Exactly.
Washington Post: Eddie Murphy - The Real King of Comedy
- Thread starter playahaitian
- Start date
Exactly.
Article I did a few years ago...
Eddie Murphy was anything but "sensitive". He wielded his fame and popularity in much the same way Elvis and Mick Jagger did. And up to that point it was very rare to see a black celebrity do that. Most usually played the humble role like Nat King Cole or Sidney Poitier and even though Sammy Davis Jr. was a swinging cat back in the 50s who thumbed his nose at society by dating and marrying white women and cavorting with known Hollywood rabble rousers like Peter Lawford and Dean Martin, his celebrity was tied closely to Frank Sinatra, leader of the Rat Pack. Sinatra more or less had to cosign Sammy's boldness in a "it's okay, he's with me..." fashion. Richard Pryor was the precursor to what Murphy would become but he never quite made it to the mainstream leading man level that Murphy had. There was very briefly Jim Brown who definitely wasn't sensitive either, Brown was as bold, confident and masculine as they came back then but he never really attained leading man mainstream superstar status either. The only other person I can think of who flaunted his celebrity as brazenly as Murphy had would be early 20th century heavy weight boxing champ Jack Johnson.
Johnson was not only rich but dated and married white women and publicly flaunted his wealth at a time in American history when black men were being lynched at astounding rates in the south. The most flamboyant black entertainer today couldn't hold Johnson's jockstrap in comparison.
And you wouldn't see that kind of conspicuous display of arrogance and conceit by a black man in quite the same way again in mainstream entertainment until the 1980s. And like Johnson, it would all come down to one person pretty much holding it down for the whole group. Chris Rock made the observation that before Eddie there was a sidekick way of acting in the past that other black actors did that Murphy never subscribed to. Make no mistake, 48hrs and Trading Places were Nick Nolte and Dan Akroyd lead films. Eddie just shined brighter. His star quality was so big by that time that when the third film he worked on, Best Defense, tanked at the box office people were saying it was his first bomb when in actuality it was a Dudley Moore film. His first leading role was in his fourth movie, Beverly Hills Cop.
Eddie's most indelible and iconic characters in his career were all from the first three films he did, Reggie Hammond (48hrs.), Billy Ray Valentine (Trading Places) and Axel Foley (Beverly Hills Cop). All three were fast talking, extremely confident, streetwise characters who were kind of like a live action version of a Bugs Bunny cartoon in that no matter what craziness happened around them you knew they would always come out okay. It was just a matter of how they would do it. And like Chris Rock had astutely observed, it was something the Black community really hadn't seen on the mainstream stage that often. Rarely did we see a black male character take control in a mainly white cast film up to that point. Or operate in a manner that didn't require the white male leads permission in some fashion. In 48hrs. Reggie was directly under cop Jack Cates (Nolte) control as a convict but he clearly had his own agenda in helping to apprehend Ganz. In Trading Places, Billy Ray had a keen innate understanding of how stocks and business worked long before the Dukes picked him up. Both of these roles could easily been performed in the more submissive way of the sidekick but Murphy went in the opposite direction and created people who are just as funny and distinctive today as they were some 25 years ago.
Those characters as well as Detective Foley (a loose cannon cop with great investigative instincts) had such an impact on the generation of black actors coming up after him that when Martin, Chris Tucker, Rock and Smith had the opportunity to play cops or con men, they blatantly ripped them off. Bad Boys, Rush Hour and even Lethal Weapon 4 (Chris Rock's character in it) are all variations on Axel Foley. In Money Talks, Frank Hatchett (Tucker) is a variation on Billy Ray Valentine. The same with Martin Lawrence's character Miles Logan in Blue Streak, that's just Reggie Hammond. Lawrence would further go on to emulate his idol by doing films and TV shows where he plays multiple characters in heavy make up and fat suits. Jamie Foxx followed in his footsteps by establishing a singing career after the stand up took off and he scored a number of hits himself. After Eddie, Foxx was accepted more easily as a comic who can sing as well. And all of the stand up comedians mentioned replicated Murphy's stand up moves. From pacing the stage and the use of storytelling elements to the leather outfits.
http://mczfilmtvreviews.blogspot.com/2011/11/eddie-murphy-dont-call-it-comeback-just.html
Excellent article bruh.
they re-aired it again last night
Eddie is an all time great period. It doesn't matter if hes considered the greatest ever. And quite frankly who cares......
What I like about Eddie is that he was never afraid of new and up & coming comedic talent, he embraced all of them: Chappelle, Martin Lawrence, Chris Rock, & the list goes on and on. & he embraced the legends, he wanted to do films with Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor, Della Reese, and many others. Eddie was like the bridge person, he had a foot in the old comedic world while he outstretched his arms to the new world that was to come.
