MR.GUMBY TALKS DIRTY

MR.GUMBY TALKS DIRTY

EDDIE MURPHY Comedian

(Entertainment Company/CBS)

by

Mitchell Cohen

Eddie Murphy's impersonation of Michael Jackson singing "She's Out Of My Life" isn't merely savagely accurate, and funny ("Tito, give me some tissue"), it's shrewd. Skewering Jackson, and the other singers in the bit, including mid-and-late period Elvis, Stevie Wonder (a long-winded Grammy acceptance speech) and James Brown (grunting unintelligible), sets up the terms of Murphy's fame: other comics aren't the competition, only pop stars. His arrogance isn't all that presumptuous, since Murphy was on every magazine cover in '83 that Jackson wasn't —both,by year's end, had appeared in John Landis movies (a 1995 trivia question)—and since their dual ascendancies are due to a precocious mix of instinct, packaging and canny synthesis. In a rare moment of foresight years ago, this writer offered the theory that the guy who came along combining James Brown, Smokey Robinson and youthful sex appeal would rule the world. Jackson proved me right, but I'd never have extended the idea to imagine the impact of a comic who combined Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby and y.s.a.

It isn't easy keeping those elements in balance, and Comedian falters when Murphy gets his influences jumbled up: the longest piece on the LP, a description of a family cookout, is meant to be a narrative tour de force, with a number of characters and incidents, as well as a througha-child's-eyes reminiscence. There are moments of high comedic observation (the uncle who builds a raging inferno to cook the burgers and franks), but Murphy doesn't sustain interest in the scene. He also has the tick of punctuating everything, even the most inappropriate routines, with profanity, and when "Barbeque" starts to falter, all we hear is a harsh string of "m.f."s and other, as they used to say, unprintables. But apart from "Barbeque" and some Carlinesque scatology ("The Fart Game"), Murphy is in top form on the nasty stuff, and on some of the gentler material as well: a depiction of his mother as the Clint Eastwood of shoe-throwers, the effect of jingling ice cream truck bells on a kid playing in the street, a dead-on Ricky Ricardo impression.

A number of gays have had a fit over this album and the HBO special that's its audio-visual companion piece (both were taped this past August in D.C.), taking out ads in entertainment trade papers castigating Murphy. He does what-ifthey-were-gay jokes about Mr. T, and Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton, but they're in an ancient smuttycomic tradition of imagining famous figures in pornographic postures. No big deal. What's upset gays more, it seems, is Murphy's acknowledged homophobia regarding AIDS. It's understandable why Murphy s attitude bothers some people, but the primary thrust (no pun intended) of the routine is a panic at the increasing severity of sexually-transmitted diseases, from gonorrhea, which took a shot to cure, to herpes, which you keep "forever, like luggage," to AIDS, which kills people. Next, Murphy worries, "You just put your dick in and explode."

Sex is a key topic on Comedian, and rightly so. On SNL, playing Buckwheat, Gumby, Mr. Robinson and even Tyrone Green, and so far in movies, Murphy's been virtually neutered (his determiniation to get laid in 48 HRS was treated as a running gag, and Aykroyd got the girl in Trading Places). Doing stand-up, he overcompensates, bragging about being in his sexual prime. His bits on man-woman stuff—the fumblings of an inexperienced 18-year-old, the fury of a woman who won't stand for any macho bull—are sharply rendered. He only brushes on racism, but when he does he's on target, remarking incredulously that young blacks can't imagine how their ancestors got roped into slavery, or doing a riff on Jesse Jackson delivering a presidential speech while dodging the rifle sights of would-be assassins.

Comparisons to Pryor are going to follow Murphy around for a while: they both do caricatures of white people cursing, for example,and there are strong similarities in vocabulary and sensibility. But there are parts of Comedian, "Singers" especially, and also "Modern Women," that suggest Murphy, at a frighteningly confident 22, is well on the way to claiming a chunk of comic ground all his own.