A Life Through Film #025: The Nutty Professor

Eddie Murphy dons the fat suit like Peter Parker becoming Spider-Man

Release Date: 6/28/1996

Weeks at Number One: 1

Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!

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At some point, everybody has to grow up. You can’t be a kid forever, no matter how much the internet has convinced you that a state of arrested development is the dream. The process of growing up never happens all at once though. The big moments add up and become your journey into adulthood. You get your first job. A childhood friend gets married. You realize that people are not as kind as you had hoped they might be. The world is rougher and more complicated than the privileged bubble that comes with young age would have you believe.

It’s not all big moments though. Often, the process is also filled with small occasions of reconsidering something you thought you knew. For example: a part of adolescence I remember vividly is subverting childhood favorites as actually being dark and twisted. I’ve seen enough internet fan theories that shows like Pokémon, Codename: Kids Next Door, and Ed, Edd, & Eddy are actually about how the characters were dead the whole time. To what end? Honestly, it’s probably an effort by teens to enrich media they like that would otherwise be seen as too kiddy. This happens across generations; the only thing that changes are the childhood touchpoints. I’m sure Gen Alpha will love talking about how Paw Patrol secretly took place in a fascist police state once they reach 7th grade.

One version of this that sticks out in my mind wasn’t a morbid fan theory on the internet, but instead learning the history of someone I knew for playing a funny animal in one of my favorite movies. As a kid, I must have watched Shrek close to a hundred times thanks to a well worn VHS copy in the family living room [no rating yet, it’ll eventually appear in this column]. My metatextual knowledge of it was limited though. I knew that Mike Meyers, Eddie Murphy, and Cameron Diaz were already famous by the time the movie was made, but I wasn’t clear on why. Finding out Meyers and Diaz were, respectively, a respected sketch comedian and a beautiful actress isn’t too shocking as a kid. But Murphy was different.

The first time I saw clips from Eddie Murphy’s Raw and Delirious specials, I was stunned. Here was the actual voice of Donkey, telling some of the dirtiest and most vitriolic jokes I had ever heard. I had watched too much Comedy Central Presents as a kid to be shocked by most stand up comedy by that point, but seeing what was allowed by a major comedian in popular specials just 20 years earlier made me uncomfortable, honestly.

Over the years, I found out more and more. Murphy had been a comedy prodigy, someone whose 1980s were filled with groundbreaking films and performances that provoked, outraged, and made a lot of people laugh. By the time I was aware of him in the early 2000s, he had already gone through multiple arcs of success in his career. I was only catching him along the path of a relatively new one for him.

How did a guy like that end up voicing the comedy relief animal in Shrek? Like all of us, Eddie Murphy had to grow up. He couldn’t be that brash young man forever, and he had the box office returns to prove it. So Murphy forced a big moment of maturation, a full-bodied switch to more family friendly comedies that would carry his career past the turn of the century. There were occasional exceptions, of course, but the “old” Eddie Murphy who made jokes about AIDS and women in Raw was gone, in favor of a “new” version of the man who kept things PG-13 at their edgiest. For a time, this move pulled his career out of a tailspin and introduced him to a whole new generation of fans.

In 1996, the 35-year-old Eddie Murphy grew up by starring in a movie about how funny it is when fat people fart a lot.

The Nutty Professor is a 1996 comedy starring Murphy as Professor Sherman Klump, a 450 pound, socially awkward science professor who, in an effort to woo the woman of his dreams (Jada Pinkett, no Smith), uses experimental science to become a thinner, more confident version of himself named Buddy Love. Hijinks, moral lessons, and plenty of cringe ensue as Dr. Klump and Mr. Love battle for dominance and acceptance in a society that really wants to laugh at fat people.

If that sounds like a juvenile time at the movies, you’d be right. And for most other actors, The Nutty Professor would likely be seen as a step down on the respectability totem pole. That the opposite should be true in this case should give you a sense of the state of Eddie Murphy’s career come 1996.

I don’t really associate him very much with the show, but Murphy’s primetime career got off to a bang in 1980 when he joined the cast of Saturday Night Live. Despite only being 19 years old, the young standup standout was immediately pegged as a star in the making. His young age didn’t stop him from making a name for himself on the iconic sketch show, and he succeeded in large part because of his love of pointing and laughing at race relations in America. Whether it was recurring characters like the Mr. Rogers parody Mr. Robinson or single bursts of genius like when he donned full white face to experience the world as a white person, Murphy’s work quickly made him a fan favorite on SNL.

