marc:So what's going to happen, man?
Marc:What's going to happen with, you know, there was some, I read some bit that you told about that.
Marc:I thought it was kind of beautiful that you, you know, in terms of your, the sort of the, the, the arc of the comedy history that you say, you said that Groucho informed Cosby, Cosby informed Richard, Richard informed you, you know, that there is this through line.
Guest:Did I say informed?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:I'm saying that.
Marc:Inspired.
Marc:The engine.
Marc:The engine of Cosby was Groucho.
Marc:The engine of Pryor was Cosby.
Marc:And the engine of Eddie is Pryor, right?
Guest:It's more than the engine.
Guest:It's like the engine of those other people.
Guest:It might have been like that.
Guest:But then when it's Richard...
Guest:Richard changes it.
Guest:It's not like you just become your engine because she was influenced by him.
Guest:Richard restructures the whole thing.
Guest:And it's not just me.
Guest:He changes everything.
Guest:He takes it from black and white to in color, the whole art form.
Guest:He takes the ceiling and puts it up here.
Guest:Comics used to just stand there and tell their shit into the mic.
Guest:with their little suede patches on their elbow.
Guest:And Richard is the one that made it three-dimensional and used the whole stage.
Guest:And so he opens it up, how you can perform.
Guest:And he opens up subject matter.
Guest:He opens it up.
Guest:He just opens it up.
Guest:He makes the canvas like this big, giant thing.
Guest:And we were working on a stool.
Guest:And he made it as big.
Guest:And everybody just, he's like, no, you can do this.
Guest:Richard changed.
Guest:So he wasn't just my engine.
Guest:He changed everything.
Guest:Like I said, he's what Brando was as an actor.
Guest:Brando showed up and changed everything.
Guest:That's what Richard was.
Marc:So are you going to go back?
Marc:Are you going to do the hour again?
Marc:You think after the plague?
Guest:The plan was, because I had stopped making movies in 2011.
Guest:I was like, let me take a break from movies.
Guest:I was making shitty movies.
Guest:And it was like, this shit ain't fun.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They give me...
Guest:giving me Razzies.
Guest:I think the motherfuckers gave me the worst actor ever Razzies.
Guest:Maybe it's time to take a break.
Guest:Maybe you get the worst actor ever Razzies.
Guest:Maybe I need to pull back.
Guest:Maybe it's time to pull back.
Guest:So I was like, let me take a break from it.
Guest:And then I was only going to take a break for a year.
Guest:And all of a sudden, you know, six years go by.
Guest:And I'm like sitting on the couch.
Guest:And I'm like, hey, you know, I kind of could sit on this couch and not get off it.
Guest:But I don't want to leave it.
Guest:You know, the last bunch of shit they seen me do was bullshit.
Guest:So I was like, let me get off the couch and do some stuff and remind them that I'm funny.
Guest:Then if I want to come back to the couch again, I can do that.
Guest:But so the plan was to go do Dolomite, Saturday Night Live, do Coming to America, and then do stand-up, and then see how I felt afterwards.
Guest:But, you know, I was like, then at least they'll know that, you know, I'm funny.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Again.
Guest:Because otherwise, if you sit on the couch, they don't know you're sitting on the couch.
Guest:They're just thinking, yeah, he fell off.
Guest:He ain't funny no more or something.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Last movie, did you see his last movie, Pluto Nash?
Guest:Yeah, then he went and didn't sit on the couch since then.
Yeah.
Marc:Wondering what happened.
Guest:I didn't want to leave it there.
Guest:It's like, let me go, you know.
Marc:So it might happen.
Guest:Might happen.
Guest:We were literally, we had dates.
Guest:We had, you know, we literally, we had a tour lined up and we had dates and all that shit.
Guest:And then the pandemic hit, you know?
Guest:So now it's like when the world gets back to normal and people can be around each other, put that stuff together.
Guest:I still want the same plan.
Guest:I did everything else.
Guest:All that other stuff came together.
Guest:And, you know, and now I still wanted to go and do that.
Guest:Cause I stopped doing standup when I'm 28.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:I'm 59.
Guest:I'm going to be 60 in April.
Guest:So I'm like, I want to bookend it.
Guest:I'm curious to see what it would be.
Guest:What will it be like?
Guest:Because I was a baby when I did it before.
Guest:When I get some structure to my little thoughts and go and get on stage and do it again, I want to see what it's going to be like.
Marc:Wow, man.
Guest:And it'd be cool.
Guest:It's kind of like bookend on it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Then if I want to go sit on the couch, cool.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, pick my shots.
Guest:And when I say sit on the couch, that's a metaphor for, you know, just not chasing it.
Guest:And if something comes along that's amazing, you know, get some opportunity to work with some amazing artists or something, some amazing director, of course, you know, I get off the couch and do that.
Guest:But the whole being out there doing, you know, three movies a year and doing all that shit, that shit is over.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Don't need it anymore.
Guest:Like I said, I'm going to be 60 in a couple of weeks.
Guest:I got all these babies.
Marc:You love it?
Marc:You love the fatherhood thing?
Guest:Oh, yeah, man.
Guest:That's at the center of everything.
Marc:That's beautiful.
Marc:It's nice that you found that.
Marc:And you found it over and over again.
Guest:Ten times.
Guest:Over and over again.
Guest:Over and over again.
Guest:And then along the way, I realized that if you put your children first,
Guest:You never make a bad decision.
Guest:That's nice.
Guest:Everything, when you get to it, I got to say, okay, well, you got to hear some crossroads moment or you got some shit.
Guest:Okay, well, what's best for my children?
Guest:If you go that route, you never make the wrong decision.
Marc:And you get along.
Guest:you know mark i am so blessed with my kids i don't have one bad seed i don't have one you know or you're the one i don't have any of my kids are so great that's great normal people and nobody's hollywood jerk kid none of my kids are so and they're smart and they're trying to do stuff yeah i'm so blessed with my kids well great man really really got lucky
Marc:Well, it's great, man.
Marc:It's great talking to you, and congratulations on the movie.
Marc:It was really an honor to speak to you.
Marc:I've always had a lot of respect for you, and it was fun, man.
Guest:Oh, thank you, Mark.
Guest:Nice talking to you too, bro.
Marc:Take care, man.
Guest:You too, man.
Guest:Bye.
Guest:Stay safe.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:Eddie Murphy.
Marc:What a blast.
Marc:What a fun thing to just be engaged in talk with Eddie Murphy for an hour.
Marc:The movie is coming to number two America.
Marc:That's a sequel of coming to America.
Marc:It's now streaming on Amazon.
Marc:I will let you know.
Marc:I will let you know what happened.
Marc:at the Critics' Choice Awards.
Marc:You're going to know before me if you're listening to this.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Here's some dirty rhythmic blues work.
Marc:Blues work.
Thank you.
.
.
guitar solo
Marc:Boomer lives!
Marc:And Monkey and La Fonda.
Marc:Cat Angels, coming in for landing.