Depth-finder: What makes a grudge stick

A joke may have sparked Eddie Murphy's 15-year grudge against "Saturday Night Live," but there was much more to it than that.

On Dec. 9, 2005, comedian David Spade looked into the camera as a picture of Eddie Murphy appeared above his left shoulder during that week’s broadcast of “Saturday Night Live.”

“Look, children,” Spade said to the audience, “It’s a falling star. Make a wish.”

The joke took less than 15 seconds to deliver. It was part of Spade’s “Hollywood Minute,” which was chock full of catty cheap shots aimed at folks in show business.

The audience reacted with a collective “Oh,” which fell somewhere between a laugh and a groan. Murphy was — and is — the show’s most famous alum.

“Yeah,” Spade said. “Yes. That’s right. You make a ‘Hollywood Minute’ omelet, you break some eggs.”

Two days after the show aired, Murphy was calling the SNL offices, looking for Spade. Spade ducked the call. Murphy called back. A couple of times. When Spade returned his call, Murphy was furious.

Murphy then waged a cold war against SNL that lasted more than a decade. It didn’t fully thaw until 2019, when he came back to host the show.

It’s tempting to conclude that Murphy overreacted to a single joke.

But that’s because we tend to see grudges as the result of a specific incident.

That’s not how grudges usually work, however.

The triggering event isn’t the only factor. In fact, in most cases, it’s not the biggest factor.

It certainly wasn’t the case with Murphy’s grievance against the show, which was a launching pad for his career. It wasn’t in my 20-year grudge against my stepfather, either, but I’m getting ahead of things.

Let’s start by looking at the three things that determine not just if we’ll hold a grudge, but how tightly we might cling to it:

1. The triggering event

This is the flashpoint. The thing that gets cited when someone asks, “Why don’t you like such-and-such?” However, this triggering event is often the proverbial straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.

2. The surrounding context

These are the 9,999 straws beneath the proverbial backbreaker. Less proverbially, it’s the circumstances surrounding the triggering event, especially our history with the person (or institution) we’re angry at.

3. Your own personal perspective

This has nothing to do with the other party and everything to do with us. We all come equipped with our own vulnerabilities, tendencies, and personality traits. This individual psychology can make us more sensitive or reactive to certain things.

OK, let’s get back to the case study.

The event that triggered Eddie Murphy’s grudge against Saturday Night Live was fairly minor.

Spade’s joke about Murphy came after the less-than-optimal box office returns of the film “Vampire in Brooklyn.”

The context is important, though. Not in terms of Murphy’s relationship with Spade because he didn’t really have one, but with the show.

Murphy: “When he said that (stuff) about my career on ‘SNL,’ it was like, ‘Yo, it’s in-house! I’m one of the family, and you’re (messing) with me like that?”¹

Because of his experience on the show, Murphy knew the checks and balances that existed.

“I know that he can’t just say that,” Murphy said. “A joke has to go through these channels. So the producers thought it was OK to say that.”

And then comes the personal perspective. Murphy felt that he’d been ridiculed in a way that was different—more pointed—than former SNL cast members like Chevy Chase, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd.

“All the people that have been on that show, you’ve never heard nobody make no joke about anybody’s career,” Murphy said.

It felt not just pointed at Murphy, but personal.

“I thought that was a cheap shot,” Murphy said. “And it was kind of, I thought — I felt it was racist.”

So let’s sort Murphy’s grudge into the three different fuel sources.

1. The triggering event: the joke

“I thought that was a cheap shot,” Murphy said.

2. The surrounding context: Murphy’s history with the show

“It was like, ‘Yo, it’s in-house! I’m one of the family, and you’re (messing) with me like that?”

3. Murphy’s own personal perspective

“I felt it was racist,” Murphy said.

So was Murphy right to be that mad?

I think that’s an unproductive question.

The fact is that Murphy did get very mad for a few different reasons and perhaps a few more he either hasn’t revealed or isn’t aware of.

