This is Eddie Murphy's final appearance on the show. In the monologue, Murphy says he did not want to return to the show but he needed to promote Beverly Hills Cop (1984) after the box-office failure of Best Defense (1984). This episode was the highest-rated of the season.
Eddie Murphy's remaining co-stars during his tenure on the show (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Gary Kroeger, Mary Gross ) had not gotten along with him and were indifferent about his return.
In his 2019 autobiography, "Baby Don't Hurt Me", Chris Kattan recounts how the "Black History Minute" sketch in which Eddie Murphy breaks character as Shabazz K. Morton and tells the audience to shut up and not to make him laugh, then 14 year old Kattan knew that this was what he wanted to do with his life, and getting to be on Saturday Night Live became an obsession for him. He finally got to meet Murphy at the Saturday Night Live: 40th Anniversary Special (2015).