Wired
I have always had trouble…accessing John Belushi, I guess is the right term.The guy is just not funny to me.A lot of early/”classic” SNL is not funny to me, which stems partly from hearing the catchphrases all the damn time and how such-and-such sketch represents a seminal moment in comedy, and then the bit in question can’t possibly live up to expectations.And times have changed, too; it’s like the old stories about how early rock-and-roll acts used to get run out of town by enraged village elders for corrupting the local teens, and Bill Haley is crouched on the floor of a Ford Fairlane with bullets whizzing past the car, and you think to yourself, “Didn’t Bill Haley and all his Comets wear suits and ties?Bow ties?How is this the twilight of Rome?”It’s so far away from the way we think now.
But I can see the talent in a lot of those people even if the style doesn’t date well.Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd: I get it.I may not giggle, but I get it.Belushi, I don’t get.I don’t think he’s awful; I don’t think it’s impossible that he’s funny, or that a Belushi SNL sketch exists that I would chuckle at.But it’s a big leap from “not untalented” or “probably funny if he’s not too rehearsed” to “on the Mount Rushmore of comedy.”I liked Animal House and The Blues Brothers just fine, but I spent most of those movies waiting for a moment that would illuminate Belushi the towering cultural legend, and it didn’t come.
Nothing solidifies a legend quite like an early death, of course, but I read Wired wanting to understand why Belushi’s death is up there with John Lennon’s as an event that reverberated so far and so loudly, and the book didn’t help me there.It’s entertaining in its way — I enjoyed reading it — but it’s not very well-written, and it’s written in the wrong way to boot.”The wrong way” doesn’t refer to the angry objections of various intimates to the portrayal of Belushi as a rampaging junkie and, at least during the shooting of Neighbors, a willful asshole who couldn’t back up his arrogant behavior with any recent success at the box office.He’s depicted as an exhausting guy to know and/or to deal with professionally (at one point I found myself rooting for Mike Ovitz, which is telling), and in the second half of the book, you see so little of Belushi’s apparently renowned charm, and so little evidence of the talent that would have given him license to act a fool, that it’s hard to see why anyone would have tolerated it.
That sense of unleavened dicksmackery is the basis of Aykroyd’s and Judy Belushi’s protests, and I don’t blame them, although it’s like that with addicts a lot of the time, and it’s not exactly Bob Woodward’s first day on the desk.You have to think that, if anyone had shared a tender moment with Belushi during the twelve consecutive days he stayed awake doing coke, Woodward would have found the guy.
But Woodward is a great reporter; he isn’t a very good writer.The prose is AP-wire flat most of the time, with an occasional shot of deep purple, and that’s what I mean by “wrong way”: he should have put it together as an oral history instead.The book is exhaustively researched and footnoted; gathering the information is Woodward’s strength, not nestling it in a traditional narrative, and I love oral histories, so I have a bias, but one of the reasons I love them is their ability to give you a bunch of little pictures of the subject that, when you stand back from them all at the end, give you a big picture.The SNL oral history is fantastic because it’s like a novelized documentary, and all the different people and perspectives come together as a portrait of what it’s like to work there, now and in the past.
If Wired had taken that approach, it would have had something to say to a reader like me who might not really see what Belushi’s about, what all the fuss is for.As it is, I don’t know anything I didn’t know before I read it.I don’t get him, or why I should get him, and Woodward isn’t going to do a good job articulating that compared to the people who do what Belushi did for a living.Woodward can say that Belushi is important and talented; Chevy Chase or Bill Murray or even Jim Belushi can explain why.No doubt they did, in interviews with Woodward, but if Woodward is shaping the narrative and deciding how it’s phrased instead of just transcribing what they say, it’s going to have a different feel.He’s not necessarily going to have the vocabulary for it, so it’s a story about a gifted guy who destroyed himself but it doesn’t quite tell us why we should care.
The other weird element is how soon after Belushi’s death it came out.Woodward is a news guy, so he’s going to want to run right out and talk to people about their recollections while everything’s still fresh, which makes sense.It might have made more sense to re-interview everyone again in two years, or five years, to get a better perspective on what happened before sitting down to write or assemble the anecdotes or whatever.For one thing, it’s mentioned a number of times that nobody thought doing drugs could kill you; I find it puzzling that anyone truly believed that, even then, but it’s a moldy enough attitude by now that it makes the story hard to relate to sometimes.Roger Ebert’s contemporary essay on Wired and Belushi’s death suffers from a similar datedness, and it’s not his fault, or Woodward’s, that we didn’t know then what we know now, but the word “enabling” is in quotation marks, and he explains it to the reader.Even five years later, he wouldn’t have needed to — and that’s probably because of Belushi’s death.I don’t remember the reaction at the time, but I feel like that OD got people’s attention in a big way as far as the perception of cocaine as a serious problem.Again, nobody could necessarily have seen that shaping up at the time, but if he’s an important enough figure to write a book about, he’ll stay important for another few years and give you time to put him in context.
