In a world full of followers, John Belushi seemed like the last free man

John Belushi, at 33, was gone too soon. Even if you hated physical comedy, you could not stop watching him. Where would he be now?

John Belushi, at 33, was gone too soon.

When a great talent dies young, the world is diminished. You find yourself thinking not only of what that person created but of what that person could have created if he’d had time. Everyone can make their list. For me, there is no purer case of the-acorn-that-would-have-become-the-oak-had-it-not-been-pancaked-by-the-truck than John Belushi, who, had he not died at age 33 in 1982, would turn 75 this month.

John Belushi would have turned 75 this month.

In a world full of followers, Belushi seemed like the last free man. Even if you hated physical comedy, you could not stop watching him. He lived the showbiz maxim: to do anything original, you must be willing to make a fool of yourself. And he did. Again and again. The audience did not know what he was going to do because half the time neither did he. It made him a star – first at National Lampoon, then on television’s Saturday Night Live. A handful of Belushi’s SNL sketches are remembered, but it’s less the characters that linger than the energy.

Animal House (1978) and The Blues Brothers (1980) remain his signature movies. He played Bluto in the first, the hard partier still living in the fraternity house years after he was supposed to graduate. Why does the picture hold up when so many other comedies of that era have faded?

Because it presents a philosophy, personified by Belushi. It’s the husk of the old 60s thing, the libertine dazzlement, the drive to act, because doing anything is better than sitting alone in your room. Bluto smashing the guitar of the folk singing dweeb on the Delta house stairs is the end of the 60s and the return of rock ’n’ roll –goodbye The Mamas & The Papas, hello The Clash.

That freedom inspired a new kind of comedy. You don’t have The Hangover without Animal House, nor Tommy Boy starring Chris Farley, whose overdose death at 33 seemed like a gruesome homage to Belushi.

The Blues Brothers was his second masterwork; Belushi as Jake and Dan Aykroyd as Elwood reunite their band and raise money to save an orphanage. The movie is a monument to Chicago’s native art, the electric blues, with Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and John Lee Hooker preserved in cinematic amber.

It’s Chicago before the boom, the city of my childhood – bungalows and weedy yards, labyrinthine wooden fire escapes and clubs that stay open “From can ‘til can’t,” quoting Muddy Waters.

But it’s Belushi that makes it go. The fedora and black suit, Ray-Ban Wayfarers and unflappable cool, the bluesman who looks like a Hasidic diamond merchant, orders fried chickens whole, runs the Illinois Nazis off the Jackson Park bridge and stares forlornly at the El tracks and dark smoky city beyond. He was to us what Bogart had been to our parents, only funnier.

In a world full of followers, Belushi seemed like the last free man.

Those movies cranked Belushi up to Elvis-level fame and put him on the same coaster that killed the King. He used drugs to blank out or to key up to the level he needed to reach to become Bluto, which is what everyone wanted from him, even the 4am nobodies at the bar. That he never wanted to disappoint was his undoing. You become sensitive in order to perform, then die of exposure.

He was starting to take a different kind of role at the end, playing straight in Neighbours (1981) and Continental Divide (1981). That neither movie works does not make the effort a failure. These were transitional films, Belushi on the way somewhere else, which is how you avoid becoming a hack. Keep going. Keep trying.

Keep making a fool of yourself till you arrive. The fact that he died before he got there is a tragedy worth mourning.