Hadley Freeman
Hadley Freeman
@HadleyFreeman
Fri 11 Jan 2019 01.00 EST Last modified on Fri 11 Jan 2019 07.08 EST
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John Belushi in Saturday Night Live's medieval band sketch, 1980.
John Belushi in Saturday Night Live's medieval band sketch, 1980. Photograph: NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
“What you need to understand about John Belushi,” the director Ivan Reitman tells me, “is he really was this extraordinary talent. I've known a lot of famous people but he was at the centre of the zeitgeist in a way that's hard to describe now. But his fame took over to a degree I'd never seen before and haven't seen since.”
Belushi would have turned 70 this month, but instead he died aged 33 in 1982. Yet unlike other influential comedians of that era who died young – Doug Kenney, the founder of the comedy magazine National Lampoon; Belushi's Saturday Night Live (SNL) co-star Gilda Radner – his legend burns bright. His face can still be seen on a million T-shirts and even more posters on the walls of those born decades after he died. In 2015, Rolling Stone voted him the greatest of all of SNL's 145 cast members, beating Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey and Bill Murray. The magazine cited Belushi's comedy skills and physicality – “a wrestler's body with a dancer's feet, something boyishly vulnerable in his madness” – as the reasons for his lasting appeal, and this is all true. But it would be naive to pretend that Belushi's premature death doesn't play a part in his enduring reputation.
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