I don’t regret reading it; I wouldn’t recommend anyone else bother with it.
Tags: bees books ethical dilemmae John Belushi short dudes SNL TV
OK, it’s terrible that I got through your whole review and then got the giggles when I saw that one of the tags was “bees”.
Thank god you’re writing for such discerning customers. ;)
Re: the drug thing – I agree that it seems disingenuous at best for people to claim they didn’t know drugs could kill. I mean, Hendrix and Joplin were gone by then, this wasn’t news. Different drug, but you know what I mean.
What I’ve heard, though, is that a lot of people thought drugs couldn’t kill him. Robin Williams credited Belushi’s death for Williams getting sober (the first time) because he realized that if Belushi could die from it, anyone could: “This was a guy who’d run full tilt into a wall to get a laugh, and then get up and do it again.” There’s also that story in that oral history of SNL about Aykroyd and Lorne Michaels nursing nasty hangovers from whatever cause and wandering out to see Belushi, who had been equally lit up the night before, doing backflips off the hotel diving board. Everyone thought he was indestructible, and whether they all thought he knew what he was doing and would never overdose or whether they all just had that arrogance of youth thing that assumes you’ll never die, I’m not sure, but the shock seems to have been that anything could stop this guy.
(Can I just say I find it hilarious that this is tagged under “short dudes” by the way?)
“Didn’t Bill Haley and all his Comets wear suits and ties? Bow ties? How is this the twilight of Rome?”
Dude, nice. And I’m with you on Belushi, I think. I can understand that he was an important influence on a lot of people, even if he wasn’t my kind of funny. Gilda, though, she was my kind of funny. I’ve always thought Gilda was the jewel in that group. She could anything, it seemed to me, and would. There was a sweetness in her sense of humour, a playfulness that the others mostly lacked, at least to me. There could be bitterness, too, but I never saw mean-spiritedness.
(And speaking of unleavened dicksmackery (which, hee!), some part of me wants to point out that “dilemmae” isn’t really the plural of “dilemma.” But if you can’t have fun with your tags, when can you?)
I’m with you on this one, Sars. I found it particularly annoying that my not-getting of the Belush was often blamed on the fact that I am female. As if there wasn’t a perfectly sane reason for not finding him humorous that had nothing to do with my chromosomes or lady parts. I find plenty of stupid, crass, and physical humor stuff funny, thankyouverymuch, as long as it’s funny!
I didn’t watch him on SNL during the first run, so the punchlines were ruined by the time I saw the bits (“Is there something that comes after ‘cheeseburger’ that makes this skit funny?”). But the same is true of Monty Python for me, and I guffawed my way through college watching that, so I really have no more excuses to offer. Clearly I am humor impaired when it comes to JB.
I’m with you. I just don’t get Belushi. I see his sketches and go ‘……eh’
Also bees and short dudes. Heh
I read “Wired” in high school (so, late 80s), and even then I thought it was a piece of crap. And yeah, I say this as a huge Belushi fan to this day, so I admit to a bias. I would definitely recommend reading “Belushi,” the biography put together by his widow: http://tinyurl.com/59xpyq.
Dierdre’s comment is dead-on. The sense I have seen and heard in interviews and articles, at the time and ever since 1982, was that the perception about John/drugs/death was not about drugs/death, but about John’s apparent resilience in the face of *clearly* excessive abuses.
p. 160, per Treat Williams: “But they were young, and everyone knew coke was okay — nonaddictive and just an energy burst.”
p. 85: “Judy still believed cocaine was the logical drug for all of them. It provided a sense of clearheadedness, of intellectual power. The drug was nonaddictive, and it kept them awake as they wrote…”
This is more the attitude that I was talking about, that at least as of the ’70s a lot of people thought (or said they thought, so as to rationalize their own use) that cocaine was like Red Bull. And you also have all the enabling, some of which was more classic enabling (Belushi’s doctor, who treated the chronic symptoms of longterm coke use but didn’t get aggressive with Belushi because he thought it was better to keep him close and keep an eye on things), and some of which was “we have no right to tell him to slow down because we still snort ourselves.”
