Eddie Murphy certainly was not laughing

When I find out that someone is angry, my first question is why.

Part of this is curiosity. I’m a nosy little bastard who likes hot goss.

Part of this is because I want information so I can appoint myself judge and decide whether this person has the right to be as mad as they are.

That’s usually how we evaluate grudges, right? We try and figure out if it’s justified.

However, after more than two years of dogged first-hand research into my own tendency to cling to my grudges, I do not think this is a particularly helpful approach in evaluating anger. In fact, I think it’s pretty pointless regardless of whether that anger belongs to me or to someone else.

Instead, I think it’s better to try and understand the reason(s) behind the anger, but I’m getting ahead of myself. First we need to talk about Eddie Murphy.

You know him, right? Industry-changing movie star of the 1980s. A stand-up comic whose 1987 special “Raw” is still the highest-grossing comedy concert film of all-time. 

I was a little young to get in on the front end of his career. In fact, my mom was quite adamant about me NOT seeing his movies. Were she still alive, she would crinkle her nose in disapproval while reading the following sentence: One of the first things I did after getting a Walkman in junior high was listen to my friend Steve’s tape recording of “Delirious.”

The one exception was “Saturday Night Live.” Mom let me watch best-of-episodes that included Murphy’s sketches from that show: Mr. Rogers, grumpy Gumby, even Velvet Jones.

It wasn’t until earlier this month, though, that I realized Murphy had a decades-long feud with the show. This wasn’t a secret or anything. There have been stories written about it. I’d just oblivious until I read his (absolutely excellent) interview with the New York Times Magazine earlier this month. In it, he referenced how hurt he was by a joke that David Spade told back in the 1990s.

I went and looked up the joke that had made Murphy so mad:

Spade told the joke in 1995 after the release of Murphy’s film “Vampire in Brooklyn,” which had been deemed a flop. Twenty years later, Spade spelled out exactly what happened  in his book “Almost Interesting.”

Murphy called Spade on the phone and cursed him out. He then engaged in a cold war with “Saturday Night Live” which didn’t really end until he came back to host the show in 2019.

Murphy explained the reason for reacting the way he did to the New York Times:

I find this all very interesting because objectively speaking, Spade’s joke was not even a pimple on the butt of what is one of the most lucrative careers in Hollywood history.

Yes, “Vampire in Brooklyn” flopped, but it wasn’t some inflection point in Murphy’s career. “The Nutty Professor” was released the very next year and had the highest opening-weekend gross of any movie in Murphy’s career to that point.

To this day, Murphy remains a huge freaking star, and his 10-year run that started in 1982 with “48 Hours” is one of the most impactful decades any actor has ever had in the industry when you consider he was not just a Black man, but a Black comedian, who became one of Hollywood’s top leading men.

Yet Murphy remained vehemently pissed about an off-handed joke made by someone who was not nearly as famous as him on a show he had long-ago outgrown.

What’s more: The joke itself wasn’t actually that mean.

Don’t get me wrong, I can understand why it would have annoyed Murphy, but my initial reaction upon hearing the joke was that it certainly didn’t merit a 30-year grudge.

Ooops. I just did the thing I said we shouldn’t do back at the beginning of this piece: I judged his grudge, essentially deciding that Murphy shouldn’t have been as mad as he was.

Except Murphy was that mad. He was furious regardless of what I or anyone else thought about this reaction, which brings me to the principal problem of trying to decide whether anger is justified: We don’t decide how much anger we’re going to feel.

Anger – like other emotions – is something we experience. It’s like a wave that sweeps over us, and while we can try and manage it or minimize its influence, we don’t get to decide how strong the feeling itself is. It surges through us. It’s why the word “triggered” is used to describe an emotional reaction. It is unleashed.

To say someone shouldn’t feel the way they do is like being in a chemistry lab, observing a particular reaction between two compounds and summarizing the experiment with the statement: “Well, that shouldn’t have happened.”

Except it did happen, and in a chemistry lab, we would go back and try and figure out why it occurred so we could find out if our expectations were wrong or perhaps our methodology was flawed or maybe lab environment was corrupted.

We can do the same thing with anger, too, as well as the grudges it leads to. However, this requires a willingness to try and understand what triggered the emotion as opposed to simply judging it.

There’s almost always a reason for anger. It may not be a very good reason. It may be very hard to articulate the reason. The reason may wind up having very little to do with the thing we think we’re mad at, but there is going to be a reason we feel the way we do.

So instead of judging the validity of Murphy’s anger, let’s accept it as a given. He was really mad. So mad he waged a 30-year cold war against SNL.

Why was Murphy that mad? Well, he spelled out the reasons he was mad in his New York Times interview:

• He’d been subjected to a professional pot shot from a show he’d helped immeasurably.

• He felt these sort of pot shots were not taken at other former cast members.

• He thought there was a racial component to being targeted in this way.

It wasn’t really the substance of Spade’s joke that made Murphy mad, but the circumstances. He was angry not only about the joke, but the fact that Spade was given the go-ahead to make the joke. He thought the fact he was Black played a role in this.

So was Murphy right to be mad?

I don’t know if that’s a judgment anyone else can really make for at least two reasons:

1. It’s impossible to fully know the actual motivation behind the joke.

   Even if Spade spelled it out, I’d still wonder if he was fully aware of exactly why he wrote and delivered the joke the way he did. Similarly, it’s impossible to know exactly why it was OK’d, if it was in fact OK’d by producers on the show.

2. None of us have the history Murphy has.

   Part of what informed Murphy’s reaction was his specific lived experience both as a cast member on SNL and then as a Black comedian who became a leading man in Hollywood in Ronald Reagan’s America.

The fact that Murphy got mad is not really a matter of right or wrong, justified or invalid. It is, instead, a reaction that occurred to that particular joke made at that point in time.

The question is what to do about it. For Murphy, it meant staying mad until suddenly he wasn’t. Murphy said in the recent interview that he had no hard feelings.

“I’m cool with everybody,” he said. “It’s all love.”

In researching the story, I found lots of mentions of the détente, including Spade saying what a relief it was when Murphy finally acknowledged him in a friendly way on the street in L.A. I could not find any example of Murphy explaining exactly what changed for him that caused his anger to ebb.

Maybe that’s just how long it was going to take Murphy to get to the other side. Regardless, I’m happy he did in part because I hope to see him host Saturday Night Live again (it would be his fourth).

A spite fence?

Last week, I wrote about spite houses, buildings that are constructed to express the resentment that someone feels toward an individual or an entity they believe to have wronged or slighted them.

One of the responses that I got mentioned a spite boat in the San Francisco marina. This was the result of a divorce as a couple split up with one member being awarded the yacht and one of the couple’s two moorage berths. The other member of the couple went and bought the rustiest hunk of junk that could be found, mooring the eyesore next to the yacht.

Sadly, I could find no media reports on the spite boat. I did, however, come across the story of a boat owner who was ordered by the city to store his boat behind a fence. Apparently, there’s an honest-to-goodness law in Seaside, Calif., which requires boats be stored behind a 6-foot fence.

The fellow who owned the boat complied, building the requisite fence. However, he then commissioned his neighbor – an artist – to paint a mural on the fence. The mural was of his boat sitting in his driveway.

Yeah. That’s right. The scene he painted on the fence is what it would have looked like had there been no fence. I even learned there’s a term for such an act: malicious compliance. I prefer “begrudging compliance.”