This article originally appeared in the March 16, 1982 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
John Belushi’s death may not have been as shocking as John Lennon’s, but I felt his loss in much the same way. Like Lennon, Belushi was greater than the sum of his talents. To the millions of us who watched the original Saturday Night Live religiously, he was one of our own. Belushi wasn’t the first comic to get on stage and act like a nut, of course, but his spastic craziness seemed to bubble up from somewhere deep in his chromosomes (indeed, Michael “Mr. Mike” O’Donoghue always attributed Belushi’s deranged personality to his Albanian parentage). When he slashed through a head of lettuce with his samurai sword or went into one of his seizures on “Weekend Update,” you felt you were watching a man who knew no bounds. Belushi was the Keith Moon of comedy, and people loved him for it. By the time he appeared in Animal House as the gleefully infantile Bluto Blutarski, he’d become an idol to a generation of college students.
From the start, Belushi had a special way of imposing his presence. Unlike his fellow Not Ready for Prime Time Players, he didn’t so much play to the audience as grab it by the lapels. His characters were stubborn, aggressive misfits who practically intimidated you into laughing. It was gonzo comedy at its purest. You couldn’t imagine such belligerent behavior from someone with Chevy Chase’s WASPy good looks, but Belushi’s routines nearly always took off from his physical equipment. How could he have avoided it? The paunch, the frizzy hair, the grimacing, ethnic mug (how often did you see him smile?) – he was like a Silly Putty caricature of an ordinary Joe. And John Belushi could be loveable – a big, demented teddy bear. He was never more cuddly than when he was frothing at the mouth as the “Weekend Update” weatherman, working up to his ritual “But noooo!” and then spinning off his chair as though he’d just swallowed a tornado.
It’s fitting that when Belushi first achieved recognition, in the National Lampoon’s 1973 Woodstock parody Lemmings, he was doing one of his classic put-me-in-a-straightjacket routines – his spasmodic impression of Joe Cocker. Four years later, on Saturday Night, he joined the real Cocker on stage for a number, and the sight of the two Cockers writhing in unison had to be seen to be believed. (Rumor had it that an insulted Cocker practically punched him out at the post-show party.) Anyone who saw that show will never forget John Belushi. He did other beautiful impressions – the most inspired may have been his chicken-scarfing Elizabeth Taylor – but, like Bill Murray, he was funniest when he could draw his characters from the madness within. Who else could have succeeded in turning a phrase like “Cheeseburger, cheeseburger” into comic poetry?