I agree that there was the sense that John was a tank and could do huge amounts of coke and drink a lot and not be harmed; I’m talking more about the attitude that this was a serious problem that needed to be intervened upon, and that attitude didn’t develop societally for a few more years — the idea that this is addictive behavior and not just inconvenient/assholic.
Compare this to Chris Farley, who went to about 16 rehabs, vs. Belushi being assigned a minder to keep him away from coke while he was on a shoot. They’re going for the same result but the mindset about what the problem is is totally different.
Being a kid when Belushi died and then Len Bias a couple of years later, I always thought of coke as something that was going to kill me if I even saw someone doing it. But for people older than us it wasn’t like that. I mean, they had jokes about it in Annie Hall where normal people were doing coke and it wasn’t a big deal. (Though it did make for a funny scene). Can you imagine any movie after, say, 1985 where normal characters could do coke without it being a morality play?
Er, “She could do anything, it seemed to me, and would.” That’ll teach me to show off my grammar nerd. Sorry. And hey, I don’t even do Red Bull.
I have an old tape of Belushi on SNL (“The Best Of” or something like that). Interestingly, they left out “The Honeybees.” (Heh.)
My mom and I have had this, “Was he really talented? What would he really have done had he had the chance?” conversation. I have no answer; I can see glimmers of it (I particularly like a bit he does with Jane Curtin in one of the news bits where he works himself into a frenzy – I’m not sure why but I think it’s funny) but nothing that really stands out. I can’t sit through “The Blues Brothers,” although I thought “Animal House” was okay (mostly because Tim Matheson was still so hot). Aside from the guitar-smashing bit, I don’t think Belushi did anything that memorable in the movie.
He had some comic eyebrows. That’s about all I come up with, in the end.
I loved the Samurai sketches, and OMG I laughed so hard when he did his parody of Joe Cocker onstage with Joe Cocker. (Joe appeared less than amused, though.) His movies? Meh.
He did seem indestructable, like an army tank, and I think that’s why it was such a shock when he died. But twelve consecutive days of ANYTHING will take its toll.
Thanks for the review, Sars. (also love the tags, you crack me up!)
Did you see Nathan Rabin’s write up of the film Wired in My Year of Flops at the AV Club?
http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/my_year_of_flops_extra_innings
@RJ: The eyebrows, yes!
My boyfriend and I just finished watching the first season of SNL, and while I agree that it is not nearly as funny as many claim, Belushi cracked me up (not every time, but a lot).
This is not particularly thought out, but I think one of the things Belushi does that I find hilarious is the slow build to out-and-out manic behavior. The bits as the weatherman are good examples.
@C.: Totally read it yesterday. I didn’t even know a film version existed; it sounds really really bad.
I’m so glad that other people out there don’t “get” John Belushi- I thought it was just me. I find it both sad and hilarious that once upon a time people thought cocaine was non-addictive and “just an energy burst.”
Anyone else here remember the Lampoon flic “Lemmings?”
It was supposedly the first time JB did his Cocker schtick. It was different; maybe that was what struck me as funny.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301538/
“I’m talking more about the attitude that this was a serious problem that needed to be intervened upon, and that attitude didn’t develop societally for a few more years”
Gotcha, and had I read the end of your review more carefully I would have seen that you addressed the “John was a tank” issue. As you say, it was probably his death that woke a lot of people up to the problems with cocaine, and more distance on the subject might have brought that to the fore.
(Funny that coke is still perceived as “an energy burst” in small doses even now. I worked at a big resort one year where serving staff were working 18-hour days and pretty much lived on espresso and coke. *shudder*)
I think the early SNL was a lot like later SNL: maybe 2 hours’ worth of gems in a season’s worth of shows. I liked a lot of the now-classic Belushi stuff, I adore Jake and Elwood and the “Update” piece RJ mentions above was hilarious to me – perhaps because the one I’ve seen wound up being a rant about Irishmen and I recognized a lot of it. But there was a lot of garbage in there, too (and I seem to have an immunity to anything National Lampoon puts out, Animal House included).
Wait, wasn’t the addictiveness of cocaine the reason it got taken out of Coca-Cola in the first place? So _somebody_ obviously knew. But yeah, someone made a good point about coke use in older movies not being morality plays. So maybe it was just the FDA who knew. Why didn’t they tell anyone??
