Paige Butcher, left, and Eddie Murphy attend the SNL 40th Anniversary Special at Rockefeller Plaza on Sunday, Feb. 15, 2015, in New York. (Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP)

(USA Today) – SNL 40 was massive, a three-hour show with famous SNL greats in every seat in the house. But the good stuff is always what happens off camera, no? The sketches that got axed, the hand-wringing, the reunion gossip. Instead of waiting a few years and pulling together a snoozy documentary of what really happened leading up to the Sunday night broadcast, Norm Macdonald went ahead and revealed all on his Twitter feed Wednesday night. That’s right, Macdonald, who spent four years as a face of Weekend Update on SNL before getting the boot in 1997 (“they said I wasn’t funny”) only to return as a host in 1999, just went ahead and put it out there, 140 brutally honest characters at a time.

“Among many other things, this show was to be the return of Eddie Murphy. Eddie, the man who, in Lorne’s absence, kept the show alive. Singlehandedly,” he tweeted. “To every comedian who ever performed on SNL, what Eddie accomplished was unthinkable. Every Saturday Night at 11:30 Eddie Murphy, a kid, would fill 90 minutes with comedy. Impossible. The last anniversary was the 25th. Eddie did not attend due to a remark by David Spade. David is a very kind man, but his remark was not. So Eddie never came back. Until last week.”

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