Inevitably, his star expanded past 30 Rock. Starting with 48 Hours in 1983, Murphy began a run of ‘80s films that rank among the most well-remembered and successful comedies of that decade. Beverly Hills Cop, Trading Places, Coming to America [3.5/5], The Golden Child, and the list actually goes on from there. All of these movies were huge, R-rated hits for Murphy, who was often given carte blanche within them to improv and add his own crass humor. The comedian became an A-list celebrity off of the back of his ‘80s movies, and was so famous that in 1985 he embarked on a pop music sidequest that gave us one of the best awesomely bad pop songs of all time.

Murphy was also able to stay successful as a stand up comedian, even as he left SNL in 1984. Delirious [3/5] and Raw are some of the most beloved standup specials from the ‘80s, and they do a good job capturing his style at the time. Murphy was an incredibly talented impressionist, able to convincingly lampoon both famous celebrities and archetypes of American culture. He was also a horny party animal, and had plenty of stories to share of his time hitting clubs with celebrity friends. Between these more clever bits, though, lies so much aggressive homophobia, racism, and misogyny that just couldn’t happen today. Maybe the shock was the point, but the crowd also seemed to eat it up when he calls gay men the f-slur and freaks out at the idea of catching AIDS from them in Delirious. If they were all that shocked, their raucous cheers and applause were a funny way of showing it.

The ‘80s, of course, couldn’t last forever. Coinciding almost exactly with the start of the 1990s (as well as Murphy’s 30th birthday) was a downturn in business at the box office for Eddie. With the exception of 1992’s Boomerang, most of his films were both critical and commercial bombs. Vampires of Brooklyn, directorial debut Harlem Nights, and sequel Another 48 Hours all disappointed at the box office on top of getting pretty nasty reviews. Even worse, 1994’s Beverly Hills Cop III was so poorly received that it shelved what had looked like a billion dollar franchise for three decades.

The director of BHCIII, John Landis, had an interesting comment about Murphy from that period in an interview with Collider in 2005:

I discovered on the first day when I started giving Eddie some shtick, he said, “You know, John… [main character] Axel Foley is an adult now. He’s not a wiseass anymore”...I had this strange experience where he was very professional, but he just wasn’t funny. I would try to put him in funny situations, and he would find a way to step around them.

A few years into this career downturn, Murphy was looking to mix it up. He either didn’t want to or couldn’t be the edgy, high-energy young man obsessed with sex and celebrity impressions anymore. Unfortunately, attempting to play an established character more seriously didn’t pay off, and only damaged his image as a box office draw even more. After the failure of BHCIII, Murphy decided that it was time for a shift in his comedy strategy.

Murphy reflected on the comedy that had made him laugh as a kid and remembered Jerry Lewis’s The Nutty Professor. The slapstick goof fest was a silly sort of Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde parody, where a goofy scientist used a new serum to become a douchy yet charismatic ladies man. The film had been a big hit back in the ‘60s, and to this day is still considered some of the finest work in Lewis’s storied career. I think it’s alright. [3/5]

More than anything else, The Nutty Professor was a way for Jerry Lewis to flex his wide range of acting and comedy abilities. Switching between the annoyingly dorky Professor Kelp and the obnoxiously cool Buddy Love, sometimes within the same scene, gave the comedian a way to show general audiences that he had versatility as a performer.

Murphy, seeking that same recognition of his own range of talents, had a revelation. Not only would remaking The Nutty Professor give him the chance to flex his abilities, but it would also allow him to transition to broader, more family friendly comedies. After all, the subject matter was far goofier in The Nutty Professor than his usual fare of sex and race, necessitating the switch to a rating that people could comfortably bring their kids to.

That world of family movie would be a change for sure, but if this movie succeeded, it meant Murphy no longer had to be pigeonholed as the crass, horny young man that he didn’t connect with anymore. And he knew there was interest in Hollywood in a new version of the film; Murphy himself had been asked to do one years prior but turned it down.

