*James Brown gave Eddie Murphy a direct warning when the comedian was still building his career: tone down the profanity or risk shortening his run in entertainment.
Murphy shared the story in Apple TV’s 2025 documentary “Number One on the Call Sheet.” The actor and comedian said Brown believed cleaner material could help him last longer in the business.
“James Brown told me to, he asked me to. He told me I should stop cursing,” Murphy recalled. “He said, ‘You want to be in this business a long time? You can stop that cursing.’”
In the doc, he described Brown as one of the older entertainers who offered guidance when few established figures were around to mentor young performers.
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Brown’s guidance did not stop at comedy. Murphy said the Godfather of Soul also gave him a strange lesson about protecting money.
“He said, ‘Do you think you got a million dollars?’” Murphy said. “I said, ‘Yeah, I do.’ He said, ‘You ain’t got a million dollars. If you do got a million dollars, you take it, you bury it in the woods.’”
Murphy said he pushed back on the idea by asking whether the government could still take the land where the money was buried.
“I said, ‘But can’t the government take your land?’” Murphy recalled. “He said, ‘But they won’t know where the money is.’”
Murphy added, “That’s a true story. So that’s the kind of advice I used to get.”
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