On Problematic Standup: Eddie Murphy: Raw and Dice Rules (Part 2 of 2)
The second part of a piece, which is the first in a series of four essays on the subject of free speech, privilege and reactionary politics as reflected in films that have a personal allure for me.
I did stand-up for over ten years. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I was that good. I didn’t put enough work into it. I did literally everything you’re not supposed to do. I corrected my mistakes. Maybe by the end, I wasn’t terrible. But I sure loved doing it.
A little performative swagger of my own back in 2007, when I thought I knew what I was doing as a comic.
As a performer, I had no time for other people’s arbitrary standards about speech. I was there to work. Up there on stage, I was doing work. If I didn't make the people laugh, then I had a bad day at work. I almost never blamed the audience. If I didn’t get the results I wanted, then I didn’t articulate my point well enough. At least, that’s how I saw it. But I never bothered too much if someone was offended. After all, I’d joked about something that made them uncomfortable. You have a right to be offended.
But in another way, you don’t have a right to never be offended. This is the price of free speech. To never have to encounter speech that makes us uncomfortable is a right we don’t have. What’s shocking depends on who’s receiving the shock. A shock at its core is just a form of surprise, of which there are only varying degrees. It was my observation that people who constrict themselves, who have walls built around themselves - morally, patriotically, or due to just plain old conformity or whatever - are, in a way, living in little prisons. When those walls get broken, that’s the surprise.
So I understood why people got upset. I would never scream, “oh, take a joke!” in people’s faces or anything like that. That would tell the audience that I have a combative motivation in how I speak to them. This contributes to a mistaken idea people get about stand-up that hinders its capacity for respect and recognition as an artform. To a degree however, I do look at stand-up as a relatively combative artform, hence all the violent language among comics regarding success (killing, slaying) or failure (bombing, dying) on stage. This is because I believe a comic should be angry about something, even if it’s something very trivial. But for the most part, if something didn’t work, 90% of the time, I believed it was my fault.
You’re building on a foundation of ideas, or at least smart observations, with language that George Carlin said could be, “stunning or spectacular.” He used those words advisedly. Not dirty language, “but rhetorical flourishes, things that have rhythm to them and have kind of a value of their own in just the way they sound.” Of course, the first obligation is to be funny. Finding the jokes. Carlin’s attitude was that there’s no foundation for language in this context to be harmful in any way, if one ignores those rude-to-some-and-not-others barriers.
George Carlin was why I wanted to do comedy and (foolishly) how I thought I came off when I did it.
In my own experience, I used words that people who didn’t know me or my work well enough could falsely interpret as indications of who I was. So in choosing not to honor what I also felt were arbitrary demarcations, I risked winding up with people thinking I was a complete anti-this or anti-that or I was phobic about this, or whatever. People become convinced that’s what kind of person you are. That shallow and literal reading of performance (I never believed Andrew Silverstein lived day to day as that guy). It’s a shame. I don’t subscribe to that. Because I do not believe language has that kind of power.
Honestly, I’m better at talking about it than I was at doing it.
It was in bumping up against the mentality behind wanting a performer gone for being offensive to somebody that I began to look more closely at the basis for these demarcations, which almost always arise from the questioning of values. That’s the kind of attitude and the kind of slant I wanted my comedy to have. My favorite comics were always the people who tried to showcase their writing. I love the musicality of language. I even tried to write bits in ten-syllable bursts of iambic pentameter because of the way it seems to psychologically satisfy our brains. Again, I was not successful consistently enough to really master the mechanism of this thing. It’s an elusive discipline, its illicit customs and rules always mutating and drifting across volatile cultural and political tides.
What complicated the basis for stand-up as a vehicle for speaking truth to power is that in my lifetime, a fair portion of oppressive power became invisible. People lost sight of the nature of that power and started attacking and threatening each other, which is exactly what our Capitalist gatekeepers want: A zero-sum institutional battle between identity groups, some who want to see their enemies vanquished, while for others, equality of outcomes supersedes rights or opportunities. It’s in this chaos that free speech becomes a casualty.
Insofar as we as a society can distinguish between entertainment and hate rhetoric - and a look at into any given sector of the current political discourse suggests that we neither can nor want to very much - this now more nebulous nature of societal dysfunction makes it harder for a humorist to point at something as a cause and say, “That right there!” Harder to distinguish just who the underdogs are. Harder for a comic to chip away at social hypocrisy when life under the whims of regimes and cults has a way of sucking everything into a shame-free black hole that is beyond satire.
