Keith's Rants

We here at Alexrock.com pride ourselves on asking the tough questions. Questions like, “Who would win in a fight – Erin Esurance or Kim Possible?” and “What else could we turn into a self-propelled automaton?” Today I’m going to attempt to answer the toughest question of all, one which may have no true answer.

Who is more awesome: John Belushi or Groucho Marx?

There’s no denying that between them these two have created some of the greatest characters
and funniest movies of all time essentially without even acting: each just went up in front of the camera and acted as he always did, with some supporting actors to change the context from movie to movie. This is what makes them both infinitely more awesome than, say, Ben Stiller, who made up a hilarious character in Derek Zoolander but has never been funny on any other occasion and was obviously acting the whole time.

Deciding which of these timelessly cool icons of American culture is most awesome is naturally difficult, which is why I’ve chosen to add some structure to the question by breaking it down into categories. Whoever wins the most categories is probably cooler, with the caveat that both are at least twice as cool as the next coolest person on Earth, Bill Murray.

The categories that I came up with are:
1. Career.
2. Sidekick.
3. Babes.
4. Quotability.
5. Personality.

CAREER

This category is meant to take in the whole of the contestant’s acting career and measure its value in terms of contribution to the global culture. Obviously, because we’re going to all this trouble to decide who’s coolest, they must be fairly close, which means that length of career is the decisive factor.

In this respect, Marx wins hands down. Belushi was a flash in the pan in the late 70s and early 80s, producing such hits as Animal House and The Blues Brothers, as well as several of the best Saturday Night Live sketches ever, before being cut down in his prime by an overdose of cocaine and heroin. Marx, on the other hand, lived well into old age – doubtless due to his steady diet of gin, cigars, and saltine crackers. He made a half-dozen movies that I can think of, and then went on to television in the 50s. He was on a game show of some kind whose name I forget, but from what I can remember he didn’t really have what you’d call a “part” in the show – his job was just to sit there and crack obscene one-liners every few minutes. On one occasion his comment was so funny and so lewd that not only did the show’s censors cut the tape-delayed broadcast before it could be aired, but they had to stop broadcasting entirely for several minutes while everyone in the room regained their composure.

You could certainly imagine Belushi doing something like that had he lived, though instead of placidly puffing a cigar and occasionally chiming in with a smart remark, he would have probably ranted and raved across the sound stage like a drunken gorilla – a difference of style, not effect. Alas, because he picked the wrong drugs, we never got to see what Belushi could have been.

Winner: Groucho Marx.

SIDEKICK

No hero is complete without a sidekick. Some sidekicks are lame and even slightly gay, e.g. Robin from Batman or Superboy from Superman. Others are nearly as awesome as the hero himself, e.g. Spock from Star Trek or Mr. Bush from the Horatio Hornblower series. Belushi and Marx both had sidekicks, so they deserve comparison.

Marx’s sidekicks were the rest of the Marx Brothers, without whom none of his movies would have been complete. There’s no question that they held up their end of the various movies and provided a light-hearted repose from Groucho’s rapid-fire delivery. On the other hand, their gags were only good for so long, and while Groucho had an extensive solo career, no one ever invited Zeppo to be on a game show.

Belushi didn’t have a memorable sidekick in Animal House, unless you count his good friend Jack Daniels. In The Blues Brothers, on the other hand, he had an extremely cool sidekick in the form of my personal hero Elwood Blues, played by Dan Aykroid. Elwood made that movie what it was by providing the straight man to Belushi’s Jake Blues, yet didn’t miss a chance to kick the ass of an entire Winnebago full of country music singers, brilliantly sabotage an elevator in a way that I’ve always wanted to try, and deliver some of the best deadpan shtick in the history of the universe. What’s more, Aykroid went on to make The Blues Brothers 2000 which, even without Belushi, was still a good movie, even if it didn’t measure up to the original.

Dan Aykroid is pretty awesome all by himself. As Belushi’s straight man, he rules.

Winner: John Belushi.

BABES

Groucho Marx was always hitting on Mrs. Teasdale, who wasn’t all that hot but was apparently loaded, which shows that he had his priorities straight. After all, if your wife is rich, you can always hire a hot Latina maid. On the other hand, John Belushi almost married Princess Leia, then blew her off, probably to play the blues and/or get smashed. Case closed.

Winner: John Belushi

QUOTABILITY

Both Belushi and Marx are intensely quotable. Quotability is good because it allows laymen to pretend for only an instant that they are briefly almost as cool as the man who made up the quote. Who hasn’t watched Bluto Blutarski and pals call for “a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part” and wished that he could somehow be in that exact same situation, saying that exact same thing? It’s stirring in the same way the Gettysburg Address is stirring.
The flip side of this is that, as the Gettysburg Address is only useful in a very limited set of circumstances, so are most of Belushi’s best quotes. Alex Rock and I drove well over a thousand miles so he could say “hit it” like Belushi, and we were 106 miles from Chicago in the wrong direction. Most of us will never lead a banned fraternity in a spectacular raid on a homecoming parade, no matter how awesome it is when Belushi does it.

In contrast, some of Marx’s best quotes are one-liners that are widely applicable. Anyone who’s ever been asked to join any club of any kind has had the opportunity to bust out, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” Marx’s snappy punch lines are much easier to adapt to everyday situations, which makes it easier to pretend that you’re as cool as he was.

