Over the weekend, Saturday Night Live host Eddie Murphy returned to the sketch series after 35 years. Murphy took to 30 Rockefeller Plaza with some of his iconic characters including Buckwheat and Gumby. That said, not everyone enjoyed Murphy’s return to Saturday Night Live. Case in point, Eddie Murphy’s monologue joe that asked, “Who is America’s dad now?”, did not settle well with Bill Cosby.
The joke directly referred to Cosby being in jail while Murphy was a “boring, stay-at-home house dad,” and Cosby spokesperson Andrew Wyatt responded back. In a statement posted on social media, Wyatt called the joke as “disparaging” and declared that Cosby had “broke[n] color barriers in the Entertainment Industry so that Blacks like Eddie Murphy, Dave Chappell, Kevin Hart, and et al., could have an opportunity to showcase their talents for many generations to come.”
The public statement continued by calling Murphy as a “Hollywood Slave” and suggested jokes like the previously mentioned are “bringing all of us down together.
You can read the full statement below:
“Mr. Cosby became the first Black to win an Emmy for his role in I Spy and Mr. Cosby broke color barriers in the Entertainment Industry, so that Blacks like Eddie Murphy, Dave Chappell, Kevin Hart and et al., could have an opportunity to showcase their talents for many generations to come. It is sad that Mr. Murphy would take this glorious moment of returning to SNL and make disparaging remarks against Mr. Cosby. One would think that Mr. Murphy was given his freedom to leave the plantation, so that he could make his own decisions; but he decided to sell himself back to being a Hollywood Slave. Stepin Fetchit plus cooning equals the destruction of Black Men in Hollywood. Remember, Mr. Murphy, that Bill Cosby became legendary because he used comedy to humanize all races, religions and genders; but your attacking Mr. Cosby helps you embark on just becoming click bait. Hopefully, you will be amenable to having a meeting of the minds conversation, in order to discuss how we can use our collective platforms to enhance Black people rather than bringing all of us down together.”
Bill Cosby is currently serving a 3-10 year prison sentence following his sexual assault conviction. During his only interview since entering prison, he declared he will never express remorse in the event he comes up for parole.
In other entertainment news, Eddie Murphy has recently finished filming his sequel to ‘Coming 2 America’ in Atlanta, Georgia.