***
So knowing what we know about Andrew Dice Clay’s raison d'être, its distinction from Eddie Murphy’s act posits the overcoming of an philosophical obstacle. What is it about our brains that makes a distinction between whistle-blowing dehumanization and vulgarity-laced human satire? We’ve talked about Dice’s fraud being the basis for his unworthiness. What makes Eddie Murphy worthy? Why should we give Eddie the pass we don’t give Dice?
Despite a long list of variables and contextual factors, the lines separating worthy art from unworthy art in much of the English-speaking world are illustrated by notions of authenticity, sincerity, and good taste. It is the commercial art market and its emphasis on targeting niches that has perhaps irreversibly scrambled these boundaries. And it is the mentality behind Politically Correct ideologies that would falsely equate Raw with Dice Rules for the phobic content in both films. This would be a shame, because I would argue that their artistic contrasts make for an important and instructive dialectic useful for getting one’s bearings in the slippery, fragmented culture that Neoliberal Capitalism has been sculpting our whole lives.
In Raw, which is Citizen Kane next to Dice Rules, Eddie Murphy picks on underdogs a fair bit as well. Fewer kinds of underdogs to be sure, in less of a mean-spirited manner, and from the vantage point of someone who’s a bit of an underdog himself: a young black man who became one of the biggest stars in white-run Hollywood. Coming from the world of comedy, he was a precocious, young ingenue: arguably the first black comedian to land starring roles in movies since Richard Pryor and who, unlike Pryor, did extraordinary box office numbers in a wide range of parts - the first real black comic movie idol.
His act contains some homophobia and more than a fair bit of sexism but the overall tone is one of incredulity, not disdain. It’s certainly not excusable but it doesn’t invalidate Murphy’s talent and it’s nothing approaching Dice’s relentlessness. The common theme throughout Raw is Murphy’s struggle to come to terms with the new, bizarre hazards of his fame, the expectations and pressures on him as a celebrity and as an artist. Most prominently among his concerns is the citing of a vindictive and litigious new breed of American woman in the 80’s.
“What would you do, baby? Take half?”
The bulk of Murphy’s act centers on this particular incredulity. He begins by relating the details of Johnny Carson’s messy public divorce (big tabloid fodder at that time) and relates his fear of being taken for half of his net worth (“Half!”) in a divorce settlement. The legal and financial savvy of the modern woman has taken him by surprise. It was a long overdue cultural awakening in which women began to break their allegiance to the men guarding the doors to their financial independence. We sense his paranoia and unsureness in understanding it.
In his own hit stand-up special, Bring The Pain, Chris Rock would remind us that having amassed fortunes to be protected is a relatively new thing for Black America, whose relationship to wealth was in its infancy. To this brash young version of Eddie Murphy, it looks like a climate where wealth can be easily lost and what he says on stage can come back to haunt his personal life. Of course, underneath all this is a genuine shock that women have ceased to be subservient doormats within relationships and would learn how to use the court system and the cultural climate to gain ground within a patriarchal system that denies them the same rights as men.
Why is it funny? Or at the very least, less offensive than Dice’s act? Because Murphy’s views on the shift in relationship dynamics and power dynamics between genders is something he seems to be working out on stage in real time, soliciting and implicating the audience in the process. It’s slyer, smarter and in better taste. But most importantly, there is humility in this dialogue, because he lacks the horror of total confidence.
Murphy sees himself from the outside. He’s constantly referencing the blows to his ego in navigating this new terrain. He sees the world from outside that ego, outside himself, and each character he affects is like a fresh angle for understanding that terrain. His self-awareness is what accounts for this humility. None of his characters are seen from a safe or voyeuristic distance.
All Murphy required was a mic and a stage. No band. No rug at his feet.
Murphy is always there alongside his creations. He imagines an especially effeminate Michael Jackson coming after him in retaliation for the jokes he did about Jackson in Delirious (1984). Then he goes on to call Jackson’s Moonwalk dance stupid before admitting his inablility to do the dance is probably the reason why. Later in the show, he recounts an incident involving a fight at a nightclub. He impersonates the macho Italian racist who picked a fight with him, as well as the tough guy version of himself, backed by a movie career as a leading man who always won and a dopey white guy he imagines would be intimidated by this act. He impersonates the black onlookers who joined in the resulting lawsuit against him to get paid and the nerdy white clubbers who threw him out. Then he personifies his own ego itself as it deals with the hard truth of his inability to intimidate others and hold his own in a real fight. Then his lips, swelling from the punch he’s taken, get their say. Then the relating of a remarkable phone call to his drunken, disapproving father to close the show.