The comedian reached out to friend and producer Brian Grazer about Universal Studios picking up the remake rights. As luck would have it (or at least as Grazer would tell it), the producer had procured the rights to The Nutty Professor mere days before that call. This sounds like too much divine providence to be true, but evidently Grazer had been hanging out late one night with hip-hop executive Russell Simmons at a New York City club and saw that they were playing The Nutty Professor on one of the TVs. Simmons assured the confused Grazer that hip club hoppers had gravitated to the film as a cult classic, and that a remake of it with a Black leading actor would have a lot of crossover appeal.

Still, even though it seems the stars had lined up perfectly for this, it was still something of a risk for Grazer, co-producer Simmons, and Universal to go with Eddie Murphy. The 1990s had been tough for him professionally, and even though he was still a notable public figure, there was just a feeling that he wasn’t all that funny any more. Grazer, though, stood by his friend, and told the LA Times that this new Nutty Professor would retrigger America’s love for Eddie Murphy:

The only way to [have the audiences rediscover Murphy’s comic talent] is have him play a character that is vulnerable.

The movie had a lot of goals to accomplish, including honoring the material of a comedy classic. The overall product leaves something to be desired, but I’ll give Murphy’s movie this. If there’s one thing that I can say 1996’s The Nutty Professor does far better than its source material, it’s that engendering of sympathy towards its main character.

Let’s address the elephant in the room first, and I really wish there were a different saying I could use when talking about this movie. Murphy’s version of the titular professor is not merely a goof with a funny voice like in the original. Instead, Professor Sherman Klump is a kind, soft-spoken intellectual who happens to weigh 450 pounds.

Life at this size is a certifiable disability for Klump, and on top of that, he lives in a health-obsessed ‘90s that thinks his mere existence is justification for mockery. When Murphy is done up in the layers of prosthetics and makeup that this transformation calls for, his performance is my favorite part of the movie. This is a far cry from the hyperactive young man screaming about singers getting pussy in front of thousands of adoring fans. Instead, we get a conflicted character in Klump. Through the first act of the film, he’s so confident in himself when it comes to science but basically nothing else, even as he shows himself to be a generally kind, thoughtful person who, yes, could stand to lose some weight.

Murphy himself said that he wanted to examine obesity as a disability in The Nutty Professor, and said that while there were certainly jokes about fat people in the movie, it wouldn’t be a putdown of them. I think the core of the screenplay reflects that. Written by Murphy, longtime friends David Sheffield & Barry Blaustein, director Tom Shadyac, and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls director Steve Oedekerk, the idea of sensitivity towards the obese in a society that finds them disgusting is the film’s big swing at a mature theme. At its best moments early, The Nutty Professor makes Klump almost inspirational as he tries to lose weight and become more comfortable in his skin.

Unfortunately, that kernel of honest sympathy towards larger folks is buried under countless jokes at their expense. There are a number of noticeable problems with The Nutty Professor, but the crux of why I don’t enjoy this movie comes down to it trying to have its cake and eat it too. And all the while, Murphy is using the film’s metanarrative to get his box office success back. Well, it worked. Somehow, one of the more annoyingly unfunny movies I’ve watched so far for “A Life Through Film” turned it all around for its star.

The incredible fat suit and prosthetics created by Academy Award winning special effects artist Rick Baker are the route Murphy took to garner that all important sympathy, but why go down that road at all? As the comedian tells it, he had been watching daytime television and had been shocked by the narrow mindedness that pop culture showed towards body shape. The goal was thin thin thin, and if you were big at all, that was a mistake that had to be corrected by any means.

This societal pressure fascinated Murphy, and to be sure the 1990s were an era with a high volume of fad diets and get-thin-quick schemes. Some of us like to think we’re living in a more body positive period now, but the flat tummy teas and other influencer-hocked diet products are a recurring echo of three decades ago, now blasted directly to young eyeballs by their favorite Instagram model. At least back in the day you could just turn the TV off.

Like I said, the scenes early on in the movie where Klump lacks confidence in himself around Pinkett’s Carla Purty and tries to better himself through an exercise montage are legitimately pretty good. I fell for Murphy’s performance at times and felt some sympathy towards the plight of his character, especially when a crude stand up comic (played by a young Dave Chappelle) makes him the victim of some nasty crowdwork at a standup show. Later in the movie, Klump’s insecurity drives a wedge between him and his skinnier, hornier Buddy Love alter-ego, and the core of that arc is done well enough that the final rejection of Love and embrace of Klump wraps up the arc nicely.