Winner: Groucho Marx

PERSONALITY

This is a deliberately vague category that I included to capture that unique quality that made each man who he was. How could this article be complete without mentioning the incident in which John Belushi stole the Bluesmobile while on a bender during the filming of The Blues Brothers and took off without warning or provocation, only to be arrested in Iowa the next day for driving recklessly, while intoxicated, without a license, in an unregistered, un-street worthy vehicle. How balls-out can you get?

Likewise, Groucho Marx is classy beyond words. Sure, Belushi makes the “COLLEGE” sweatshirt and the plastic sunglasses look cool, but when I first got to college there was a credit card company offering free “COLLEGE” shirts, just like Belushi’s, to anyone who signed up for a card. Over the next week, I saw every skinny nerd on campus wearing one – and at Case, that meant like 9,000 people. It’s cool when Belushi wears it, dumbass. Not you.
On the other hand, Marx’s brand of cool was classic. There is no person in the world who couldn’t benefit from nose glasses, a top hat, and a cigar. That means everyone, from Courtney Love to Osama bin Laden. Groucho Marx was cool while still being restrained and gentlemanly, which makes him far more accessible to the average Joe.

The winner is clear for the purposes of this essay, but the result is not without controversy. Feel free to chime in. I’m off to go drink gin and smoke a cigar.

So, a while ago I wrote about how much I loathe Glenn Beck, CNN’s odious news commentator and radio talk show host. Today I want to draw attention to his exact opposite, the greatest man in television and print journalism since Hunter S. Thompson went out like a man, Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens.

Now, many of you are saying, “Vanity Fair? How lame!” But trust me, Hitchens is awesome. He combines Winston Churchill’s gift for language and penchant for drunkenness with George Orwell’s ability to cut through the bullshit that oozes from political discourse and call it like he sees it, all with a British accent that makes you just believe, if you forget where and when you are, that he really could be one of them.

His finest moment, so far as I can tell, came after the death of Jerry Falwell, an oddly famous revivalist preacher who had been spewing religious hatred and quasi-Biblical bullshit since probably the Harding administration. As is our national custom whenever someone remotely famous dies, all five or six 24-hour cable TV news stations went into mourning mode, satisfying our inexplicable need for vicarious grief. Even the likes of Anderson Cooper, CNN’s implacable Scud stud, took to speaking in hushed tones of the man as if he could hear from heaven and smite anyone not sufficiently reverential.

Hitchens was having none of it. He came right out on Cooper’s show, apparently drunk, and spent the best part of five minutes lambasting Falwell to no end, calling him a fraud and charlatan who was too dumb to even read the Bible, let alone preach the Word. Cooper tried to soften the tone a bit by asking that Hitchens be respectful of Falwell’s family in their hour of mourning, but The Hitch was just like “No. Fuck his family. Those assholes lived the high life because of Falwell’s crap, and they deserve whatever they get.”

It was the type of unremitting and eloquent bombardment of bitter abuse that you’d imagine Winston Churchill was capable of when on a bender in the presence of some vegetarians or something. Hitchens gave no quarter in slandering the dead man for all he was worth. It was spectacular.

COOPER: Do you believe he believed what he spoke?

HITCHENS: Of course not. He woke up every morning, as I say, pinching his chubby little flanks and thinking, I have got away with it again.

COOPER: You think he was a complete fraud, really?

HITCHENS: Yes.

Hitchens is also one of the very few public figures to discuss candidly and calmly America’s options in Iraq. Most of the discourse on this subject that you will see, particularly on TV news, comes from party sycophants repeating hackneyed catch-phrases, whether they be “troops home now” or “support the troops,” or whatever, that convey little real understanding of the situation there and the likely consequences of the several courses of action open to us. Hitchens doesn’t do that, and that alone puts him a cut above the rest.

Like Winston Churchill, he’s also an unrepentant drunkard, which is uncommon in this day and age. He once declared that his daily intake of alcohol was enough “to kill or stun the average mule.” I suspect that he has taken more out of it than it has out of him.

My other favorite newsman is Carl Strock, who writes a column called “The View From Here” for my hometown newspaper, the Schenectady Gazette.

Nothing gets by Strock, and when he gets a hold of some issue or cause he latches on like a pit bull and doesn’t let go until the person or organization relents and does whatever he says. He does extensive research behind the scenes before he publishes the first word – something you’d think most newsmen would but seemingly few actually do – such that in the weeks after his initial column, when a bunch of morons write in to the editorial page with objections to his position, he just shoots them down like ducks in a bucket. Every time he states something controversial but unquestionably right, I and thousands of other readers think, “Huzzah! Here it comes!”

One of his favorite things is creationist baiting, where he will debunk some obvious creationist myth like “thousands of scientists believe that the Earth was created on October 23rd 4004 BC at 9 am” by pointing out that only two scientists have ever said anything like that, both were meteorologists, one was schizophrenic, and the other has spent the rest of his career claiming that he was misquoted. The whole thing is pretty airtight, but the editorial page of the Gazette, which will publish anyone including me, invariably spends the next few weeks printing half thought out replies that Strock systematically demolishes.

Another example is the case of a woman who left two young children at home in the care of their 12 year old brother while she went to the store or something. Alerted by a busybody neighbor, child services immediately moved in and took the kids away, alleging neglect. Strock smelled the bullshit right away and spent the next month or so laying into child services, calling them kidnappers and morons and whatnot and demanding that they give the children back, which of course they did. That’s public service right there.

A real man doesn’t need a signature.