“This is my house, Lillian. You don’t like it, you can get the fuck out!”
Eight different characterizations, each distinctive and articulate, are brought to life in the span of about eight minutes. Oppressors and victims, white and black opportunists, human beings and parts of human beings, family members and strangers, all of them spoken with body language that is alive and in the moment. It is the highest compliment I can think of to say Murphy is like Pryor in this respect. He is thinking, speaking, remembering and regretting using his entire body, telling a complete story from multiple angles, as well as its implications and its aftermath, without ever straining or losing the thread.
That’s why I bristle at the idea that these two concert films be lumped in together simply because they share a few tasteless ideas about what’s funny. Murphy’s act is about recognition - that of the audience with the celebrity on stage in front of them whose fame has now made that life so much different and more complicated than theirs. This kind of approach comes about as the result of searching around inside of oneself, confronting what is painful with regards to the process of coping with life.
Dice’s act meanwhile is one of affirmation, a kind of unity found in lowness and despair. Dice is happy to make no attempt to use the art of performance to include anyone not predisposed to what he claims to be offering, which is the idea of some sort of cultural rebellion, as opposed to Murphy’s more complex means of expression. The use of language, impersonation and gesture to create these effects when talking about the two performer’s accomplishments would be like measuring a paper airplane against a 747.
These specials would become the basis for what would become Murphy’s line in utilizing fat suits and drag makeup to play multiple characters in a single movie.
There are actually many similarities between Raw and Dice Rules that upon closer inspection, highlight the more striking differences between the two films and their stars. Both shows take place in Madison Square Garden and have rock concert vibes. But where Dice’s performance can’t be separated from the phenomenon of its animalistic crowd, Raw features not a single shot of the audience. Director Robert Townshend (a veteran black comedian himself) knew that cutaways would break the connection we come to have with Murphy, whose power comes from sustaining long stretches within character monologues. It would have been disastrous and unnecessary to interrupt the flow to simply remind us that people are nearby laughing and cheering. We hear it and that’s enough. Raw is essentially the Stop Making Sense of stand-up films.
Dexter St. Jock
Eddie Murphy does a fair amount of posing himself. Like Dice, he revels in the atmosphere of male glamor, strutting across the stage, dressed in a leather suit and black gloves that compliment his figure and swagger. Murphy, like Dice, also grabs his genitals and brags about his sexual prowess, occasioning material that conveniently affords him the opportunity to do so. Like Dice, he’s also pitched at the level of rock stardom, and both films rely on that as a model. Like Dice, Murphy is also not bashful about his high-profile status and his bumping up against celebrities in the Hollywood climate.
Murphy’s observations, like Dice's, are filtered through his experiences and he too takes some potshots at underdogs that are not entirely fair. I can’t abide what some of his jokes about gay men imply (ironically, it’s a bit about coming under fire for jokes he made about them in his last special), though I know people who are gay or rabidly anti-homophobia like myself who find Murphy’s impersonation of a flaming cop who delights in frisking him hilarious and studied, even despite his use of the word “fag”. Or they do have a problem with it but don’t think he should have to go away forever for having said it.
“He’s an asshole.”
If we recognize the voice and manner of Murphy’s gay character instantly, maybe it’s because most stereotypes contain a kernel of truth. Groups of people do tend to have similar habits and mannerisms. It never feels like a bit designed to deny the humanity of an entire class of people. It may to others. I’m not gay and can’t speak to anyone else’s experience. But it’s telling in the way Murphy appears to even crack himself up on stage after performing the bit as if in disbelief of his own outlandish excess. For a huge star, he comes across as relatively life size.
And while it would seem like excuse-making to mention the diminished progressive culture at the time Raw was filmed or the tumultuous events going on in Murphy’s life at the time, those contextualizations and the ability to avoid looking at everything through a lens of contemporary sensibilities do mean something. Murphy also has since repeatedly apologized and expressed regret about those specific bits, calling them “ignorant.” If Dice ever acknowledged the nakedly ignorant nature of any of his material, it would all have to be thrown out. He’d forfeit any reason to go on stage as that character.
This is the first of many ways in which the professionalism of Eddie Murphy breaks with the narcissism of Andrew Silverstein.
Murphy’s material always has a point. Because he’d become a high profile celebrity, he uses stories and anecdotes regarding situations that would be unfamiliar to the public - like coming under fire for making fun of other celebrities like Mr. T and Michael Jackson - and relates them using sharp impersonations that cast those situations into terms the audience can understand. It’s a night-and-day juxtaposition of perspective. Dice’s act aspires to the power and virility that his adolescent celebrity idols have. Murphy is constantly poking fun at that virility and power.