When it comes to defusing a grudge, though, it’s important to understand the actual source of the anger. This is true both for the person who's holding the grudge and anyone looking to soften it.

Telling Murphy, “It was just a joke,” is unlikely to have much effect. To Murphy, it wasn’t just a joke. He felt he was being singled out in a way that other cast members had not been.

He eventually got over it. It just took a while.

A first-person perspective

Let’s put my own history into this framework.

I held a grudge against my stepfather for a solid 20 years.

The triggering event: My mom concluded that he’d been unfaithful. After he’d repeatedly denied this for two full years, he called her one morning to say he had tested positive for HIV and she needed to undergo a blood test, too. She tested negative, which provided a great deal of relief, but this didn’t erase the fact that (I believe) he put my mom’s health at risk.

The surrounding context: The diagnosis came after two years of increasingly dysfunctional behavior in which he:

• lost his job as a public-school superintendent after scrutiny of his unchecked spending;

• moved out on my mom’s birthday;

• depleted their retirement savings by—among other things—leasing a series of increasingly fancy cars.

I found his behavior wildly hypocritical given how strict and self-righteous he’d acted back when I was a teenager. When I did something he didn’t like, he would call me into his bedroom, close the door, and explain that he would never dream of being as selfish and arrogant toward his family as I was toward mine. He would also ground me, but it was those lectures — and the way he would ramp up the pressure until I cried — that had the biggest impact on me.

My own personal perspective: I tend to feel I am something of a pushover. That I prioritize the needs and desires of others to such an extent that I often don’t know what I actually want. Then, if things don’t turn out as I hoped, I regret not having stood up for myself sooner.

My grudge was not rooted in the triggering event. It was more like the tipping point.

When I heard about my stepfather’s diagnosis, it was one of the only times in my life I felt any real sympathy for him. This compassion, however, was mixed with the anger and fear I felt because (I believe) he put my mom’s health at risk.

What I was really angry about was his refusal to apologize or be accountable for what had occurred. He flat-out refused to talk to me about it.

A little more than a year after he moved out, he invited my brother, my sister, and me to visit him for Christmas. He gave me an email address and asked for an RSVP. I sent a note saying I felt it was disingenuous to have a holiday gathering without first having an honest conversation about what had happened in our family. I told him if he wanted to continue to have a relationship with me, we’d need to have that talk. He never responded to me.

The next time I saw him was two and a half years later at my brother's college graduation. My stepfather walked up to me as if nothing had happened and spread his arms in anticipation of a hug.

My cheeks flushed, I became slightly dizzy, and I remember trying to keep my face perfectly still. Then, I accepted his hug.

Some of that was because I didn’t want to distract from the graduation. Some of it, I feared, was because I still couldn’t defy his expectations. Not even at age 30, knowing the ways he’d hurt my mom.

I spent years resenting not just my stepfather for putting me in that position, but myself. The fact I returned his embrace became Exhibit A of how big of a pushover I was.

So, should I have been as mad as I was?

Again, I don’t think that’s a productive question.

I was that mad. It’s a fact.

To let go of the resentment I carried toward my stepfather, I had to understand where it was coming from.

Some of it was the inciting incident, and the fact (I believe) he put my mom’s health in jeopardy.

More of it stemmed from my history with him, though, going back to when I was a teenager. He wasn’t as honest or as selfless as he’d insisted he was. Worse: He couldn’t ever admit that, let alone apologize.

Finally, I felt a level of shame for never standing up to him. Not when I was growing up. Not when his marriage to my mom collapsed in fairly spectacular fashion.

This stemmed from my own personal perspective, a narrative that I told myself.

In other words, it was complicated.

But grudges usually are. Rarely is it as straightforward as a single event, and it was only after I could see all the things that contributed to my roiling cauldron of resentment that I was able to start turning down the heat.

1. This quote comes from the thoroughly excellent interview that David Marchese conducted with Murphy in 2024 for the New York Times: “Eddie Murphy is ready to look back”