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Charlie Murphy from ‘Chappelle’s Show’ Dead at 57 From Leukemia

Prince has company. Charlie Murphy died today at 57 from leukemia. Murphy is Eddie Murphy’s older brother who achieved fame from Chappelle’s Show. His stories about meeting Prince and Rick James are classics.

Murphy recently toured with Cedric the Entertainer, Eddie Griffin, George Lopez and D.L. Hughley on “The Comedy Get Down.” Eddie Murphy also has made remarks about doing another stand-up tour. Wonder if Charlie’s death would motivate him to go out even more.

Charlie didn’t get his start in comedy until 42. Brother Eddie was already super famous for his own comedies and stand-up. That forced Charlie to use anger to fuel his humor.

I’ll put it like this: when I first started doing comedy, I was 42 years old and I was the brother of one of the most celebrated comics in history who made his name in the game 20 years earlier. So, that took a lot of bravery. It’s never been done before. It’s not a part of human reality. It’s like, if Michael Jordan all of a sudden had a big brother who plays basketball and he’s good, too. That does not compute for most people. So, I had to have anger to do this because there were going to be people saying, “You can’t do this.” And when they saw the rage and anger, they got out of my way.

That anger would get him in trouble. He doubled as Eddie’s security guard, but didn’t last long because he was too aggressive.

If I’m standing there and you mess with him, I’m still his security today. But I stopped doing that job because I used to react to s**t you weren’t supposed to. Professional security teams have to ignore heckles and insults—I couldn’t. I’d walk over, like, “What did you say?” and punch the guy in the mouth.

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