Did John Belushi deliberately try to tank female sketches?
As one of the seven original cast members of Saturday Night Live, John Belushi will always have a place in the annals of small-screen comedy history, even though he was well on the way to cinematic superstardom before his death at the age of just 33 in March of 1982.
Animal House and The Blues Brothers are both regarded as classics despite occupying completely different ends of the comedic spectrum as a raucous frat house romp and a car-crashing musical buddy movie, respectively, but Belushi’s demons ended up getting the better of him.
While it was alcohol and drugs that seized most of the headlines and ultimately conspired to deliver the overdose that ended his life, his widow, Judy Belushi-Pisano, admitted in the documentary Belushi that “he had that systemic sexism”. However, she was quick to point out that “sometimes contrary to some things you might hear, John was very good with women, in general”.
One of the people who disagreed was SNL co-star Jane Curtin, who revealed on The Oprah Winfrey Show that Belushi would go out of his way to ensure that female writers and performers were subjected to borderline sabotage: “Their battles were constant,” Curtin said. “They were working against John, who said women are just fundamentally not funny”.
Not only that, but Curtin also noted that “if a woman writer had written a piece for John, he would not read it in his full voice,” offering that “he felt as though it was his duty to sabotage pieces written by women”. One exception to the rule was Gilda Radner, with the two rising through the ranks together and forming a close friendship.
On the other side of the coin, Curtin had an explanation for that, too: “He thought Gilda was funny, but she really…he didn’t classify her as a woman. She was Gilda.” Outside of that, even more SNL alumni have told their own stories of Belushi’s reticence to endorse female writers and/or performers as meaningful parts of the recurring sketch series.
Creator Lorne Michaels corroborated claims made by Curtin that appeared in The Ringer, where she stated that “John absolutely didn’t like being in sketches with women”. In addition, writers Anne Beatts and Rosie Shuster found themselves being treated especially harshly: “In the beginning, there were two things John didn’t do: He wouldn’t do drag, because it didn’t fit his description of what he should be doing. And he didn’t do pieces that Anne or Rosie wrote. So somebody would have to say that a guy had written it.”
Even in the face of his bond with Radner – who escaped criticism because he didn’t even see her as such – Belushi made it clear to any number of people that working with the female creatives on Saturday Night Live wasn’t something he could even find the will to feign interest in being part of.
