War Stories but no wars, or bang bang to cover: The Night I Wandered Into "Buckwheat Is Dead"
Some of the best stories in this business happen when the cameras aren't supposed to be pointed at us.
I was an NBC News producer, out on assignment covering a story in the field. By the time I got back to the newsroom that night, something was off. The place was full of people I didn't recognize. I walked to my own desk and found a stranger sitting in my chair.
I asked him, politely enough, what exactly was going on. I got no comment. My phone rings and its Alice, who tells me Im in the middle of a liv SNL set,
Turned out I'd walked straight into the middle of a "Saturday Night Live" taping. Joe Piscopo was playing Ted Koppel. Eddie Murphy was deep into his "Buckwheat Is Dead" bit. If you know where to look, top right of the screen, you'll catch me standing there, clearly wondering whose newsroom I'd wandered into.
Years passed. I'd moved on to Univision News, working the West Coast in LA. I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard one night when a doorman at a comedy club waved me over, offered me a drink, and told me to stick around a while.
I didn't know it yet, but Eddie Murphy was about to try out a brand-new stand-up routine, raw, unfiltered, and full of language that would never survive a broadcast standards meeting. It was one of the funnier nights I've had in this business, and I got to see it before the world did.
Two decades, two networks, one comedian, proof that sometimes the best stories find the reporter instead of the other way around.
This was a fantastic bit of Murphy's Law, the good kind, apparently, since it worked out twice in my favor.
Walking back into the newsroom that night and finding yourself accidentally cast as a background extra in "Buckwheat is Dead" is the kind of story that gets better with every retelling. Piscopo doing his stone-faced Koppel opposite Murphy in full Buckwheat mode was one of the sharper recurring bits of that SNL era, and I got a permanent, if accidental, cameo in it.
Is the Hollywood Boulevard doorman story is the better sequel? Getting pulled in for a drink and ending up watching Murphy work out raw, unfiltered material before it ever hit a stage or a special that's the kind of thing comedy nerds would trade a lot to have witnessed. Stand-up comics famously use small rooms like that to stress-test jokes precisely because they can say the unsayable-on-TV stuff and see what actually lands.
Two brushes with the same guy, a decade or so apart, at two different networks that's a good line for a memoir if I ever write one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaDToc8CsOE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9nG2eTn5VI&list=PLC2OiS73j-0gmZN27jgu6EL9mp2-L6Um6&index=2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqbvsDt_D3o
Eddie raw, but still he was funny. However it was full of those dirty words we would would never ever say on TV if you want to avoid the wrath of the FCC.