David Spade on ’25 Years’ Spent Getting Eddie Murphy to Forgive Him for ‘SNL’ Joke: ‘He Was a Hero’

David Spade and Eddie Murphy have buried the hatchet over an infamous Saturday Night Live joke, but it took more than a couple of decades.

Spade said that he and his fellow SNL alum Murphy are “all good” now after they reunited at last year’s SNL50: The 50^th Anniversary Special, though it took “25 years” for him to win Murphy’s favor after he made a joke on Saturday Night Live about Murphy’s 1995 Vampire in Brooklyn.

“It was weird going from being a super fan to having him hate me overnight, and to try to win him back for the last 25 years,” Spade said during a recent episode of his Fly on the Wall podcast with Dana Carvey.

“We had some bumps in the road along the way, early on. I was on Weekend Update on SNL, new to the show, making fun of all the celebrities and I made fun of him and it didn’t go well,” Spade told Carvey. “And he called me and we had it out.”

Spade added, “Actually, he had it out. I didn’t really fight back. Because I did feel a little guilty about it. And he did make some sense, I just didn’t like that because he was a hero.”

It was a long feud. Back in Dec. 9, 1995 during the Weekend Update segment, Spade was poking fun at several celebrities. He included Murphy and Vampire in Brooklyn, which had a poor box office draw. “Look, children, it’s a falling star. Make a wish! You make a Hollywood minute omelet, you break some eggs,” he said of Murphy at the time.

During Murphy’s recent Netflix documentary, Being Eddie, he said that he declined to return to SNL for years due to that joke. “The joke had went through all of those channels that the joke has to go through, and then he was on the air saying, ‘Catch a falling star,’” Murphy said, per Variety. “So I wasn’t like, ‘Fuck David Spade.’ I was like, ‘Oh, fuck SNL. Fuck y’all. How y’all going to do this shit? That’s what y’all think of me? Oh, you dirty motherfuckers.’ I was like that. And that’s why I didn’t go back for years.”

Murphy did eventually return to host SNL in 2019, which earned him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.
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On the Fly on the Wall podcast, Spade said that he and Murphy reunited at SNL: 50 and things are fine between them.

“I’ve seen him once or twice. And then I saw him at the 50th and we talked a little bit and everything’s fine,” Spade said. “And then they asked him about it and he said, ‘Yeah, we’re all good.’ So yeah, we’re all good.”