Eddie Murphy’s Challenge: Making the Right Choices

In the year 1983, director Martin Scorsese released one of his best and most unpopular films, the black, satiric “King of Comedy,” in which wannabe comic-certified psychotic Rupert Pupkin kidnaps his idol, TV superstar Jerry Langford. It’s a movie that makes you squirm, partly because of what it says about incompetence, failure and baseless ambition--as well as talent, success and the high cost of being really funny.

In 2000--today, as a matter of fact--a genuine king of comedy, Eddie Murphy, stars in “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps.” Featuring Murphy in multiple, heavily upholstered roles, it is this summer’s much-anticipated follow-up to “The Nutty Professor,” the 1996 comedy that brought the actor back from the dead.

The fact that “Klumps” is a sequel--a sequel to a remake, in fact--is nothing new for Murphy. There were already several among his 20-odd films: “Beverly Hills Cop II,” “Another 48 HRS.,” “Beverly Hills Cop III.” According to Variety, Murphy will get $20 million for the second “Doctor Dolittle.” And a remake of the ‘50s sci-fi relic “The Incredible Shrinking Man” is reported to be on the performer’s agenda as well.

So what we’d like to suggest, given the comedian’s fondness for recycling, is that he appear in a remake of “The King of Comedy.”

The hook? As this is pure fantasy, indulge us.

Rupert Pupkin, unnerving madman and painfully unfunny stand-up comic, would be played by the young Eddie Murphy--the devilishly droll subversive who in the 1980s turned Gumby into a venomous old Catskills retiree, Buckwheat into the Anti-Minstrel and “Saturday Night Live” into something a lot more dangerous than Spartan Cheerleaders or Mary Katherine Gallagher.

The product of Bushwick, Brooklyn’s projects and Long Island ‘burbs, Murphy arrived on “SNL” equipped with a killer timing nurtured at the feet of Richard Pryor, and a smile so disabling it almost masked the corrosive anger behind it. Anger like a cute little pit bull. Just because it didn’t bite didn’t mean it couldn’t.

Murphy’s Pupkin--although destined to be a lot funnier than Robert De Niro’s original--would be lethal.

And yet, the morbidly fascinating, I-can’t-turn-away-from-this-car-crash performance (in this totally fabricated scenario) would be the older, established Eddie Murphy--the Murphy of “Golden Child” through “Holy Man”--in the role of Jerry Langford: the classic show-biz vet, the case-hardened mega-star for whom comedy is strictly business, the entertainment mogul who exists on a rarefied, insular plane to which he is exiled by his own celebrity.

As a performance, it would be pure psychodrama.

Which is just what it was, of course, when Langford was first played by Jerry Lewis--the original “Nutty Professor,” coincidentally, but also a comedian whose career provides unavoidable parallels to Murphy’s own.

Would Murphy, like Lewis, ever agree to play Langford? Johnny Carson, Langford’s inspiration, wouldn’t--he was asked and refused, presumably because he knew the risks. Lewis did it, presumably because he couldn’t resist those risks. Murphy might do it because--well, for the same twisted motives that drive a trapeze artist to assay the quadruple back-flip.

Lewis and Murphy Willing to Take Risks

The willingness to take risks is a common bond between Lewis and Murphy, who are otherwise comedians of organically disparate means of making us laugh. Murphy has never been as frantic or as needy as Lewis; few are. Among contemporary comedians, Jim Carrey is far closer to the Lewis model, displaying the same hungry willingness to do almost anything--mugging, slapstick, pratfalls, impersonating the mentally deficient--to get a gag across.

Murphy, even when he’s playing an out-and-out clown--Billy Valentine in the early scenes of “Trading Places,” for instance--maintains a dignity that makes his routine a conspiracy rather than an object of ridicule or contempt. He may feign Stepin Fetchit, but the effect is Groucho Marx.

That there’s a racial element to this aspect of Murphy’s comedy--that the history of racism in America informs it--seems beyond question. But Murphy is no product of the so-called chitlin’ circuit, the post-vaudeville tradition that produced an earlier generation of black comics--a fact that probably has helped make Murphy the pan-racial attraction he is. He learned his craft from TV, he has said.

If there’s a comic continuum to which Murphy belongs, it would include Bill Cosby, whose avuncular wit skirts racial issues in a way so purposeful that it carries its own singular eloquence. And it would include Chris Rock, whose scorched-earth social commentary also is buffered by a smile, albeit one far less benign than the one Murphy brought to “SNL.”

What bonds Murphy and Lewis--besides the gold mine of “Nutty Professor,” of course--are choices: the ones they made, the ones they got to make. When you’re acclaimed as a genius (even by the French), it’s hard to maintain your perspective; when you’re several light-years from hunger, the fire in the belly has a tendency to die. You end up making movies like Lewis’ “Hardly Working” (1981). Or, in Murphy’s case--during the particularly fallow period of 1992-1995--”Boomerang,” “The Distinguished Gentleman,” “Beverly Hills Cop III” and “Vampire in Brooklyn.”

Even after the so-called renaissance of Eddie Murphy--which began with his first turn as Seymour Klump and alter-ego Buddy Love in the ’96 “Nutty Professor”--Murphy somehow ended up in “Holy Man,” a total waste of time. But he also lent his voice to “Mulan” and gave two of his better performances ever: in the double role of action star Kit Ramsey and his near-idiot brother, Jiff, in the Frank Oz-Steve Martin comedy “Bowfinger.” And--co-starring with his constant shadow, Martin Lawrence--in Ted Demme’s poignantly funny prison movie “Life.”

There may still have been doubts about Murphy’s judgment, but any questions about his talent were out the window.

“Nutty Professor II: The Klumps” seems destined to be one of the big moneymakers of summer 2000. The “Doctor Dolittle” sequel will be huge, as will anything Murphy appears in--until, perhaps, he decides to make a sequel to “The Golden Child.”

All this happiness and joy and revenue bring to mind a rather remarkable event, set to occur on April 3, 2001:

Eddie Murphy is turning 40.

For some, the kid who debuted on “SNL” at age 18 still seems like the state-of-the-art maverick comic genius; for others, he’s been part of the cultural landscape since the Great Flood. You have to wonder how Murphy feels, ensconced with his wife and children amid the exclusive, Hudson-hugging suburbs of New Jersey. He’s been a teenager with a multi-picture deal. He’s been a near-washout in his 30s who had to audition for “Nutty Professor.” Has he had anything like the career he thought he’d have? Done what he wanted to do? Unlike most people, the choices are all his. We can only hope his movies are as intriguing as his moves.