Early on in Eddie Murphy`s first film, ”48 HRS.,” there is a moment that didn`t quite make his career but certainly proclaimed that the burgeoning appeal of Murphy`s work on NBC`s ”Saturday Night Live” was going to be multiplied a hundredfold on the movie screen.
Impersonating a cop, Murphy`s character strolls into a redneck, country-and-western bar and in a few minutes manages to totally subdue the hostile natives with his inimitable blend of arrogance, nerve and gargantuan self-esteem.
It`s a very amusing, dramatically effective scene; and when Murphy caps it off by telling the would-be lynch mob he`s just jerked around that
”there`s a new sheriff in town,” audiences across the country seemed to know that the line was aimed at them, too–for in a very short span of time Murphy has become the ”sheriff” of contemporary comedy.
Murphy is remarkably popular on the screen right now–his ”Beverly Hills Cop” is the top-grossing movie in America, having brought almost $200 million into Paramount`s coffers, and two of his three previous films, ”48 HRS.” and ”Trading Places,” also were big moneymakers.
Murphy`s recent deal with Paramount gives him a $15 million nest egg and calls for him to star in five more films with a total budget of $60 million. And as if that weren`t enough, Murphy has made two best-selling comedy albums and sells out large concert halls whenever he takes his standup act on the road. (He will be appearing Friday at the UIC Pavilion.)
Quite a change from 1981, when Murphy was a so-called ”feature player”
on ”Saturday Night Live,” earning a salary of $750 a week, and an even bigger change from 1979, when Murphy, having just graduated from high school, was making $25 a night at New York-area comedy clubs.
Murphy`s explosive rise to the top has a lot to do with sheer talent, and we`ll get back to that in a moment. But because comedy may be the most volatile, fad-prone area of the entertainment industry these days, some of our hero`s sudden appeal is based on timing and luck.
Consider, after all, what has happened to some of the more prominent pre- Murphy comedians.
Murphy`s key influence, Richard Pryor, has become something of a recluse lately (both ”48 HRS.” and ”Trading Places” were, by the way, originally conceived as Pryor vehicles).
Steve Martin`s humor has lost a good deal of its faddish following and now seems a little faded around the edges; and Lily Tomlin and George Carlin also have become figures from the recent past. As for Cheech and Chong, they are close to being the answer to a trivia question, while Andy Kaufman and John Belushi are dead.
Aside from Murphy, then, the only other comedians who are really hot right now are Joan Rivers and Bill Cosby.
Now, Cosby`s return to eminence is based on his wholesome, ”family”-
style humor, which is as different as can be from Murphy`s brash, profanity-filled routines and his similarly foul-mouthed movie roles–with their constant emphasis on the kind of sexual and scatological themes that appeal to adolescents of all ages and offend a good many adults.
So if Murphy has the youth market cornered, it`s partly because he has no real competition right now–no rival who can lay claim to what remains of the mantle of ”irreverent hipness.”
Yet Murphy`s appeal, especially on the screen, is not confined to the audience that goes to see ”Porky`s Revenge.”
There is something about him, variously described as ”likability,”
”vulnerability” and ”boyish charm,” that has a lot of non-adolescents responding quite positively to Murphy`s work–even though they may wince a bit under the barrage of profane words and wish that Murphy, who has just turned 24, didn`t come on like an overgrown, nose-thumbing 12-year-old.
Still, Murphy does have that special ”something,” a quality so tricky to describe that it has bewildered some critics and reduced others to sputtering rage.
Reviewing a recent Murphy concert performance, Variety said that ”his laughs are caused by the obscenities he utters . . . without them, he has no act,” which is true as far as it goes but doesn`t really explain very much
–for if ”blue” material were all it took to make it big today, we would be in the midst of a Buddy Hackett revival.
On the other hand, Murphy was slammed a while ago in the pages of the Village Voice for his supposed lack of irreverence–tagged (along with Joan Rivers) as a phony ”rebellious outsider” who really ”panders to majority interests.
”The key to (Murphy`s and Rivers`) comedy,” writer Michael Williams continued, ”is middle-class prudery filtered through an upper-class cruelty toward a legion of unlucky outsiders.” And Williams went on to describe Murphy and Rivers as the perfect ”court jesters” for Ronald Reagan`s America –a pair of ”minority superstars” who gleefully have sold out.
There may be something to that in Rivers` case. And if one were a professional bleeding-heart, as Williams seems to be, it would be possible to take offense at Murphy`s gross lampoons of gays and his eagerness to portray lower-class black males as (in Williams` words) ”either slick or funny-looking or criminal or stupid.”