Murphy mocks racist Italian tough guys who come out of Rocky movies all fired up by Sylvester Stallone (Dice’s hero). After being chastised over the phone by Bill Cosby (who we would learn could not claim the moral high ground over anyone) for the profanity in his act, he gets affirmation and solace from his hero, Richard Pryor, who in so many words encourages him to be true to himself on stage, to be brutally honest and stick to the one thing a comic is supposed to do: make people laugh.
Growing up, humor was extremely important in my family. We watched stand-up. Richard Pryor and George Carlin were heroes in our household.
Murphy’s material about the new vindictiveness and proprietary values of women in the 80’s are not particularly enlightened. By Murphy’s admission, they’re the words of a “brash, young asshole.” He’s impressed by what he perceives as the subservient nature of Japanese women (“Now that’s pussy control!”) Most misogynist is his assertion that a woman will put up with any amount of male sleaze-baggery as long as he can bring her to orgasm. As sexisms go, it’s more dangerous in some ways than Dice’s act because there is humor and insight in some portions of this long stretch of Murphy’s act. Its success hinges almost entirely on the rapport Murphy builds with his audience, demonstrating an understanding and respect for them as a group.
He’s constantly polling them for applause when he wants to make a point, encouraging just the men or the women to clap as a response to his questions about their fidelity, as if to ground the material in the lived reality of the spectator. He also approximates the internal responses he imagines from audience members regarding the battle of the sexes he’s just ignited on stage. He goes as far to imagine couples arguing in the car on the way home from the show. Whatever you might think about some of his observations, he is always dialoguing directly and honestly to his audience. The material about women and relationships begins at the 23 minute mark and ends at the 59 minute mark. It’s clearly the focus of what Murphy wanted to stress and it’s an examination that ends with Murphy, having failed to solve the mystery of contemporary femaleness, telling the audience to “just go out and find somebody as fucked up as you are.”
Like Dice Rules, Raw also opens with a filmed segment designed as a snapshot from the performer’s early life. It opens on a family gettogether at the Murphy household. It’s after dinner and the young children are taking turns performing for the adults. The first thing we learn is how important the act of performance was in the home in which Murphy grew up. Following a girl who has the adults clapping and dancing along to her singing, one boy, whom we immediately assume to be a young Eddie, gets up to tell a joke. The highly inappropriate gross-out joke he tells has Eddie’s disappointed parents and all his relatives looking at each other and shaking their heads (save for one uncle played by Samuel L. Jackson who’s cracking up).
The setup sequence for Dice Rules felt interminable and apologetic for its performer’s inability to meet the requirements of a feature length running time. The four minute scene that opens Raw is like the introduction to a sprawling novel with dozens of major characters.
Just four minutes long, this sequence accomplishes what the clumsy sequence opening Dice Rules couldn’t accomplish in thirty minutes - it sets the tone for the film, gives us a hint of what we’re in for and tells us the most important thing we need to know about the performer: he’s a purebred entertainer. Dice’s opening xenophobically saw his persona and aspirations as thrust upon him as a result of the demands of a milquetoast society that was all but begging to be offended. Murphy however, was born that way. His offenses come out of the honesty of living as his real warts-and-all self. He uses the word “raw” a number of times throughout the show to describe a kind of brutal honesty and authenticity and his whole performance is essentially about his successes and failures to try to be true to that standard.
Though young, even a hot dog like Murphy has the hindsight to realize that age causes a gradual humbling. I love his beautifully wrought story about the disappointing hamburger made by his mother, who used her improvised home recipe to compensate for the fact that the McDonald’s hamburger her son wanted would have been a luxury in their family. The other children taunted him with “Where you get that big welfare green pepper burger?”
A greasy ball of meat served on Wonder Bread, the nostalgic burger of Eddie’s childhood is more than just the subject of a funny reflection. It’s an object bound up with class and race-based anxieties: a signifier of hard-luck status, as well the determination of his parents to provide for their children in spite of their economic circumstances, and of the strong need children always have to fit in. “You want that big burger when you get a little older,” Murphy says wistfully. It’s my favorite line in the show.
