Eddie Murphy is returning to stand-up comedy
Big news for Eddie Murphy fans. The comedian has just confirmed that he will be hitting the road for a new stand-up comedy tour that people have been waiting decades for.
Details are limited right now, but Murphy himself released news about the tour on the Netflix podcast, “Present Company With Krista Smith.”
“Next year, in 2020, I’m going to go on the road and do some stand-up,” Murphy told Smith on a recent episode of the show.
Murphy also recently talked to Jerry Seinfeld on Netflix’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” about how he was exercising his comedy muscles again.
“I’m going to do it again,” he told Seinfeld on the streaming series. “Everything just has to be right. You have to get up there and start working it out.”
In addition to his upcoming tour, fans of Murphy can also look forward to seeing the comedian return to “Saturday Night Live,” where he became a worldwide star in the 1980s. While the comic shot to fame on the “SNL” stage, he has not been back on the show for 35 years.
On Dec. 21, “SNL” fans will see Murphy take center stage again as the show’s host. While Murphy has not been a part of the long-running television series since 1984, his impact on the NBC program is widely acknowledged.
“Out of nowhere, Eddie saved ‘Saturday Night Live,’,” said fellow “SNL” alum Chris Rock during an anniversary special episode of the show. “If ‘Saturday Night Live’ hadn’t hired Eddie Murphy, this show wouldn’t have lasted half as long as ‘Baywatch'”.
And “SNL” historians agree.
“He saved the franchise,” James A. Miller, co-author of “Live From New York,” said in an interview with ThinkProgress in 2015. “I think there are a lot of arguments to be made over who may have been the best cast member or the funniest cast member, but I think 19-year-old Eddie Murphy hopped on ‘Saturday Night Live’ at a time when its future was very uncertain … But Eddie was vital.”
Murphy’s stand-up comedy career was equally heralded, with his acclaimed specials, “Delirious” and “Eddie Murphy Raw,” standing as all-time classics because of his sharp delivery and skin-tight costumes.
In 2004, Comedy Central ranked him as the 10th greatest stand-up comic in history. He walked away from the stage in the late 1980s and there’s long been speculation that he would return but it seemed like a fantasy until now.
We’ll keep an eye out for upcoming details about Murphy’s 2020 tour and cross our fingers that he’ll release a new special as well.