Who’s Afraid of an Eddie Murphy Comeback?
By Dave Schilling
Dolemite Is My Name allows Eddie Murphy to reclaim a potent swagger that made him both inescapably magnetic and undeniably threatening. Photo: Netflix
In the new Netflix film Dolemite Is My Name, a dramatization of the real story behind a 1970s blaxploitation classic, Eddie Murphy’s Rudy Ray Moore is faced with the daunting task of performing a sex scene in front of the ragtag crew he’s assembled to bring a soon-to-be-cult movie to life. Moore is a paunchy, middle-aged, borderline sexless man who has nonetheless made a career out of boasting about his sexual prowess, posing nude with models on the covers of his raunchy comedy albums. But now, he’s being asked to illustrate that imagined prowess for the camera. Instead of playing the scene for titillation, Moore decides to lean into the joke. He rocks the bed violently, causing pictures to bounce up and down on the walls. A piece of the ceiling falls. Dolemite’s libidinous power is off the charts. He might not look like much, but under the right circumstances, he can make the Earth move.
Black masculinity in movies, especially comedies, was and remains a dicey subject. When the original Dolemite was released in 1975, only eight years had passed since Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner became the rare Hollywood movie to depict an interracial relationship. In that film, Sidney Poitier plays an eerily perfect example of an upper-class African-American man, nary a rough edge to be found. The image of John Prentice would go on to define black sexuality in pop culture for years after, and while the line from Poitier to Will Smith is not a clean one, an idea persisted: for a black actor in 20th century Hollywood, placidity was the key. Otherwise, you don’t get the girl. Outside of romantic dramas, many of the great black comedic film actors of the era were pulled into this cinematic paradigm. Richard Pryor was a massive star for years, but in movies like Brewster’s Millions, the white female co-lead was his cheery confidant rather than a lover. Before Bill Cosby was outed as a sexual predator, he appeared in movies like Leonard: Part 6 and Ghost Dad, where he was a doddering parental figure rather than a romantic lead.
In the pre–My Name is Dolemite career of Eddie Murphy, we see how hesitant Hollywood and audiences alike could be when it comes to black male sexuality on screen. You can count the number of sex scenes he’s performed on one hand — largely as the romantic lead in unpopular fare like Vampire in Brooklyn or Boomerang. Audiences never quite embraced his virility the way they fell for his wit, energy, and sexless charm in Beverly Hills Cop or Trading Places. The box-office grosses for Murphy’s romantic films paled in comparison to the mega-bucks successes of movies like 48 Hours. In Trading Places, it’s not Murphy but Dan Aykroyd who gets the girl at the end. In Beverly Hills Cop, Axel Foley is “just a friend,” eliminating any chance of him bedding the leading lady when the bad guys are all dead. Murphy’s biggest hits were R-rated films filled with provocative language, nudity, and violence, yet sex was less than an afterthought. Axel Foley could go to a strip club and crack wise around countless exposed breasts, but it was as if these things were happening behind glass.
The black movie stars that came after Murphy, now 58, had more success developing romantic personas. Namely, Will Smith, who could sublimate any threatening aspects of his persona to seduce Margot Robbie in Focus. Predominantly black romantic comedies like The Best Man began to spring up with more frequency. While all of this was happening, Murphy was either slathering himself in makeup for kids’ movies or struggling to keep up with Smith, now 51, in sci-fi comedies like The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
Murphy’s superpower was extreme confidence and unflappable wit. Smith has that, but he also possesses a remarkable capacity for vulnerability; he’s not especially tough or particularly menacing. Above all, he feels safe. In Coming to America, arguably Eddie’s most successful attempt at being a romantic hero, he has to play a naive fish-out-of-water to be credibly romantic to moviegoers. His inherent street smarts are negated by how alien his character is made to feel. The film was surely a triumphant moment in Murphy’s career, but the part was far from the flashy talker people fell in love with on SNL or in his stand-up concert films.
Part of what makes Dolemite Is My Name so revelatory is that it allows Murphy to play a character who was, unequivocally, sexual over four decades ago. It was, after all, the blaxploitation films of the 1970s that took Poitier’s portrayal of acceptable blackness and blew it all to hell. These movies were violent, crass, and explicit. They gave white audiences a glimpse of a different kind of hero. Dolemite, as with contemporaneous characters like Shaft, demanded a sexual gaze. But by the time Eddie Murphy became the most recognizable black face in late 1980s movies, mainstream acceptance of those transgressive stories had waned significantly. Movies reflected the new Reagan-era conservatism that gave us the non-threatening, buttoned-up Cosby Show.
