Eddie Murphy returned to Saturday Night Live (SNL) in a big way and threw a shade at imprisoned fellow comic actor Bill Cosby, resulting in Cosby’s PR calling Murphy ‘a Hollywood slave.’
Eddie Murphy announced a while ago that he was making his return to stand-up comedy and thanks to him SNL got its best rating in recent memory.
The Dolemite Is My Name actor got into a monologue that saw him update the people on what has happened in his life since he left the SNL cast in the 1980s and while talking about how he has become a stay-at-home dad to his kids, threw a jab at Bill Cosby.
My kids are pretty much my life now, but if you would’ve told me thirty years ago that I’d be this boring, stay at home house dad and that Bill Cosby would be in jail, even I would’ve taken that bet. Eddie Murphy
Murphy mimicked the embattled Cosby and asked, “Who is America’s Dad now?”
Responding to the mockery, Andrew Wyatt, Cosby’s PR, released a statement which reads:
It is sad that Mister Murphy would take the glorious moment of returning to SNL and make remarks against Mister Cosby. One would think that Mister Murphy was given the freedom to leave the plantation so that he could just make his own decisions; but he decided to sell himself back to being a Hollywood Slave. Stepin Fetchit plus cooning equals the destruction of Black Men in Hollywood.
Obviously, there has been bad blood between Murphy and Cosby. Both men became famous for their iconic comic onscreen personas and sometimes this could breed envy as one could see the other as a threat.
Bill Cosby was sentenced over a year ago to serve 3 to 10 years in jail for drugging and assaulting a woman back in 2004.