And FWIW, I thought JB was hilarious. All the samurai sketches, especially. And every scene he was in in Animal House, but he was really more of a bit character than the main guy in there. I dunno, anyway.
Belushi is a few things that make him legendary. I don’t know who’s going around saying he’s a *comic* legend; plenty of people, I suppose. I’m in my late 30s, though, and I think of him as more of a type than as a comic genius. He’s:
A). Weirdly uninhibited (without being a chatterbox or self-consciously eccentric)
B). Totally rustic and unkempt without forgetting how to play to the camera
C). Unassuming
They’re kind of all the same, but, more than that, they’re all of a piece. From Lear’s Fool to the present day, one central vein of comedy is the pleasure of doing the forbidden, or at least the discouraged. Say what everyone else wishes they could say. Flip off the people/societal mores that everyone else wishes they could flip off. Belushi did that.
Best of all, he did it without acting like he had scored some big victory for slobbiness everywhere. He did it without acting like it was another brick in the wall he was building against pretense.
But was he a comic genius? Not really. He had his schtick and he knew exactly what to do with it–spit mashed potatoes on cheerleaders, smash stuff, dodge bazooka shells fired by ex-GFs, grill it like the whole bolivian army. He plugs into that desire, nearly universal among the caucasian bourgeoise male, to let down the facade of civility (…which was how hard to erect in the first place?).
Guys like to run in packs, from frats to sports teams to cafe society to what have you. And there’s always the scofflaw in there somewhere, though the uniform changes. And even the most decorous in the group can be heard to say “Ya gotta have a Bluto.”
Belushi didn’t so much crack as up as keep open the idea that the unthinkable was not only thinkable, but part of the plan for tonight.
I think there is a lot of merit to the argument that people just didn’t think of cocaine as a serious drug at that time. For some reason my husband really loved Crocodile Dundee as a kid. So, when it was on cable, he and I sat down to watch it. On top of it ruining his childhood memories, we both realized just how acceptable it was for people to use coke as a recreational drug even that late (1986) in the decade.
So, I think Belushi’s death was a shock because the mindset was that coke couldn’t really hurt you AND that he was pretty much a tank. And even though Dundee was only like 4 years or so later, I still think it took a while for coke to be viewed as something dangerous.
As for Belushi himself, I got him. His appeal for me – like others have said here- was his controlled build up to out and out destruction. But, I also really liked the black and white skits where he played an old man – they weren’t necessarily funny but they were endearing.
I always wonder how different the movie Ghostbusters would have been if he had lived. Dan Ackroyd claims that when he was writing the movie, he was writing a part specifically for Belushi.
I really do believe that Sars is right on Belushi and the whole expectations thing. After you hear the catchphrases a bazillion times and other people build up the bit, it’s never as funny. (I mean, it’s just painful to hear anyone explain why something is funny, IMHO. And then try to sell you on it. Either you find it funny when you see/hear/etc. or you don’t…)
Personally, I like Belushi in some of the movies and the SNL stuff, but he’s clearly a limited performer.
I love The Blues Brothers, because the music is great and he and Ackroyd work really well together in it. I enjoy the tomfoolery of it all, but I’m not going to pretend it’s the greatest thing ever.
Animal House I love, but it’s not just because of Belushi. He’s very good and it’s a perfect sort of role for him. but he’s not carrying the movie. It’s an ensemble piece with a cast that fits it very well. It’s a movie that works because the people that are being pranked on deserve the shit they’re getting (Marmalard and Co. are set up early as unthinking dickwads, so the Deltas can do no wrong when screwing with them) and the Deltas all have the ol’ heart of gold thing going on. I still think it’s a very funny movie, but it’s been beaten down a bit by A) having a bunch of rip-offs out there diluting the movie and B) having so many of the bits being put out there out of context. Hard for people to have the same laugh-fest when they’ve already heard 3/4 of the jokes.
Oh, I forgot to mention “Wired” the movie. God, that was awful. Hard to believe Michael Chiklis went on to become the hot bald guy on “The Shield.”
Tanner Colby worked on the “Belushi” bio with Judy; the same guy who did the Chris Farley book Sars mentions in the next post. I wrote to him after “Belushi” came out to tell him I liked it. Got a nice reply.
