Eddie Murphy: The Rolling Stone Interview

Brian Hiatt: You've talked about doing stand-up again – what would it be like now?

Eddie Murphy: If I ever get back onstage, I'm going to have a really great show for you all – an hour and a half of stand-up and about 40 minutes of my shitty band. But I don't know. The way that used to come about, you'd be around the house, hanging out, say something funny and it'd be like, "I'm going to go to the club, try that out tonight." That still happens, but it's been a long time. I'm not that guy in the leather suit anymore. The hardest thing for comics nowadays is to find your fucking voice.

BH: People do love that guy in the leather suit – that's a good guy.

EM: Yeah, you know. He's a kid. No more leather suits. I'm still that person in terms of how I'm wired. Whatever muscle makes jokes pop out, that muscle still works, I just don't have a leather suit on anymore. One of the things that's really cool is whenever they talk about stand-up, they'll mention me with all of those guys, like, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, but I haven't done it since I was 27, so why fuck with it? But that's just weighing both sides. It comes up too much for me to not do it again. It's like, when it hits me, I'll do it, eventually.

BH: Why did you quit in the first place?

EM: It stopped being fun. In the beginning, it was fun, then I was controversial. Whenever I would do anything, there would be picketing, negative backlash. I thought I should just do movies. I don't have to deal with this shit. Big chunks of time went by and before you knew it, it had been a hundred years since I had done it.

BH: A young Eddie Murphy coming up now would never use the word "faggot" the way you did.

EM: A lot of the stuff you just don't do now. Nowadays, comics say something that's offensive and they have got to apologize to everybody. How do you even write an act and go into a club when everybody has their cameras, it's on YouTube, if you say something offensive, you've got to apologize to everyone? How do you come up with anything?

Eddie Murphy: The Rolling Stone Interview / by: Brian Hiatt / November 9, 2011