Fans are still reeling from watching Eddie Murphy revive some of his most famous Saturday Night Live characters on this past weekend's episode. The famous comedian returned to the stage that helped make him a star and brought in the highest number of viewers the series has seen all year. Ahead of his Saturday Night Live performance, Eddie sat down with The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon to chat about his return to comedy, a discussion that prompted an interesting story about Keenen Ivory Wayans.
Fallon asked Eddie about his preparations to return to the stand-up stage in 2020 and the comedian revealed that he doesn't write down his material. Then, Eddie admitted that he no longer has the leather suits that he wore in his stand-up specials Delirious or Raw. He keenly remembers what happened to the red suit he wore in Delirious and its demise courtesy of Keenen.
Eddie said he didn't care about the outfits because he had no idea that they would one day be his signature looks. He doesn't know what happened to the Raw suit, but he said that he and Keenen, a friend he's had since he was 16, were getting ready for a night on the town when Keenen saw the red leather suit in Eddie's closet. "Keenen's like six-four with muscles [and] the suit was bustin' off him," Eddie recalled. "I said, 'I dare you to go out with that suit on! This was back in the day so we went to Studio 54 and all these clubs."
Eddie also shared that Kenan's classic In Living Color character Frenchie was birthed out of that night while wearing that suit. "That started from going to the club one night and he was Frenchie from ten to six in the morning and didn't come out of character...At the end of the night, the suit was destroyed." The actor added that girls would later call looking for Frenchie, but Keenen told him he couldn't talk to these women because he was pretending to be someone else. Keenen actually shared this same story years ago, so watch Eddie and Keenen tell their versions of the Frenchie tale below.