Whether he’s Klump or Love, Eddie Murphy captivates. His shy dorkiness endears as the former, and his brash antics as the latter are like a car wreck you just can’t look away from. It isn’t an accident that Buddy Love, who eventually reveals himself as the villain of the movie, most resembles Murphy as a young man up on the stage in Delirious. He gesticulates wildly, throws his voice up and down pitch within a sentence to get a laugh, and obsesses with getting laid over anything else, including self preservation.

The difference is that this testosterone overload is not for the purpose of our entertainment, but for juxtaposing it against the more normal behavior around him. Similar to Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy, the Buddy Love performance is a recontextualization of shtick, framing the act that made Murphy famous as overwhelming and even a little frightening when placed in a world that doesn’t see him as the main character of a movie.

This strategy led to poor critical and commercial prospects for The Cable Guy, but in The Nutty Professor, it helped Murphy leave that version of himself in the past. Why the difference from movie to movie? Well, Carrey decided to pull this alter ego death only a few years into his fame. People were still into his goofy routine, and wanted more of it. Meanwhile, movie goers had been rejecting Murphy since the turn of the decade. They were tired of his old stuff, so they were more than happy to see it turned on its head before being cast aside.

At the center of The Nutty Professor is a decent lead performance, solid practical effects, and a compelling bundle of thematic threads. Unfortunately, those good parts of the movie are surrounded by a vortex of baffling, annoying, and frankly disappointing decisions that drag the movie down from reaching its potential.

Remember that quote from Murphy about how this movie wouldn’t be a putdown of fat people? While it’s true that the core of the movie is body positivity, the bulk of the jokes in The Nutty Professor are at the expense of its fat characters, including Professor Klump. There were multiple times, especially early on, where I could feel the movie expected me to laugh at fat Eddie Murphy appearing on screen or walking up stairs or some other innocuous activity. There wasn’t an actual joke happening, just a guy in a fat suit on the screen.

And when the more obvious jokes about Klump being fat come out, they fight against the sympathy we’re meant to be feeling for him. Klump’s obesity is a disability, but you’d think by the way he acts that he woke up the morning the movie starts 300 pounds heavier than usual. He has no consideration for how to live in the world at his size, and will frequently forget that he’s much larger than everyone else so that the audience can laugh at a fat guy doing something funny. Klump accidentally erases the chalkboard because he doesn’t realize his belly is rubbing up against it. He chooses the smallest chair possible so we can laugh at how much he doesn’t fit in it. He’s generally inconsiderate of his size until it’s time for him to get moody about it, and as a result this college professor comes off as inconsiderate and honestly a bit stupid.

The worst of these fat jokes come during the movie’s most technically impressive scenes. I’ve buried the lede on this, but Murphy doesn’t just play Sherman Klump in The Nutty Professor. He also plays Klump’s entire adult family: his mother, father, grandmother, and brother, all with differently sized fat suits and prosthetics to account for the differences in age and gender. On a visual level, the sight of these characters all sitting around a dining room table and having multiple conversations at once is astounding. Murphy wore an earpiece to sync up his dialogue and filmed the dinner scenes one character at a time, taking days to make sure everything looked cohesive in the final edit.

But to what end though? The two scenes at the Klump dinner table are the most egregiously nasty towards fat people in the entire movie. These are the only overweight or obese characters we see in The Nutty Professor, and they are not good representation, let me tell you. The Klumps are loud and ignorant. They’re sex-obsessed in a leering, gross way. They pour gravy over everything and loudly proclaim that they don’t need to change for anyone. They joke about clearing out their colons and talk with their mouths stuffed full of food. And they fart. Jesus Christ, they fart a lot.

Watching the dinner scenes felt like watching propaganda. It was as though some white supremacist group wanted to convince me that lower middle class Black people were stupid and gorging themselves to death. I know these are probably the most beloved and well-remembered moments from The Nutty Professor, but I watched both through the gaps of my fingers. Not just because of the content on screen, but because of my realization that the movie wasn’t being honest with me about its intentions.

