Foul-Mouthed Eddie Griffin Finds Mic Goes Dead
Earl Graves, founder of Black Enterprise magazine, is an old-school kind of guy, and so were most of the 1,200 in the audience for the 14th Annual Black Enterprise/Pepsi Golf & Tennis Challenge.
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So when comedian Eddie Griffin started tossing around the “N” word and the one abbreviated “MF,” and then brought white women into his repertoire, he suddenly found his hand-held microphone go dead. Griffin tried a floor mic, but that one was dead, too.
Griffin then turned to the audience, whose members hadn’t been laughing at the jokes but were uncertain what was happening when the mics were turned off. He said, “f— it, I don’t need no mic,” and finished his joke. Then he left, with Morris Day and The Time not quite ready to go on next.
After sending someone to the stage to fill the time, Graves, 72, took the mic and explained, “the man’s going to get paid, but we can’t tolerate this,” in the words of a witness who described the scene to Journal-isms.
Griffin, 39, who has fashioned a movie career with such films as “Undercover Brother” (2002) and “Scary Movie III” (2003), lasted no more than five or 10 minutes.
Wearing short pants, sneakers, a white cap turned sideways and a cigarette in his hand, he had told the audience that NFL quarterback Michael Vick was going to jail for abusing dogs but that O.J. Simpson had been charged with killing a white woman and served no time.
“In that setting, it just didn’t fit,” the witness said. “This was an audience of people, white and black, who were somebodies.”
Late Tuesday, the Web site TMZ.com quoted the Rev. Al Sharpton giving his version of the incident. According to Sharpton, Griffin said, “Why are some black leaders telling us to stop using the N word?” and Graves “stomped on stage and proclaimed, ‘We . . . will not allow our culture to go backwards . . . We will pay Mr. Griffin all that we owe him but we will not allow him to finish the show if that’s the way he’s going to talk.’
“The crowd gave Graves a standing ovation — and Rev. Al, speaking the next day at the event, gave Graves props for his axing of Griffin,” TMZ said.
The setting was the Legends Ballroom of the Doral Golf Resort and Spa in Miami. It was Friday night, at a performance sponsored by Aetna. Other entertainers at the Thursday-through-Sunday event were vocalist Heather Headley of Broadway’s “The Lion King,” R&B singer Erykah Badu, the zany Morris Day & The Time and the funk group Cameo.
A portion of the proceeds from the affair are to go to the Harlem Junior Tennis and Education Program, a New York-based nonprofit that offers urban children free tennis lessons, and the Bill Dickey Scholarship Association (formerly the National Minority Junior Golf Scholarship Association), a junior golf program that enables interested youngsters to learn the fundamentals of golf, in the words of a news release.
A publicist for Griffin said Tuesday morning he had not heard of the incident and did not respond later. A spokesman for Graves said he would have no comment.