The Eddie Murphy Joke That Inspired Jordan Peele’s ‘Get Out’
Eddie Murphy isn’t known for horror movies — even Vampire in Brooklyn was more belly-laugh than jump-scare, despite the presence of Wes Craven behind the camera. The likely reason Murphy stayed away from the genre? He knew Black people had way too much common sense for horror-movie tropes, as he jokes in this clip from Delirious:
“I was watching Poltergeist last month. I got a question: Why don't white people just leave a house when there's a ghost in the house?” Murphy asks the crowd. “In Amityville Horror, the ghost told them to get out of the house. White people stayed in there. Now that’s a hint and a half for your ass. Ghosts say get the fuck out? I would just tip the fuck out the door.”
No curious investigation for Murphy. Blood in the toilet? An ominous voice whispering “Get out”? That’s all it would take for the comedian to tell his partner, “Too bad we can’t stay, baby!”
Don't Miss
The similarity to Jordan Peele’s breakthrough Get Out is just too crazy to be ignored. Was Peele deliberately referencing the joke?
“Absolutely,” Peele told Entertainment Tonight in 2017. “I mean, Eddie Murphy is talking about the difference between how a white family and a Black family would react in a haunted house. It’s one of the best bits of all time,” Peele said. “So yeah, I’m hip.”
To be fair to Peele and Get Out, the movie had more going on than simply riffing on an old Murphy punchline. “The story came from this period in the Obama administration when we were in this post-racial lie. Race is over,” Peele explained. “We got a Black president. Let's not talk about it anymore.”
Peele’s dating life also inspired parts of the plot. “I was dating a white girl, and I had to ask that question. Like, if we're going to meet your parents, they know I'm Black? And she was like, ‘No.’”
When Peele did meet her parents, “there was no reaction and that in itself was this creepy moment,” he said. “I'm like, Okay, well then, what's going on here?”
“That's a perfect situation to give a protagonist of a horror movie,” he said. In Peele’s favorite scary movies, “there's always a question: Am I imagining this? So this was about identifying these hints and these little subtle reminders that any Black person in America is consistently reminded of: Race is real.”
Get Out was also a reminder of Murphy’s comedy advice: When the scary voices tell you to take a hike, it's time to grab your bags and get moving.
