Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
I’m so here for the late-life success of Eddie Murphy. His new movie, “Candy Cane Lane” is No. 1 on Amazon Prime right now. To see him now as a grown-up movie star reminds me how wild and, well, raw he was as a young comic. Make no mistake: Murphy became a comedy superstar a few years after he started doing comedy. Comedians love to say that there are no prodigies in comedy. It takes time to learn how to do all of this. This is true but the one exception to that rule is Murphy.
Murphy joined “Saturday Night Live” in 1980 when he was 19 years old. He was immediately the biggest star on the show. In 1982, he starred in his first movie “48 Hours,” which was hysterical and successful. In 1983, he gave us “Trading Places,” another comedy classic, and an iconic stand-up special called “Delirious.” No other comic has ever created so much epic material and ascended higher at such a young age.
In “Delirious” Murphy wore a blood-red leather suit with the zipper open to his navel. This is what a rock star would wear onstage. It was a vision of the comic as a sex symbol. Where other comics were self-deprecating, Murphy was self-ennobling. His comedy seemed to come from his ego as a way of showing how funny, how brilliant, and how untamable he was.
Murphy, as a stand-up, was incendiary. He was quickly placed on the top level of working comedians which, at that time, included the legendary veterans Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby. Murphy was a joke-teller rather than a philosopher of the human spirit like Pryor. Murphy could be a great storyteller though not as great as Cosby, but Murphy’s stories would give you characters and voices and dialogue between the characters that took you into a scene. His stories were painted so well they became visual in your mind. I can still see a group of…
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