Forumi Horizont (http://www.forumihorizont.com/index.php3)
- Figura të shquara (http://www.forumihorizont.com/forumdisplay.php3?forumid=117)
-- C'dime per shqiptarin me te njohur ne bote(pas Nene Terezes). (http://www.forumihorizont.com/showthread.php3?threadid=10192)

John Belushi
1949-1982
By OWEN GLEIBERMAN
April 9, 2007 1:48:56 PM
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?

Belushi’s career dipped after he left Saturday Night Live. In Hollywood, he appeared in several flops (1941 and Old Boyfriends), won over an even younger set of fans (if not the critics) with The Blues Brothers, and had his first shot as a romantic lead in Continental Divide, a machine-tooled screwball comedy that sank at the box office. This past Christmas, Neighbors put him back at the top of the heap. Casting Belushi as a worn-out, middle-aged suburbanite proved to be a master stroke, though it was the first time he’d looked truly comfortable in a straight part. When he played husbands and insurance men on television, his beady eyes and herky-jerky speech patterns always got in the way. And even after Neighbors, Belushi didn’t strike me as movie-star material. Having come up through the comedy-improv ranks (first with Chicago’s famed Second City troupe and then with Lemmings and the National Lampoon Radio Hour), he was a master of bits, but he always had that mysteriously impenetrable quality one typically finds in character actors. There was nothing open or vulnerable or “sensitive” about John Belushi. Watching him wax tender in Continental Divide, you kept hoping he’d throw one of his delirious tantrums.



Of course, that’s about all he did in Animal House, his most inspired film. It’s extraordinary that Belushi could have turned a 200-pound infant like Bluto into a college hero (remember those “Bluto for President!” posters?). But Bluto’s celebrity was a sign of the times. If you were in college during the late ‘70s, few things were more irritating than having to listen to some straggling “survivor” of the ‘60s assail you for being decadent and depoliticized and only out for yourself. Punk rock was one answer to sanctimonious liberalism, and comedy was another. Belushi himself was openly down on the ‘60s and his face-stuffing shtick in Animal House was the ultimate kiss-off to those who would have had college students behave “responsibly.” Belushi truly believed that comedy is a subversive force. The day after he died, I happened to be nosing around my local used-record shop when the cashier slipped on of the Blues Brothers albums on the turntable. The Blues Brothers had always struck me as one enormous aesthetic dud in Belushi’s career, but listening to him sing “Soul Man” just then, I was glad he’d come up with Jake Joliet Blues. For whatever it was that possessed a mediocre single like John Belushi to don sunglasses and perform amateurish renditions of old R&B tunes is what gave his humor such vitality. Belushi may not have been a rock ‘n’ roll star but he came astonishingly close. He showed us how to joke ‘n’ roll.