Bill Cosby Saw Eddie Murphy As ‘Threat’ in the 1980s

Richard Pryor gave Eddie Murphy a hard time later in his career — right? At least, that’s the story The New York Times’ David Marchese tried to confirm with Murphy in a recent podcast interview. Murphy vehemently disagreed. “No, he didn’t,” insisted the Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F star. “Bill Cosby gave me a hard time.”

When Murphy was hitting it big on Saturday Night Live and the movies, Cosby was arguably still the bigger star. The Cosby Show was “TV’s biggest hit in the 1980s,” said TV Guide, arguing that it also breathed new life into the dying sitcom format. Cosby should have been a comedy elder statesman, but from the sound of things, America’s Dad didn’t appreciate the competition from the upstart Murphy.

Ostensibly, clean comic Cosby disapproved of Murphy’s liberal use of profanity in his stand-up act, but “it wasn’t so much language as it was the times that we were in,” Murphy said. “This is back when it was one Black person at a time getting in the mix. So when I come on the scene, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby are like, ‘Oh, this is the new shit that’s coming?’ If it’s some new thing coming on, that’s a threat to whatever their thing is.” 

Pryor, according to Murphy, appreciated the young comic trying to walk in his footsteps. But Cosby? “He could come at me with, ‘Oh, the language!’ but it was more ‘It’s one at a time,’ and ‘Is this the new guy who’s going to knock me out of the spot?’ That’s what was going on back then.” 

For his part, Murphy saw both comics more as heroes than competition. “I wasn’t even thinking about them like that,” he explained. “I was puppy-dogging both of them when I met them.” 

But that was no longer the case after Cosby picked his fight publicly. Murphy laid it all bare in Eddie Murphy: Raw:

And he wasn’t done with Cosby as recently as 2019 when he returned to Saturday Night Live with this joke: “If you would have told me 30 years ago that I would be this boring, stay-at-home, father-of-10 house dad, and Bill Cosby would be in prison, I would have took that bet.” As the audience broke into hysterics, Murphy trotted out his dead-on Cosby impression: “Who is America’s Dad now?”

As for Pryor? It was all love, according to Murphy. “All I wanted to do when I started doing comedy,” he said, “was meet Richard Pryor.” 

“When I was on a fucking plane coming from Georgia, Richard Pryor was on the plane. That’s when I first met him,” Murphy remembered. “I gave him my cassette of my first album, and I sat like two or three rows (behind him) on the other side. I was watching the back of his head, and he was laughing at my stuff. I could have died right there. You could have crashed the plane right there. To make Richard laugh for real? You don’t see Richard laugh a lot.” 

Which, to Murphy, only proves that any perceived rift between him and Pryor was just a myth. “I’ve heard people say before that Eddie and Richard Pryor didn’t get along,” Murphy said. “Not at all. He didn’t become a mentor, but he was my idol. I idolized him. The ceiling of the whole art form, you know, stand-up comedy — that’s Richard.”