It’s the most blatant example of a film wanting to have its cake and eat it too. Eddie Murphy wants us to feel sympathy for Sherman Klump because he’s unfairly a laughingstock due to his size. But Murphy also makes the bulk of the humor in the film at the expense of Klump and his family for being fat, so what are we even doing here? Are we supposed to laugh at this guy or feel sorry for him because people are laughing at him? I don’t get the sense that we’re supposed to feel bad for laughing; the rest of the movie is too stupid to give it that benefit of the doubt. I get that fat jokes are easy, and you went through all the effort of those Rick Baker effects so you may as well make a few. But don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining, Eddie Murphy; if you want to just have a movie where the joke is that fat people are funny, just do that. Don’t base your entire public persona shift around a thematic throughline that doesn’t work.

I’ve already written too many words about this movie, so thankfully there isn’t much else to say. The other performances in the movie are fine, though I remain unconvinced of Pinkett’s actual abilities as an actress. Chappelle was funny though; this was still a good era for him when hating trans people wasn’t the bulk of his personality. Shadyac, director of the first Ace Ventura [2.5/5], shoots the movie competently enough, allowing plenty of wide shots for Murphy to galavant around in plus sized form. Like I said, the Klump dinner scenes are as impressive as they are nasty, but I put more of the credit for that on Murphy and the post-production people, not necessarily the director.

The jokes that weren’t at the expense of fat people weren’t anything special. The most noteworthy bit that I can think of is Chapelle’s throwaway line “Women be shopping!” I had heard that years ago on some video game Let’s Play and it’s lingered in my lexicon ever since. I’ve been saying that ironically for so many years now (especially when my wife wants to go shopping) but I never stopped to consider the source of that wise axiom. Thanks, The Nutty Professor?

As credits rolled on the movie, I felt both relief that it was over and disappointment that it hadn’t lived up to its own potential. Overall, a great Eddie Murphy performance and top notch special effects don’t make this one strong enough to recommend, but I’d bet there are some people reading this with some nostalgic attachment to The Nutty Professor. I still run into people who defend Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls based entirely on the fact that they watched it when they were 9. I can’t relate though; I was too busy watching good movies instead (har har).

I’m baffled that The Nutty Professor has a 65% on Rotten Tomatoes. I get the sense reading through the reviews that most critics were a bit too excited by the first halfway decent Eddie Murphy performance in ages. I live in the future, though, and can just watch Coming to America whenever I want. Maybe if I had suffered through the rest of his ‘90s output before this I would have been kinder to The Nutty Professor. Instead, I was coming off of watching Frozen II again; that’s not a perfect movie (it’ll appear in this column at some point, so look forward to my shifting thoughts on it years down the line), but it doesn’t make me want to die of cringe like The Nutty Professor did in its worst moments.

Audiences ate this movie up like the Klumps at dinner. Its debut weekend didn’t give it much competition except for legendary Demi Moore stinker Striptease, but The Nutty Professor made over $50 million in just its first two weeks of release. Universal had banked on this being a big hit for the summer, and they were right, with the movie’s popularity keeping it in the top 10 at the box office through August. By the time it left theaters in late November, Murphy’s big swing at public redefinition had pulled in nearly $130 million domestically, and over $270 million after the global release. Say what you will about farts and fat jokes: they do cross the language barrier pretty easily.

So where did this leave Eddie Murphy? He had publicly cast his old persona as the villain in his biggest hit in years. Now what? The comedian had young kids, and figured it was time to mellow out in general. Why not soften his public image even more and make some movies for the youth? Over the next few years, we’ll mostly see him appear in successful family movies, including one of the most successful animated series of all time. A whole generation of kids was raised on this era of Murphy’s career, and doubtless a lot of them had similar shocking moments of discovery after watching his ‘80s output.

No one can stay a megastar forever. But the return to glory is a fun narrative, even if not every comeback is created equal. This column has covered a few different returns to the spotlight to this point, some legendary, some short lived. I would put today’s example somewhere in the middle. He would never be as ubiquitous and undeniable as he had been in the ‘80s ever again, but Eddie Murphy’s movie career had gained a second wind.

A second wind passed from the rear of a fat, annoying version of Murphy in prosthetics, but fine, whatever works.

Rating: 2/5

Works Cited

Next Week: I think I need to watch a comfort movie after that. Thankfully, the timing couldn’t be better. I’ve been alluding to it for weeks, but in the next “A Life Through Film,” it’s time to save the world. It may be December, but let’s celebrate Independence Day.

See you then!

-Will