

“Delirious” became a generational touchstone. Eddie was wearing thousand dollar belts, diamond watches, open leather jackets with his chest out.” Not the traditionally dressed, suited Bill Cosby. The last thing you wanted to do was be pompous. “Back then, the red leather suit was revolutionary,” Charlie Murphy said. According to several comics, that wardrobe choice was nothing short of a watershed moment in comedy. No small part of Murphy’s impact in “Delirious” comes from what he is wearing: a tight-fitting red leather outfit the comedian picked up at a D.C.-area shopping mall on the day he shot the special. “I never paid any of that stuff any mind,” Murphy says on the DVD. Moreover, critics decried Murphy’s gay jokes as homophobic, resulting in protest picket lines at his subsequent stand-up engagements. Upon airing, though, “Delirious” generated no small share of controversy for the special’s profanity (which was considered excessive by the era’s abiding mores but hardly raises an eyebrow today in contrast with, say, a Katt Williams special). So you had seamless laughter from beginning to end.” It would be: one, two, three - ba-boom! The one and two jokes had chuckles on them and three was the big laugh. “His show was real tight,” Charlie Murphy said.

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But on the “Delirious” DVD, a Who’s Who of black comedians, including Chris Tucker, Cedric the Entertainer, Sinbad and Martin Lawrence, weighs in on the TV special’s initial impact. And Murphy became perhaps the earliest comedian to riff on how Michael Jackson “ain’t the most masculine fellow in the world.” He made the ridiculous sublime while also managing to get laughs out of such once-sacrosanct subjects as AIDS, slavery, domestic violence and what he predicted would be the assassination attempt on America’s first black president.Īdhering to a long-held policy of not granting newspaper interviews, Murphy declined to comment for this story. T and “The Honeymooners’ ” Ralph Cramden and Ed Norton would have been like as outed gay men. Over the course of his act, Murphy verbally flambes an eclectic array of subject matter, with spot-on impersonations of Elvis, Teddy Pendergrass, Stevie Wonder and Ricky Ricardo reenactments of what Mr. And the rest of the comedians had to step up their game.”
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“ ‘Delirious’ put Eddie in a league by himself,” said comedian Robert Townsend, who directed Murphy’s second concert movie “Raw” and recently directed the documentary “Why We Laugh: Black Comedians on Black Comedy.” “He definitely took the art form and raised the bar. Once upon a time, Eddie Murphy was a baaad man - a stand-up superstar who could in equal parts infuriate, entertain and inspire his audience. The disc serves to remind comedy lovers that Murphy wasn’t always the family-friendly star of such flicks as “The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps” or “Daddy Day Care” - not to mention the ‘tween-skewing “Imagine That,” which opened Friday.

But his jokes were a revelation.Ĭaptured by an HBO documentary film crew, Murphy’s performance galvanized a generation of comedians when it went into rotation on the cable channel the following year under the title “Eddie Murphy: Delirious.” And earlier this month, a 25th anniversary “Delirious” DVD reached retail. Shirtless and dressed in red leather pants and matching jacket unzipped to his navel, Eddie Murphy sauntered onto the stage of Washington, D.C.’s, Constitution Hall one night in 1983 and changed the face of stand-up comedy forever.Īt the time, Murphy was “Saturday Night Live’s” youngest cast member and a newly in-demand movie star after the success of his action comedy “48 Hrs.” Age 22 and cocky as a top gun pilot, Murphy used an arsenal of curse words that made his punch lines detonate with the force of sidewinder missiles.
