Eddie Murphy’s comedic chops already have earned him a place among the all-time legends—and it turns out he has a knack for ventriloquism, too.
In his new Netflix documentary Being Eddie, the 64-year-old actor and comic unboxed custom-made puppets of fellow comedians Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor.
Murphy then mocked how Cosby, who was accused of assault and other sexual abuse by over 60 women, would react to a question about whether he drugged a piece of chocolate.
“Did you put that pill in the chocolate?” Murphy asks the Cosby puppet before putting on the high-pitched, affected voice of the disgraced Cosby Show actor.
“Now, see, how you gonna ask me, ‘Did I put the pill in the chocolate?’ When you know that I put the pill in the chocolate,” Murphy says as the Cosby puppet.
With the Pryor puppet, Murphy says in a gruff voice, “Goddamn, this your place? Well, I’ll be damned. I put the pill in my motherfucking mouth. Motherfuck the chocolate.”
Per Netflix’s Tudum, documentary director Angus Wall gifted Murphy the props after the comedian discussed returning to stand-up and getting a puppet made of Pryor.
The Coming to America star had said he owned other puppets and broke them out for impromptu bits. (He also voiced puppets on a Saturday Night Live skit making fun of Mr. Rogers in 1981.)
“If Paul Mooney was around, [if] we were on vacation somewhere, then I’d pull a puppet out and Paul would go, ‘This [n***a’s] crazy. This [n***ga] has lost his mind,’” Murphy said, per Netflix. “[Singer] Val Young is an old friend of mine, so I had a puppet of her made, and I’d do an impression of her.”
The Mooney puppet made an appearance in the film, as well, with Murphy imagining him saying, “This [n***a] has lost his mind.”
“That’s what Mooney would say: ‘In the documentary, he broke out three [n***a] puppets, homie. [N***a], I spun around in my grave,’” joked Murphy, who was gifted a puppet in his own likeness on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Elsewhere in the documentary, other comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock lauded Murphy for his career and successes, which include an Emmy for his return to SNL in 2019.
“The guy’s been famous for longer than I’ve been alive, you know?” Michael Che, a current SNL cast member, said in the doc. “It’d be really interesting to hear what he has to say. What the world looks like to him. What do we look like to him, you know?”
