When Tituss Burgess recently appeared on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Cohen asked Burgess what it was like working with Eddie Murphy in their recent film Dolemite Is My Name because, “He was very problematic for the gays at one point when I was coming up.”
Burgess basically answered that Murphy was nice to him, but if you look at the expression on his face, he wasn’t too pleased with Cohen’s question and he explained why later on Instagram:
Here’s a clip of Cohen asking the question. (Watch for the extreme side eye that Burgess shoots him after answering the question.)
Page Six points out, “Cohen famously wrote in his memoir Most Talkative that he was traumatized in high school after attending one of Murphy’s standup shows with his friends where ‘every other word out of [Murphy’s] mouth’ was a gay slur. Cohen had not publicly addressed his sexuality with his friends at the time.”
Yes, Murphy’s 1983 stand-up special Delirious features homophobic slurs and jokes about AIDS — and he was once caught y police in 1997 with a trans sex worker in his car — but that stand up special was 36 years ago, and he apologized for it in 1996, so why ask Burgess about it? For a reaction, that’s why.
Well, Cohen got one, just probably not the one he expected.