Only in blaxploitation could black sexuality be truly unleashed. Of course, those blaxploitation characters usually had to be pimps or lotharios hopping from bed to bed. The original Dolemite film was about a falsely imprisoned pimp and nightclub owner coming back to reclaim his territory. His only real ally is another, female pimp named Queen Bee. Romance can be beside the point or blatantly irrelevant in blaxploitation; it’s sex as trade or sex as conquest, which plays into damaging stereotypes about black men that still persist. Nonetheless, in films like Dolemite and Superfly, there was something revolutionary — which Murphy brings to the fore. In a way, Murphy playing Rudy Ray Moore playing Dolemite presents an alternate universe version of the actor, who he might have been in an era when black sexuality was in vogue.
Because the role of Dolemite represents the antithesis of what Murphy did in Coming to America. (Murphy will be reprising both the roles of Akeem and Axel Foley in 2020’s Coming 2 America and the not-yet-dated Beverly Hills Cop 4, respectively.) Dolemite is brash, angry, clever, and unflappable, prepared to be the baddest, coolest person in any room. That’s who Eddie Murphy was in the 1980s, and that’s often what people expect from black men in America. It’s worth nothing that Moore himself was never married and didn’t have any children, which led to rumors that he might have been gay. If he was, it was a cruelly inhospitable time to live as an out gay man, particularly while portraying Dolemite. (Remember that comics like Murphy often used homophobic material to get cheap laughs in the ‘80s.) Black masculinity can be so retrograde, reactionary, and intolerant in part because of what we wrongfully deem to be our most redeeming qualities; our edge, our hipness, and our confidence is what some outsiders have decided gives us our worth. Part of the joke of the bed scene in Dolemite is that it dramatizes exactly what white audiences are afraid of, that black men are sexual dynamos that can make the ceiling collapse in your bedroom.
Dolemite Is My Name is Eddie Murphy reclaiming an aspect of himself that he seemed to have lost, that incredibly potent swagger that made him both inescapably magnetic and undeniably threatening. It’s what made him one of the greatest, if not the greatest, black movie stars. It was when he downplayed it or saw it as a hindrance that his influence faltered. Playing Rudy Ray Moore allows Murphy, for once, to wield black masculinity without fear, to make the earth move with his power.
By Dave Schilling
Dolemite Is My Name allows Eddie Murphy to reclaim a potent swagger that made him both inescapably magnetic and undeniably threatening. Photo: Netflix
In the new Netflix film Dolemite Is My Name, a dramatization of the real story behind a 1970s blaxploitation classic, Eddie Murphy’s Rudy Ray Moore is faced with the daunting task of performing a sex scene in front of the ragtag crew he’s assembled to bring a soon-to-be-cult movie to life. Moore is a paunchy, middle-aged, borderline sexless man who has nonetheless made a career out of boasting about his sexual prowess, posing nude with models on the covers of his raunchy comedy albums. But now, he’s being asked to illustrate that imagined prowess for the camera. Instead of playing the scene for titillation, Moore decides to lean into the joke. He rocks the bed violently, causing pictures to bounce up and down on the walls. A piece of the ceiling falls. Dolemite’s libidinous power is off the charts. He might not look like much, but under the right circumstances, he can make the Earth move.
Black masculinity in movies, especially comedies, was and remains a dicey subject. When the original Dolemite was released in 1975, only eight years had passed since Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner became the rare Hollywood movie to depict an interracial relationship. In that film, Sidney Poitier plays an eerily perfect example of an upper-class African-American man, nary a rough edge to be found. The image of John Prentice would go on to define black sexuality in pop culture for years after, and while the line from Poitier to Will Smith is not a clean one, an idea persisted: for a black actor in 20th century Hollywood, placidity was the key. Otherwise, you don’t get the girl. Outside of romantic dramas, many of the great black comedic film actors of the era were pulled into this cinematic paradigm. Richard Pryor was a massive star for years, but in movies like Brewster’s Millions, the white female co-lead was his cheery confidant rather than a lover. Before Bill Cosby was outed as a sexual predator, he appeared in movies like Leonard: Part 6 and Ghost Dad, where he was a doddering parental figure rather than a romantic lead.
In the pre–My Name is Dolemite career of Eddie Murphy, we see how hesitant Hollywood and audiences alike could be when it comes to black male sexuality on screen. You can count the number of sex scenes he’s performed on one hand — largely as the romantic lead in unpopular fare like Vampire in Brooklyn or Boomerang. Audiences never quite embraced his virility the way they fell for his wit, energy, and sexless charm in Beverly Hills Cop or Trading Places. The box-office grosses for Murphy’s romantic films paled in comparison to the mega-bucks successes of movies like 48 Hours. In Trading Places, it’s not Murphy but Dan Aykroyd who gets the girl at the end. In Beverly Hills Cop, Axel Foley is “just a friend,” eliminating any chance of him bedding the leading lady when the bad guys are all dead. Murphy’s biggest hits were R-rated films filled with provocative language, nudity, and violence, yet sex was less than an afterthought. Axel Foley could go to a strip club and crack wise around countless exposed breasts, but it was as if these things were happening behind glass.