But even though Murphy is a sloppy craftsman who may well, in the long run, waste most of his considerable comic gifts, that way of looking at his work doesn`t touch upon the real reasons so many people respond to him right now.
For one thing, we have just passed through an era in which some of our court jesters have been very funny but very few of them have seemed to be having much fun.
If, for instance, one can speculate about what goes on inside of Steve Martin`s head (although his act is designed in part to make such intrusions impossible), forthright happiness would seem to be an emotion that Martin seldom feels.
And the same would be true of Pryor, Tomlin and all the other ”hip”
comedic maestros of the `60s and `70s, if only because the pretzel-like irony of their best work precludes any simple and/or happy view of the world.
After all, the typical Martin character could be described as a creep impersonating a good-guy who is impersonating a creep–an approach that would seem to guarantee that the man behind the mask is prone to a certain innate moroseness and has a rather sour view of the rest of the human race.
Murphy, on the other hand, always seems to be having one heck of a good time onstage and on the screen as well–above and beyond the emotions that are appropriate to the character he is portraying.
Watching Murphy do his stuff, one knows that he not only is enjoying himself but also is enjoying everything and everybody else as well–a man who thinks that the world is made for pleasure and assumes that you agree with his fun-and-games point of view.
It`s the genuineness of that attitude that accounts for much of Murphy`s appeal, because it cuts right through the tangled knots of self-mockery, self- doubt and self-disgust that have tied down so many of his predecessors.
So after a wave of hip comics who have more or less told us that the world is a nasty place–a piece of news that is rather hard to take when one knows its purveyors are now multi-millionaires–here comes Eddie Murphy, a guy who has the nerve to say that the good life is just what it`s cracked up to be.
”But how dare he say that?” asks the social worker that lurks within quite a few American breasts.
”Murphy is black, so how can he not be consumed by feelings of rage and righteous indignation when he contemplates our nation`s racist past and the present-day plight of so many of his brothers and sisters?”
Well, no, Eddie Murphy probably doesn`t pay much attention to the plight of anyone other than himself, his immediate family and his friends. And he certainly doesn`t see that he has any special ”responsibility” as a black performer, other than to be as funny as he can.
But that doesn`t make him a sellout or a Reagan-era court jester; for if any political event has a bearing on Murphy`s humor, it is President Lyndon Johnson`s very un-Reaganlike ”Great Society” programs of the mid-1960s.
Born in 1961 and raised in the predominantly black middle-class suburb of Roosevelt, Long Island, Murphy grew up in the midst of what Georgetown University law professor Eleanor Holmes Norton has called ”the greatest change in the history of black America since Emancipation–as the fraction of black Americans who were poor dropped from more than one-half to less than one-third between 1960 and 1970.”
Thanks to the Johnson administration`s policies, says Norton, who happens to be black herself, ”a great many social and political barriers (against blacks) began to fall,” and this led to the rise of ”the first black middle class.”
Now, it`s obvious from his work that Eddie Murphy is very much a child of that time–a middle-class, TV-generation, suburban kid who grew up on Gumby,
”I Love Lucy” and ”The Honeymooners” and who found the various strains of ”authentic” black culture to be optional, not inevitable.
So Murphy uses that culture`s ”your momma” style of one-upmanship because it suits his comedic tastes; but he feels no more sense of solidarity with, say, James Brown or Little Richard than the typical young Polish-American does with Frank Yankovic. And he certainly feels free to mock any black target that comes into view, provided it will get him some laughs.
Deplore that if you will, but be aware, too, that this unfettered approach may be at the heart of Murphy`s appeal.
What Americans of all sorts detect in Murphy`s humor is a man who is saying that, for him, race is no longer a burden or even an issue but something to be toyed with–another ”fun” choice on the lifestyle menu that one may dig or not, as the mood takes you.
That`s a very comforting thought for all concerned, including Murphy himself. And while there may be a vein of fantasy involved in it, there is a lot of truth there, too–for as someone once said, ”Black people are just like everyone else, only more so.”
One suspects that Eddie Murphy would agree with that quip, if only because he embodies it every time he faces a camera or steps onstage.
Concluding his concert film, ”Eddie Murphy, Delirious,” he mentions that the performance is taking place at Washington, D.C.`s Constitution Hall
–the same venue whose owners, the Daughters of the American Revolution, stirred a racial brouhaha when they barred a Marian Anderson concert back in the 1950s.
”So here we are,” Murphy slyly adds. ”It`s not even 50 years later, and a black man is onstage, getting paid to hold his —-. God bless America.”
