Shirtless and dressed in red leather pants and matching jacket unzipped to his navel, Eddie Murphy sauntered onto the stage at Constitution Hall in Washington one night in 1983 and changed the face of stand-up comedy forever.
At the time, Murphy was “Saturday Night Live’s” youngest cast member and a newly in-demand movie star after the success of his action comedy “48 Hrs.”
Age 22 and cocky as a top gun pilot, Murphy used an arsenal of curse words that made his punch lines detonate with the force of a missile. But his jokes were a revelation.
Captured by an HBO documentary film crew, Murphy’s performance galvanized a generation of comedians when it went into rotation on the cable channel the following year under the title “Eddie Murphy: Delirious.”
And earlier this month, a 25th-anniversary “Delirious” DVD reached retail. The disc serves to remind comedy lovers that Murphy wasn’t always the family- friendly star of such flicks as “The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps” or “Daddy Day Care” — not to mention the tween-skewing “Imagine That,” now at area theaters.
Once upon a time, Murphy was a stand-up superstar who in equal parts could infuriate, entertain and inspire his audience.
” ‘Delirious’ put Eddie in a league by himself,” said comedian Robert Townsend, who directed Murphy’s second concert movie, “Raw,” and recently directed the documentary “Why We Laugh: Black Comedians on Black Comedy.”
“He definitely took the art form and raised the bar. He set a tone. And the rest of the comedians had to step up their game.”
Over the course of his act, Murphy verbally flambes an eclectic array of subject matter, with spot-on impersonations of Elvis, Teddy Pendergrass, Stevie Wonder and Ricky Ricardo; re-enactments of what Mr. T and “The Honeymooners’ ” Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton would have been like as outed gay men.
And Murphy became perhaps the earliest comedian to riff on how Michael Jackson “ain’t the most masculine fellow in the world.”
He made the ridiculous sublime while also managing to get laughs out of such once-sacrosanct subjects as AIDS, slavery, domestic violence and what he predicted would be the assassination attempt on America’s first black president.
Adhering to a long-held policy of not granting newspaper interviews, Murphy declined to comment. But on the “Delirious” DVD, a Who’s Who of black comedians, including Chris Tucker, Cedric the Entertainer, Sinbad and Martin Lawrence, weighs in on the TV special’s initial impact.
“Eddie Murphy inspired me to become a comic,” Chris Rock says. ” ‘Delirious’ was a combination of two things: great material and a great performance. I had never seen anything like it.”
Adds Keenen Ivory Wayans: “That was a defining moment in comedy.
Upon airing, “Delirious” generated no small share of controversy for the special’s profanity (which was considered excessive by the era’s abiding mores but hardly raises an eyebrow today).
Moreover, critics decried Murphy’s gay jokes as homophobic, resulting in protest pickets at his subsequent stand-up engagements.
“I never paid any of that stuff any mind,” Murphy says on the DVD. “It was part of it — what I was doing. It came with it.”