“… a bit he does with Jane Curtin in one of the news bits where he works himself into a frenzy – ” “… a rant about Irishmen”. Yes, that’s it. That’s the one. It didn’t retrospectively make the cheeseburger stuff funny for me but it did unlock the mystery of what the magic ingredient was when people did find him funny.
Belushi’s “Luck of the Irish” rant is one on my personal favorites. “So now I’ve got this drunken Irish junkie who wants to kill me!” So, so funny when he spins himself out of the chair. I can’t find a video online, alas, but you can read it here: http://tinyurl.com/2ufuu8. It really does need to be seen, though.
I do think Belushi was a comic genius, but I was never much of an SNL fan. I always thought it more unfunny than funny, and it wasn’t worth staying home on a Saturday night.
Belushi, though – he had it, whatever “it” is. I don’t know. Comedy is a personal thing. It’s almost impossible to explain why something is funny, and I’m not much for trying to break that stuff down anyway. But hell, I understand why someone wouldn’t like Belushi. He was loud and blustery, and at least some of what he did was a little gross. The same can be said of Chris Farley, who I think is one of the most unfunny, overrated people ever. I can’t even say what the difference is between Belushi and Farley, other than one makes me laugh and the other makes me change the channel.
“It might have made more sense to re-interview everyone again in two years, or five years, to get a better perspective on what happened before sitting down to write or assemble the anecdotes or whatever.”
I just read Tina Brown’s “The Diana Chronicles” and it is exactly that – a look at a controversial figure ten years after her death, when everyone involved could get a little perspective (and during which time what seems to be a metric ton of books were written about her, which Brown parsed for meaning).
@ Jen M. : “Luck of the Irish” is precisely the skit that cracks me up. I don’t know that I could have taken that kind of thing on an ongoing basis, but that particular skit kills me!
While we’re all comparing notes on “what did I/didn’t I find funny about JB” — I’ll go with “I have a fondness for Blues Brothers, and Animal House”, but I don’t remember anything from SNL cracking me up *except* for the news rants; well, except for one news rant in particular. I never heard the “Luck of the Irish” rant, but there’s one that he did about March coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb, and how it’s different in different countries… and yeah, I admit, that one slayed me. When I was in high school I managed to record him doing the rant off a radio replay of it, on cassette tape. I wonder where that is? It makes me sad that I can’t find a copy of it (audio or video) online anywhere. I can still “hear” it in my head.
But most of the “classic” Belushi stuff didn’t raise much mirth, for me.
Coincidentally, I just saw part of “Animal House” this past weekend! I can’t get on board the Belushi = Comic Genius train, but I have to say that some of my favorite parts of that movie are the small, throwaway bits Belushi does in the background, when he’s not the center of the action. When the Deltas are in Wormer’s office, being read their abysmal grades? The little congratulatory gesture Bluto gives Pinto cracks me up, every single time. The tiny, throwaway reaction stuff just kills me, for some reason.
Belushi had a great, expressive face for comedic reaction. I still don’t think he was a comic genius, and he pales by comparison to Gilda – or Bill Murray, for that matter – but he had his moments. I think Tom nailed it in his comment above, actually.
@ Holly: I also love the Belushi weather sketch. “In Norway, for example, March comes in like a polar bear and goes out like a walrus. Or, take the case of Honduras where March comes in like a lamb and goes out like a salt marsh harvest mouse. Or consider the Republic of South Africa where March comes in like a lion and goes out like a different lion. Like one has a mane, and one doesn’t have a mane. Or in certain parts of South America where March swims in like a sea otter, and then it slithers out like a giant anaconda.”
Oh, man, I could go on all day.
Check out the clip of Belushi from the movie “The Ruttles” he plays the manager that has lost quite a considerable amount of the bands money. Incredible clip. Look at the scene in the Blues Brothers where he is pleading for his life with his ex (played by Carrie Fisher) & he takes off his sunglasses. He could solicit a laugh without a word. His clips as a guest on the Richard Pryor show were impressive as well. Watch him become Joe Cocker , right next to Joe Cocker on SNL. There are some rare clips from his work on Lemmings as well. Read “Belushi” to get a grasp on this talent, not that garbage from Woodward.
Dude, you evidently don’t know what good entertainment is. You are probably one of those homo’s that listens to the Dave Matthews band and think Dane Cook is funny. No one really cares what you think. Belushi was a great performer and artist/comedian. Now if you want to trash his little brother Jim. I have no problem with that. He sucks bigtime.
Please punctuate “homos” correctly, fucknuts. Thanks.