There is force and determination in the performance. Most importantly, there is purpose. It’s what separates an auteur from a cheap flavor of the month. Murphy creates an entire world, sketched out with gold-digging Hollywood hopefuls, predatory Jamaican lotharios, unspoiled African brides, crazed fans, the absurd tyrannies of a drunken father and many, many other deftly realized figures. He slips in and out of them all so rapidly and gracefully, it never feels overdone or strained.
Maybe this is why he’s able to take on multiple characters in a single movie with equal distinction. He’s a clear example of someone who just “had it,” as far a base of pure talent is concerned. Even joining the cast of Saturday Night Live at the age of 23, he’d arrived with a well-honed ability to travel in the shoes of whoever he spent time observing. People from his childhood, and new, well-realized creations. Past, present and future all existing within the same body, acting out the absurdity of what passes for modern life. It’s deeply personal and specific and its viewpoints are something only a black artist could have come up with. There is profanity turned into poetry, such that it can appeal to just about anyone.
”Did that?...hit?....my nuts?.....just now?”
Murphy, who not once has needed to mention the size of his crowd at the Garden in 1987, has since repeatedly has expressed pride in the way comedy has developed since he broke into the business as a young phenom in the 80’s. Despite regrets about the cringy nature of a portion of his act, he doesn’t see today’s comedy as a Cancel Culture minefield. And even though he admits to not following the news, he genuinely cares about the way it’s developed. “The artform is soaring,” he told Yahoo Entertainment in 2019. “Every now and then somebody might say something that ruffles somebody’s feathers or step on somebody’s toes or something but for the most part, it’s bigger or more global or more diverse than it’s ever been.”
”Eventually, your dick will fall off....”
These acknowledgements matter because stand-up does still need this encouragement. That’s why I’m bothering to barrel-shoot the obvious cash-grab charade that was Andrew Dice Clay’s fame in the late 80’s and early 90’s. He used the artform to get away with saying shitty things about the most vulnerable people in our society, flattering and enriching himself off of the fears of the easily led. When a comic goes too far, this is exactly what people mistakenly come to believe is the rationale behind it, until stand-up eventually begins to look like another form of performative masturbation. Provocation becomes the only thing people imagine a comic would take the stage for, until one wishes the artform would just go away, First Amendment be damned.
I think stand-up is some of the freest speech we have left, which is why I would defend to the death a performer’s right to do everything they do on stage. Even Andrew Dice Clay, whose act is part of the price of free speech. Censoring those attitudes won’t make them go away. They’ll instead migrate underground and fester and resurface in nastier new incarnations. They’ll turn up elsewhere, because as I said at the top of this essay, things have a way of resurfacing. To paraphrase Albert Camus: The plague is always ready to call up its rats again. It’s always already with us.
That is to say, nothing in culture is ever solved or tabled permanently, especially if it can be used to sway public opinion. No malevolent cultural force happens in a vacuum. Until this form of our society comes to terms with the basis for these forces, like our inclinations towards fascism and harsh Capitalism, the Harts and Chappelles of the world will continue to bear a disproportionate share of self-righteous clicktivism from successive generations of emotionally brittle young consumers, raised in a miasma of persecution and coddling, hopelessly lost in an abyss of self-regard.
It takes a head stuck very far in the sand not to see that Congress, the Supreme Court, various powerful lobby groups and media outlets that stoke our paranoia and rage over imagined threats to our freedom, represent a far greater threat to the victims of Dice’s or Murphy’s humor than the performers themselves or their fanbases. Or for that matter, those of Chappelle or Hart. It seems silly to have to say this but keep in mind, there are many, many very loud people tweeting who cannot discriminate between real or imagined offenses. They see all manner of mean things as connected and therefore, of equal offense in their similarities. This is the transgression of one of the main planks of guilt-by-association Political Correctness - the conflating of equality with “sameness.”
As long as social media algorithms and corporate news outlets continue to do their part in amplifying the mechanism for fake outrage, the police will continue to get away with beating and murdering unarmed citizens, undocumented immigrants will continue to be locked up for the crime of not being white, anti-LGBTQ legislation will continue to pass, the national amnesia will worsen, steps taken towards corporate oversight, economic regulations and the halting of climate change and other environmental failures will stall, the media will go unpunished for their culpability in weaponizing the misinformation machine, limited access to safe and humane abortion procedures will put more women in danger, conspiracy theories will go on replacing substantive truths and facts, the persecution of union organization and protest will intensify, voting will become regarded as a privilege instead of a right and small glowing screens will continue to wreak havoc on our souls and attention spans. All of this will continue to go on as long as enough people remain convinced that screaming about comedians who goof on sensitive issues is tantamount to actually doing anything about them.
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