Joe Piscopo Wonders If He Could Still Do ‘Ebony and Ivory’ ‘SNL’ Sketch With Eddie Murphy
The Saturday Night Live team-up of Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder in the sketch “Ebony and Ivory” was a classic for Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy. But in Piscopo’s upcoming memoir Average Joe (out on February 11th), the comic has “to wonder if we could even do a sketch like that on SNL today, given how political correctness has been ruining comedy for a decade or two now.”
Piscopo would like to think it’s possible, given that the sketch is one of his all-time favorites. But even in 1982, he wasn’t sure they could pull it off. “Eddie led the way in that,” Piscopo tells me. “I have to give him credit. I’ll tell you why.”
That reason why: Murphy took risks that only worked because his characters were so funny. Only Murphy could watch Mr. Rogers and decide, “I’m going to do a street version of that. I'm going to do Mr. Robinson,” Piscopo remembers. “And he did it and nailed it.”
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Next up was Buckwheat and Piscopo was skeptical. “I go, ‘You mean from Little Rascals?’ I said, ‘Eddie, that is going to be a little racist, don’t you think? No disrespect.’” Murphy did it anyway and the audience ate it up.
Murphy’s “I'm gonna do what I want, how I want” attitude opened Piscopo’s eyes to what was possible. “When I saw that he could do that, we took the gloves off,” he explains.
Piscopo had been Murphy’s guest at a Stevie Wonder concert the season prior and knew that Murphy did a killer impression of Wonder. When the two comics were riffing at a piano one day, they naturally combined Wonder with Piscopo’s Frank Sinatra in a parody of the hit record, “Ebony and Ivory.” The joke was Sinatra didn’t do well with metaphors like keys on a piano — he wanted to be more straightforward with his message of racial unity.
SINATRA: You are black and I am white
Life’s an Eskimo Pie, let’s take a bite!
That was groovy thinkin’, Lincoln
When you set them free
We all know
Cats are the same
Maine to Mexico
Good. Bad. Guys and chicks
WONDER: I am dark and you are light
SINATRA: You are blind as a bat and I have sight!
Side by side, you are my amigo, Negro
Let’s not fight!
“You wouldn't say the word ‘Negro’ today,” Piscopo says. “I think even now, it’s bleeped out on YouTube.”
The official SNL version on YouTube doesn’t actually censor the lyrics, but Piscopo’s point remains. After all, he wasn’t sure the words would fly in 1982. “I did it in the sketch, and I’m saying to myself, ‘Geez, I’m really saying this?’”
In the end, the sketch’s message won out. “Being with Eddie, we were like best friends. We never saw color, and so we played it the way it was,” Piscopo says. “So you know what? The end game, the lesson is ‘I am Black. You are white. And who cares?’ That’s it.”
I tell Piscopo I thought SNL could find a way to do the sketch today, even if the show had to change up some of the language. Piscopo was dubious but optimistic about the current comedy landscape. “Not now,” he responds. “But I’ll tell you what — it’s loosening up.”
