Dan Aykroyd on Belushi, The UnBelievable and political correctness

Comedy legend Dan Aykroyd on his old mate John Belushi, political correctness - and his real-life fascination with the paranormal.

Dan Aykroyd. Picture: Sarah Hummert

Your comedy career is legendary but you’ve transitioned to documentary with your strange-but-true television series, The UnBelievable. Is reality stranger than fiction? When it comes to this show, it is! Take this one lady who fell 17,000ft from an airplane and lived. She landed on an anthill, and they figured that the anthill kept her alive because they kept biting her, and the adrenaline kept her moving – I’m not making this up! That’s what’s so fun about this show!

Don’t you ever go into some of these programs with scepticism? Sometimes, but mostly I’m just as astounded as the audience. Even I can’t believe what I have to tell you. The great thing about the world today is that you can search up everything, and all the facts are there. So I speak with confidence when I tell these stories, that they really, truly happened.

How have you maintained such a good rapport with your audience for more than 50 years? Everybody likes to laugh! I want people to feel good, and I don’t mind an encounter; it’s nothing for me to take a selfie. In my career, I was part of a number of collaborations that made good movies that people wanted to see again and again. We made films that endured because they really did connect with people at the time. We were beloved by the audience because of the quality of what we were putting out there. Not like some movies that are on streaming now.

Harold Ramis, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd in the 1984 film Ghostbusters

Do you think there’s still space for comedies to gather a cult following, like The Blues Brothers or Ghostbusters? A good comedy is missing right now. I liked The Hangover comedies, but we need something that gets people back out there in the theatres. I think there is a future for good, big, fat feature comedy. God knows I’m looking for the idea.

Why hasn’t it happened yet? I think that superheroes and sequels have overtaken our screens. I’m trying to think of the last great comedy that was out there. It’s not good because the world needs to laugh!

Comedy does not always age well. Do you think you made any jokes during your career, maybe on Saturday Night Live, that wouldn’t be told now? I never was worried about crossing the line. We never did hurtful comedy at SNL, and any profanity was pretty lightweight. Now, the “F-speak” is a language in films. I think it is very lazy writing, myself. Every second movie you see, it’s the f-speak all the way through. We couldn’t have done that way back then and I’m glad we didn’t do that.

Aykroyd, left, with the late John Belushi in the 1980 cult film The Blues Brothers

In many ways, societies have become more liberal – and in other ways, that liberalism has limited freedom of expression. Do you think political correctness can hinder comedy? It does. I guess it stops the creative flow of ideas. But if it’s overtly hurtful, it shouldn’t be used. Like Peter Sellers as an Indian character wouldn’t be acceptable today. There are so many great Indian comedians who could do it much better. And Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, who does a horrid impression of a Japanese person, just a really egregious caricature. Today, there’d be a hilarious Asian comedian to take the part. Which would be much better, wouldn’t it?

You’re a believer in spiritualism, and your great-grandfather was a mystic who corresponded with another spiritualist, writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Has that influenced the tone of The UnBelievable? Only insofar as, when paranormal stories come forth, I have a degree of real, deep earnestness in delivering those. I do believe in, and I love, stories about angels because my great-grandfather was a paranormal researcher and spiritualist, and I am a Ghostbuster. I always have a connection to that kind of material.

What’s more unbelievable – aliens existing or your late comedy partner John Belushi showing up to set on time? Well, you can definitely believe that Johnny was late all the time. But it made for great stories when we’d go find him. If Johnny showed up a little more on time, I mean, it would have defied belief.

Season 2 of The UnBelievable with Dan Aykroyd is now streaming on SBS OnDemand