The ‘Scrooged’ Joke That’s Aged Like Eggnog
There have been near countless retellings of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, including the classic 1951 film starring Alaistar Sim and the other classic film that exclusively stars Rich Little. But for comedy fans in the ‘80s, the best onscreen Scrooge wasn’t even named “Scrooge,” he was Frank Cross, as played by Bill Murray in Scrooged.
Scrooged hit theaters back in 1988, so obviously not every aspect of it holds up today. For example, in one scene, Frank’s brother James receives a VHS player for Christmas and amazingly doesn’t just toss it in the garbage. Also, several jokes seem more than a little iffy from today’s standpoint — like the racist running gag about Chinese restaurants serving up cat meat. Why didn’t three ghosts show up and convince the filmmakers to cut that material?
Another joke that doesn’t seem so great comes when Frank is about to be visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past. While dining at a swank restaurant, Frank suffers from grisly hallucinations, which include a vision of a server engulfed in flames. So he grabs a pail of water and attempts to extinguish him.
Of course, the guy wasn’t really on fire. When the room looks upon Frank with confusion and disbelief, he responds: “I’m sorry. You know, I thought you were Richard Pryor.”
This was obviously a reference to the 1980 incident in which Pryor nearly burned to death, apparently by accident, while freebasing cocaine. (Personally, this is how I first learned about Pryor’s tragic injury because I asked my parents to explain the joke while watching Scrooged.)
As we’ve mentioned before, Pryor eventually revealed that the “accident” was really not an accident: It was a suicide attempt. He made this disclosure in his pseudo-autobiographical film Jo Jo Dancer Your Life Is Calling, and then further spelled it out during an interview with Barbara Walters. That interview aired on TV in 1986, two years before Scrooged came out.
Scrooged was co-written by Saturday Night Live’s Michael O’Donaghue, who wasn’t exactly known for his restraint and sensitivity. It’s unclear whether or not the Pryor joke was scripted, or ad-libbed by Murray (it doesn’t appear in an early version of the script that’s surfaced online). But the rest of the movie’s cutthroat lack of sentimentality has a clear purpose: skewering media excess and upending our expectations for a mainstream Hollywood Christmas movie. Scrooged literally opens with Santa Claus battling terrorists in the made-for-TV movie The Night the Reindeer Died.
Poking fun at Pryor’s suicide attempt, on the other hand, really doesn’t accomplish much of anything. It could be argued that Frank Cross would make that joke in the days prior to his redemption, but why invite us to laugh along with the guy so awful that he needs to be terrorized into decency by Yuletide poltergeists?
