Eddie Murphy refused to play Bill Cosby in SNL reunion skit

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Former Saturday Night Live cast member Norm Macdonald has finally explained what was up with Eddie Murphy’s awkward SNL 40 appearance.

Macdonald tweeted a series of details Wednesday night, saying that Murphy was originally supposed to do his famous Bill Cosby impression instead of his short monologue.

Murphy was supposed to play Cosby in a “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketch that Macdonald said Murphy knew would “bring the house down.”

“We talk in his dressing room for a good hour,” Macdonald tweeted. “When it’s over, I’m convinced he’ll do it,” Macdonald wrote in a tweet, describing his role in the episode as trying to convince Murphy to go through with the sketch. But his next tweet summed up the result of all that talk: “He doesn’t.”

“He will not a kick a man when he’s down,” Macdonald said. “Eddie Murphy is not like the rest of us. Eddie does not need the laugh.”

But rather than get upset, Macdonald did nothing but praise the comedian for his choice.

“Eddie Murphy is the coolest, a rockstar even, in a room with actual rockstars,” he said.

Ultimately, as Macdonald described, Murphy decided “the laughs were not worth it” and instead gave the short monologue that aired during the episode itself.

Macdonald summed the entire SNL 40 experience with three words: “Quite a week.”