Eddie Murphy is a comedian who has always taken a different route from his peers. That’s meant shunning some of the advice of others — especially the bad kind.
In a recent interview with W Magazine , he shared one especially bad piece of guidance he received from the legendary Rodney Dangerfield.
“In the early days, I don’t remember getting any good advice,” he recalled. “I remember some bad advice I got years ago. I played the Comic Strip in Fort Lauderdale, and I was maybe 17, 18 years old. And Rodney Dangerfield comes in, he bumps everybody. It was like, ‘Dangerfield is here. Dangerfield’s going up.’ I was really full of myself back then, so I would say, ‘Mr. Dangerfield, after the show, will you watch my set?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure kid.'”
“Back then, I was really dirty and did edgy racial stuff,” Murphy added. “And so, afterward, Dangerfield sees me and he’s like, ‘Hey, kid, I don’t know where you’re gonna go with that, you know? The language, and the race stuff,’ and I was crestfallen. Cut to two, three years later, I got on Saturday Night Live, and had gotten really successful. And I was in Vegas in the bathroom at Caesars Palace. I was at the urinal, and Rodney Dangerfield comes to the urinal right next to me. And I look over, and he looks at me and says, ‘Hey, who knew?'”
While it made for a charming reunion, perhaps Dangerfield wasn’t entirely off with his suggestions.
Murphy’s taken some heat since for his early comedy routines. According to The Huffington Post , in 1996, he made a public apology in San Francisco, for prior jokes regarding AIDS and homosexuality.
In a recent interview with CBS This Morning , he said his old, more offensive material makes him “cringe” now, but excused much of it as being “within the context of the times.”
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