The black movie stars that came after Murphy, now 58, had more success developing romantic personas. Namely, Will Smith, who could sublimate any threatening aspects of his persona to seduce Margot Robbie in Focus. Predominantly black romantic comedies like The Best Man began to spring up with more frequency. While all of this was happening, Murphy was either slathering himself in makeup for kids’ movies or struggling to keep up with Smith, now 51, in sci-fi comedies like The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
Murphy’s superpower was extreme confidence and unflappable wit. Smith has that, but he also possesses a remarkable capacity for vulnerability; he’s not especially tough or particularly menacing. Above all, he feels safe. In Coming to America, arguably Eddie’s most successful attempt at being a romantic hero, he has to play a naive fish-out-of-water to be credibly romantic to moviegoers. His inherent street smarts are negated by how alien his character is made to feel. The film was surely a triumphant moment in Murphy’s career, but the part was far from the flashy talker people fell in love with on SNL or in his stand-up concert films.
Part of what makes Dolemite Is My Name so revelatory is that it allows Murphy to play a character who was, unequivocally, sexual over four decades ago. It was, after all, the blaxploitation films of the 1970s that took Poitier’s portrayal of acceptable blackness and blew it all to hell. These movies were violent, crass, and explicit. They gave white audiences a glimpse of a different kind of hero. Dolemite, as with contemporaneous characters like Shaft, demanded a sexual gaze. But by the time Eddie Murphy became the most recognizable black face in late 1980s movies, mainstream acceptance of those transgressive stories had waned significantly. Movies reflected the new Reagan-era conservatism that gave us the non-threatening, buttoned-up Cosby Show.
Only in blaxploitation could black sexuality be truly unleashed. Of course, those blaxploitation characters usually had to be pimps or lotharios hopping from bed to bed. The original Dolemite film was about a falsely imprisoned pimp and nightclub owner coming back to reclaim his territory. His only real ally is another, female pimp named Queen Bee. Romance can be beside the point or blatantly irrelevant in blaxploitation; it’s sex as trade or sex as conquest, which plays into damaging stereotypes about black men that still persist. Nonetheless, in films like Dolemite and Superfly, there was something revolutionary — which Murphy brings to the fore. In a way, Murphy playing Rudy Ray Moore playing Dolemite presents an alternate universe version of the actor, who he might have been in an era when black sexuality was in vogue.
Because the role of Dolemite represents the antithesis of what Murphy did in Coming to America. (Murphy will be reprising both the roles of Akeem and Axel Foley in 2020’s Coming 2 America and the not-yet-dated Beverly Hills Cop 4, respectively.) Dolemite is brash, angry, clever, and unflappable, prepared to be the baddest, coolest person in any room. That’s who Eddie Murphy was in the 1980s, and that’s often what people expect from black men in America. It’s worth nothing that Moore himself was never married and didn’t have any children, which led to rumors that he might have been gay. If he was, it was a cruelly inhospitable time to live as an out gay man, particularly while portraying Dolemite. (Remember that comics like Murphy often used homophobic material to get cheap laughs in the ‘80s.) Black masculinity can be so retrograde, reactionary, and intolerant in part because of what we wrongfully deem to be our most redeeming qualities; our edge, our hipness, and our confidence is what some outsiders have decided gives us our worth. Part of the joke of the bed scene in Dolemite is that it dramatizes exactly what white audiences are afraid of, that black men are sexual dynamos that can make the ceiling collapse in your bedroom.
Dolemite Is My Name is Eddie Murphy reclaiming an aspect of himself that he seemed to have lost, that incredibly potent swagger that made him both inescapably magnetic and undeniably threatening. It’s what made him one of the greatest, if not the greatest, black movie stars. It was when he downplayed it or saw it as a hindrance that his influence faltered. Playing Rudy Ray Moore allows Murphy, for once, to wield black masculinity without fear, to make the earth move with his power.
It's Pryor 1 and Murphy 2. And that is by no means a slight to Eddie.
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to this day...dis scene...
i was like man when i grow up i wanna b rich enuff to have ho`s washing my penis...
this makes me wanna ask, where is mrnogood?
to this day...dis scene...
i was like man when i grow up i wanna b rich enuff to have ho`s washing my penis...
Breh u don't need to be rich to do that I promise u
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