WIRED: THE SHORT LIFE AND FAST TIMES OF JOHN BELUSHI

by Bob Woodward

(Simon And Schuster)

I approached this book with some suspicion, the controversy still being hot. Judy Belushi, John’s widow, had made it clear she thought the book was unfair—that Woodward’s depiction of John was incomplete and that he had failed to convey that “drugs are fun.” A scandalous comment to some, but I knew exactly what she meant—too often these anti-drug scenarios fail to relate what it is in the drug experience that draws people into it, and a drug warning that doesn’t delineate the seductiveness of drugs is often defeating its own purpose. Since nobody starts out as a strung-out addict, by emphasizing almost exclusively the bad times, these warnings seem—to the neophyte drug user—unwarranted, hysterical, unrelated to reality.

And besides, Dan Aykroyd had called the book “pulpish” (which I take to mean sensationalistic), and Aykroyd is a smart cookie.

As it turns out, the book seems to be neither unfair nor sensationalistic. In fact, one can imagine few things as unsensationalistic as Woodward’s bland, journalistic prose. Sure there’s a few bits of sleaze to be gleaned, but generally what is on display here is not the art of writing but the art of research and the subsequent organizing of data. There is an unbalance of focus, since the book is as much about cocaine as it is about John Belushi, and since the book is structured so that the more John gets involved with drugs the more detailed the book becomes—time slows down, the first half of his life getting a short chapter while the last twoand-a-half weeks get a hundred pages. But is this unfair? I suspect that time slowed down for John too. And anyone who has even slightly known someone who’s addicted should recognize the veracity of Woodward’s presentation of those final drug-obsessed days. Drawing on 267 interviews, the 400-plus pages of exacting detail about the life destroyed by cocaine wears down one’s initial resistance—if Woodward’s tourist-from-squaresville approach is irritating at first, in the end it’s his objectivity that makes the book convincing.

I think the resistance to this book has been fed by two factors, the first being the way the book debuted— serialized in the newspapers, the juicier sections emphasized. The book itself, though, is more calm and serious than a glance at the newspapers may have led one to expect. A second reason, particularly among us baby boomers, is a suspicion that the book may be an excuse for a blanket condemnation of some of the cherished ideas of our generation—John after all was a shining light in a satirical group that had a keen and cutting edge to their political and social commentary. But relax. The moral here is definitely not that rebellion against the status quo leads to self-destruction. Woodward draws no such conclusion and it seems obvious that Belushi would have been in trouble even if he had decided to become a football player, his second career choice—his compulsive need to consume experience regardless of the damage to himself may have been exacerbated by a permissive show-biz milieu, but it wasn’t created by it. Also, after reading about the tight-assed fundamentalist/Republican environment that John grew up in (where his family felt compelled to hide the fact that they were Albanian for fear of having the locals suspect they were commies), and such heartwarming incidents as how some movie distributors rejected The Blues Brothers because they didn’t want to book a “black” movie, how movie exec pig-headedness assured the disaster of Neighbors and on and on—reading this, Belushi’s rebelliousness seems more justified than ever.

No, the book doesn’t trash Belushi, it just details the way he trashed himself. The message here is a simple one: cocaine can kill you, but even before it does, it will render you useless. Belushi was right to rebel and the book offers inspirational examples of how his rebellion was sustained even when he wasn’t on camera (e.g., a scene with Belushi mau-mauing composer/saxophonist Tom Scott with a tape of the punk group Fear is intensely satisfying to those of us familiar with the godawful dreck that Scott churns out for a living), but he just couldn’t avoid the fatal trap of uninhibited indulgence, and indulgence abetted by friends and biz-associates who were either doing drugs themselves, or saw John as a valuable property they couldn’t afford to upset. Fair enough. And though it’s easy to resent anti-drug messages because of the pious fools who often deliver them, if this book gets some relevant drug data into the hands of some young potential abusers, then I think that’s swell. Better they get the bad news this way, in a straight, no bullshit, scrupulously detailed presentation, than in the usual lame homilies from people they mistrust.

BOMB HUMOR

This is a story with a moral-j^nice guys can have the last laugh. And the first. And the second. In the killer world of big time comedy, where venom can drip off every punchline, nice Midwestern boy Joel Hodgson is making it big. Only halfway through his second year in the comedy capital of L.A., Hodgson has done everything he could have hoped for: three appearances on Saturday Night Live, three on David Letterman, an HBO Young Comics Special, and a Denny Johnson show. He’s also working with Showtime, writing and producing some comedy projects, cramming that between gigs around the country at top comedy clubs, including Caroline’s in N.Y.C. He’s only 22, and it’s all starting to happen.

And in place of the manic ambition you might expect, there’s all that niceness with an incredible pile of self-doubt. “1 didn’t have the idea to go to Los Angeles. Everyone else said I should. I knew I couldn’t do much else in Minneapolis. I guess I was thinking, well, everyone else was taking a year off after college.”

College was Bethel College, a very religious institution. “I’m a guy who shouldn’t be a comedian. My parents are Baptists, I’m a Christian. But I did it. I just tried. That’s what the guy I am onstage is. He doesn’t have all the tools, but he’s really trying.”

It’s not jokes that are making Hodgson such a hit—it’s that guy he is onstage. A tall and handsome blond with collegiate good looks offstage turns into a palooka, with hair and eyes jerked up into a permanent question mark. The “character” is sweet and earnest but not stupid; as he pulls his three-dimensional gags out of a big box and does the punchlines, you get the feeling that this is a little kid pulling a major sabotage on the modern world. To name too many specifics would risk making the “jokes” sound unfunny—it’s enough to say that Hodgson’s props are bizarre, tampered artifacts of the modern world that you’d find pretampering in a K-Mart store—like a plastic hockey game, or two tin cans, or a rubber Spiderman mask or a little floppy plastic pig. Or a mock bomb. Yes, Hodgson is the one that did the bomb gag on Saturday Night Live, and then got in big trouble when a maid in a New York Hotel found the “bomb’”s remnants and sparked an evacuation. People feel trapped by the tangibles of the modern world, all their possessions like trains that break, and big screen TVs that they can’t afford and umbrellas that splinter at the slightest hint of wind. Hodgson rebuilds “things” and then tells jokes about them. Innocence and humor beat modern living at its own game.

If Joel Hodgson doesn’t sound like a laugh riot, well, he isn’t, really. Certainly not like most hairy-chested Vegas yuck-yucks who appear on the Tonight Show. “There’s no social commentary in comedy anymore. It’s very clean and contrived. To some comics the ideal illusion is that you’re their friend at a party and you’re rapping. That’s an absurd lie. My stage self is about embracing the part of you that gets hurt, the part that’s easy for people to laugh at. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes 1 just want you to feel weird. Sometimes 1 just want to make you feel uncomfortable.”

Oh, he does all that, but he’s still funny—funny enough to have made a superb start in a comedy career. So what’s the dream after the dream has come true? He wants to move back to Minneapolis, produce and write comedy videos, and “mail ’em in. After all, I really consider myself a garage comic, like there are garage bands. The desire to do is more important than the ability.” A nice dream for a nice guy who lives cleaner than Pat Boone—and makes comedy as funny as any nice or nasty newcomer around.

Laura Fissinger