Rewatching Eddie Murphy's Delirious

41 years later, it's both hysterically funny and difficult to watch

The funniest stand-up show I’d ever seen in my life premiered on HBO on October 15th, 1983. Except I didn’t watch the obscenity-filled comedy that night because I was only 8 years old. Oh wait—it was the ‘80s— my age had nothing to do with it. My family didn’t have cable or a VCR until the ‘90s, so I didn’t get to see it until I was a teenager, a more appropriate age for watching a comedian do a bit where he bends over at the waist pretending to be a gay Mr. T who’s demanding to be “fucked in the ass”.

By the time I watched Delirious, I’d already become a huge Eddie Murphy fan from his hit movies Beverly Hills Cop, Trading Places, and Coming To America. Saturday Night Live introduced his comedic gift to the world in the late ‘70s, which is how tons of other Gen-Xers first got to know him. In the ‘80s, I didn’t know anyone who didn’t love him. Even one of my best friends, Jessica, told me one day while I was riding her bus home with her that she named the family’s new pet dog “after my favorite comedian— Murphy.”

My sister Sarah and I would repeatedly watch Delirious and laugh, well, deliriously. Eddie Murphy has a gift for channeling the people he’s joking about, seamlessly switching from being himself to portraying the different personalities in his stories. While humorously reminiscing about his family’s cookouts, he becomes his drunk father, slightly slurring his words as his dad accuses his brother’s wife of being “a Bigfoot” because she’s got a mustache and once said to him “Goonie goo-goo”.

“I thought I learned some new Spanish shit! I said to my friend Sanchez, ‘Hey Sanchez, goonie goo-goo’ and he said ‘Get the fuck outta here!” Sarah and I would be doubled over, our abs in agony from silent laughter.

Then Murphy asked the audience “Ever have a heavy-set aunt fall down a flight of steps?” When he put the mic close-up to his mouth and created the sound of her falling downstairs, disrupted occasionally by the aunt yelling “Lord help me Jesus!” the entire audience erupted in laughter. Comedy gold.

Who could forget his hilarious portrayal of how excited we all got when we were little kids and heard the ice cream truck arrive— “The ice cream man is coming!”

One afternoon, Sarah had a friend over—we’ll call her “Shelly”— and when we learned she’d never seen the comedy special we immediately pushed the VHS tape into the VCR and plopped ourselves down in front of the TV, prepared to live vicariously through Shelly’s first experience of the riotously funny performances. After 5 or 10 minutes had passed without Shelly producing a single chuckle, she turned to us and said “This is fucking AWFUL, guys.” Sarah and I glanced at each other in shock. Shelly continued, in full disgust, saying “None of this is funny.” At the time, we wrote her off as having no sense of humor. Now, I think she was just ahead of her time.

Fortunately, a lot has changed for the better in the last 40 years. Unfortunately, that means a lot of previously enjoyed entertainment suffers from a major case of The Cringe. I watched Delirious last night even though I remembered it well, just as a refresher, but I still wasn’t prepared to realize I am now “Shelly”. Don’t get me wrong, there were still moments of hilarity and I think Murphy is still one of the most talented human beings on the planet, but to call some of the skits “problematic” now would actually be an understatement.

Delirious begins The Cringe in the first few minutes with Murphy’s casual use of the slur “fa**ot” while blatantly owning his homophobia. “I’m scared of gay people—petrified”, he declared before launching into jokes that surely perpetuated harmful stereotypes of the time. I remember the devastating impact AIDS had on the country when we erroneously believed it was only a “gay disease” and ignorance of how it spread caused panic, so Murphy’s joke about straight people “going home with AIDS on your lips” after a casual kiss just felt cold. I was never one to use anti-gay slurs, and even spoke out against it when I heard people use them, so I’m surprised I was able to look past it back then just because a comedian said them. In 1996, Murphy apologized for the dangerous tropes about LGBTQ people in his early material.

It was 1983 not ‘81 but whatever, the important thing is that he owned his mistakes

There were a few other “jokes” that were anything but funny to me, and rewatching Delirious reminded me they actually didn’t sit well with me back in the day, too. When he’s portraying his drunk father, he pretends to scold a 7 year-old Eddie for not taking care of his dog, saying he “kicks the dog” when Eddie isn’t home. This made some of the audience laugh, presumably because they’re psychopaths. Later, Murphy asked “Remember in the old days when you could beat up a woman?” I wasn’t sure if he was saying he misses when men could legally get away with domestic violence or if he was simply remarking on how times have changed, but either way—yikes.

In this scene he’s either joking about going to Texas “looking for racism” or how his mom was like a gun-toting sheriff with her shoes

After 41 years, one should expect some of the material to be dated. Let me tell you, almost ALL of the celebrity references and impressions were dated. The only exceptions were probably Mick Jagger, Elvis, Michael Jackson, and Ronald Reagan. Most people under 25 years old would know who they are, but the other famous people Murphy jokes about would be unknown to Zoomers and younger: Jimmy Walker, Billy Dee Williams, Angela Davis, Desi Arnaz, Luthor Vandross, and The Honeymooners, to name just a few.

One of my favorite moments is when Eddie takes an audience member’s camera and proceeds to snap some pictures of the auditorium, then turns the camera toward his crotch and takes a shot. “Let’s see you explain that one to the guys at Fotomat.” Then he says in a nerdy white guy voice: “It’s a picture of Eddie Murphy’s dick.” I would love to know if that guy still has that camera and those photos.

When Jordan Peele’s 2016 horror masterpiece Get Out was released, I remember wondering if he was inspired by the famous bit in Delirious when Eddie makes fun of white people who stay in haunted houses, referencing the famous scene in The Amityville Horror when the ghost voice whisper-yells “Get out!” Turns out he was.

There’s a ton of racist jokes in Delirious, BUT, and this is a big BUTT, Murphy makes fun of almost EVERYONE. White, Black, Chinese, plus the Arabic and French languages. That said, I did feel bad for Chinese men when he perpetuates the stereotype they have “little dicks”. Anyone who’s experienced negative stereotyping or read my post about micro-aggressions understands why this gets a big fat YIKES.

My absolute favorite part of Delirious is actually how he chose to end it. He’s standing there in his tight red leather pants and unzipped jacket, exposed hairless chest and gold necklaces, a tiny amount of sweat glistening on his brow, and he says there was a Black opera singer in the 1930s named Marian Anderson who wasn’t allowed to sing there (at Constitution Hall in Washington D.C.) because of segregation. “And now a 22-year-old Black man is on stage getting paid to hold his dick” he says triumphantly as he drops the mic and walks off stage to a standing ovation.