Belushi at 63? Click the image to watch "Don't Look Back in Anger."
The hardest part was picking the iconic image. Joliet Jake in sunglasses and fedora? The chee-burger, chee-burger diner owner? Killer bee? Samurai hotel clerk? A drunken frat brother in a sweatshirt that says, simply, “College”? In the end, I kept coming back to “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” Tom Schiller’s short film in which you play yourself as an old man. “They all thought I’d be the first to go,” you say, climbing the hill to the cemetery where the rest of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players are buried. Not one of them made it past age 38, you note, as you detail their causes of death before ultimately dancing on their graves.
Of course, it was completely backward, as much then as it is now, 30 years after you died at age 33. And, of course, it was completely genius.
Yours was not the first celebrity death I absorbed in real time. Elvis, Thurman Munson, John Lennon. By March 1982, at age 12, I knew that bright lights sometimes extinguish early. But when you died, it was the first time I felt like I had lost something of my era, something that defined my worldview, such as it was at 12.
Yours was not the first celebrity death I absorbed in real time. Elvis, Thurman Munson, John Lennon. By March 1982, at age 12, I knew that bright lights sometimes extinguish early. But when you died, it was the first time I felt like I had lost something of my era, something that defined my worldview, such as it was at 12.
When I started doing these birthday wishes, one of the goals was to not dwell on deaths but on lives. But your life and death are so intertwined in the mythology: it was only seven years from when you broke ground on “SNL” in ’75 to when they laid you in the ground in ’82. That’s a small window, but that’s what makes Brother Bluto and Joliet Jake such treasured glimpses of John Belushi. What would your career have brought if you had made it through those wild and crazy days? Look at Bill Murray and Steve Martin. Look at Robin Williams, for crysakes! I have no doubt you would have tapped into that deep well of expressiveness to become not just a gifted comedic actor but also an actor capable of amazing dramatic roles. Look at your buddy Aykroyd: he cleaned up nice and has turned in some nice parts in both genres.
Then again, maybe you would have gone the other way and continued to make frat-house classics with Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn or ended up playing a hopelessly lost Boomer-generation grandparent on some two-bit network series about life in the 21st century. Who knows.
You were the Jim Brown of comedy: seven Hall of Fame seasons and out. And yet, three decades later, even 12 year-olds know to scream “Food fight!” and to chant “To-gah! To-gah! To-gah!” There isn’t a hockey rink in North America that doesn’t play the “Did we quit when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?!” clip when the home team is down in the third period. And who among us hasn’t annoyed some diner waitress by ordering “four fried chickens … and a Coke”?
In the end, “Don’t Look Back in Anger” had it exactly right. I feel like you just might outlive them all. Because ... you're a dancer!
You were the Jim Brown of comedy: seven Hall of Fame seasons and out. And yet, three decades later, even 12 year-olds know to scream “Food fight!” and to chant “To-gah! To-gah! To-gah!” There isn’t a hockey rink in North America that doesn’t play the “Did we quit when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?!” clip when the home team is down in the third period. And who among us hasn’t annoyed some diner waitress by ordering “four fried chickens … and a Coke”?
In the end, “Don’t Look Back in Anger” had it exactly right. I feel like you just might outlive them all. Because ... you're a dancer!
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