He walks onstage like a question for Eddie Murphy by Stefano Donno

 He walks onstage like a question

someone already answered with a laugh,

the mic a small planet in his hand

spinning toward another punchline.

Once, Saturday nights were sleepy churches

until he kicked the stained glass out of the TV

and preached in a voice made of hustle,

high voltage and Harlem sidewalks.

In one life he is forty faces,

a whole census of side‑eyed uncles and saints,

barbers, princes, profane professors,

each mask fitting like a memory you forgot you had.

​

Cinema tried to contain him in a frame,

but he multiplied—cop, king, donkey, dad—

box office tallies rising like laughter

counted in billions across the dark.

The rhythm of him is not a meter you scan,

it is a crowd leaning forward at once,

that sharp inhale before the joke lands

and rearranges what the day did to you.

He knows the algebra of timing,

how to hold a silence by the collar,

shake it until coins of joy fall out

onto the sticky floor of a late show.

​

There are ghosts in the bit, too:

the way he slips past the censors of pain,

smuggling whole histories in a throwaway line,

turning anger into a fire that warms instead of burns.

This is contemporary mythmaking—

a hybrid form of stand‑up, cinema, song,

where the body is stanza, the grin enjambment,

and every callback is a chorus of we’re still here.

Call him comedian, call him actor,

the labels flicker like neon in the rain.

What remains is this:

a boy who learned that survival sometimes

sounds exactly like a room exploding in laughter,

a man who walks onstage like an answer

and leaves as a thousand inside jokes,

circling the globe in the dark,

still working the room after the credits roll