"One would think that Mr. Murphy was given his freedom to leave the plantation, so that he could make his own decisions; but he decided to sell himself back to being a Hollywood Slave."

"[Stepin Fetchit plus cooning equals the destruction of Black Men in Hollywood.] Remember, Mr. Murphy, that Bill Cosby became legendary because he used comedy to humanize all races, religions and genders; but your attacking Mr. Cosby helps you embark on just becoming click bait," instagrammed Bill Cosby's spokesman, quoted in "Bill Cosby’s spokesman rips Eddie Murphy as ‘Hollywood Slave’ over ‘SNL’ jab" (NY Post)

The bracketed sentence is in the original Instagram but sanitized out of the NY Post story. The spokesman's quote reads like a garbled mess without that extra line. With it, I can remember Cosby's criticism of Murphy. If I hadn't dug a little deeper and seen the elided sentence, I'd have said that the statement was worse than saying nothing, because Murphy's joke was mild and contained no factual imperfections or even nastiness, and to criticize it is to make us read it again:

“If you would have told me 30 years ago that I would be this boring, stay-at-home house dad and Bill Cosby would be in jail, even I would have took that bet,” Murphy said.

“Who is America’s dad now?”

But with that extra line, I remember Cosby's old argument against black comedians continuing to use old racist stereotypes to amuse white people. And that is a good description of Murphy's old "SNL" characters, which he reprised unapologetically on last Saturday's show. (I blogged: "[The] Eddie Murphy material was full of racist stereotypes — Mr. Robinson, the criminal; Buckwheat, whose one joke is that he cannot articulate words; Gumby, the angry one; Velvet Jones, the pimp — and yet because these were reprisals of supposedly beloved characters by the show's biggest star from the distant past, they were apparently considered okay to present today.")

Here's Eddie Murphy in 1987 describing how Cosby criticized him, back when Cosby was "America's dad":




And here's Eddie Murphy — accepting the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2015 — mocking Cosby, after the sexual assault allegations had become viral:



Bill Cosby had won the Mark Twain Prize in 2009, and it was rescinded in 2018, after his conviction for sexual assault. It's interesting to see the elite audience in 2015 yukking it up about sexual assault. Murphy's routine at the time was clearly and viciously anti-Cosby, but it was not somber and serious about rape.

In that clip, you hear the name Hannibal Buress. Buress is the comedian whose 2014 standup comic routine revived the old allegations against Cosby:

Buress addressed Cosby's legacy of "talk[ing] down" to young black men about their style of dress and lifestyle. Buress criticized the actor's public moralizing by saying, "Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby, so that kind of brings you down a couple notches." The audience appeared to respond to Buress's accusation with incredulity; he encouraged everyone to search for "Bill Cosby rape" when they got home....

A media firestorm ensued, with numerous publications tackling the question of how Cosby had managed to maintain, as Buress called it in his set, a "Teflon image" despite more than a decade of public sex-abuse accusations. 

And here's the Wikipedia article for Stepin Fetchit. I have blogged about him before, noting this quote from the book: "Stepin Fetchit: The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry":

He was reviled in the African-American press (and soon after, in the culture at large) as a racist caricature, the "subservient, dim-witted, craven, eye-rolling" Negro. By the 1960's, his name had become an epithet, like "Uncle Tom."

In a 1968 CBS special entitled "Of Black America," a young comic named Bill Cosby proclaimed that "the tradition of the lazy, stupid, crap-shooter, chicken-stealing idiot was popularized by an actor named Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry." The outraged Fetchit, then 66, movingly responded during a press conference: "They're making me a villain," but "if it wasn't for me there wouldn't be no Sidney Poitier or Bill Cosby or any of them."

ADDED: In 2015, Eddie Murphy declined an invitation to do his Cosby imitation on "Saturday Night Live."

Norm Macdonald tweeted... that he and the other writers had intended for Eddie Murphy, on his first appearance on the show in 30 years, to play Bill Cosby as a drink-mixing bartender during their supersized Celebrity Jeopardy sketch.... “Eddie decides the laughs are not worth it. He will not kick a man when he is down.” It was a principled decision that many would disagree with; in the end, current cast member Kenan Thompson revived his Cosby impression to notably less effect.