This early Saturday Night Live video (season 3) is astonishing too, and bizarre, and awesome — for a couple reasons.
1. John Belushi’s Samurai character. He did it in a number of contexts, I think some of the cultural context is lost now, or maybe it was never there and that was the point, an absurdity that only he could sell so well. But Samurai was one of the first crowd-favorite returning characters (as you can see from Samurai Delicatessen, Samurai Hit Man, etc.)
2. The idea of doing “Samurai Night Fever” — and that the syllables scan perfectly with the original title is a bonus.
3. I never understood if the bigger joke was that Belushi spoke in nonsense Japanese or that the other cast generally understood him. (that’s an acting school exercise, communicating intention without real words — but it works here too as a mockery of the way Tony spoke in the movie.)
4. O.J. Simpson.
5. O.J. Simpson substituting his character not wanting to be black anymore for the movie character’s not wanting to be a priest anymore.
wow. For the longest time, the show had too few performers of color, but still did some great edgy humor (the famous Richard Pryor/ Chevy Chase word-association sketch; Eddie Murphy’s undercover whiteface skit)
The conceit of OJ wanting to stop being black almost gets lost in the overall wackiness here, but… man. I’m surprised they haven’t swept this one under the rug.
– Bicoastal writer Daniel Housman works hard and enjoys the very best of both Los Angeles and New York.
