Before Richard Belzer became John Munch on the landmark crime drama Homicide: Life on the Streets, he made his bones as a lacerating stand-up comedian. That’s how I first discovered him, and to be honest, at the time, I couldn’t stand him. He struck me as too mean-spirited, and even vicious. Believe you me, if you were at a club where Richard Belzer was performing, you were at great risk of being on the end of one of his wicked barbs should you have not been paying attention, or god forbid took a moment to heckle him. Richard Belzer took no prisoners with his own audience. One might even argue that he was the last great insult comic, but unlike Don Rickles, who delivered his bon mots with a twinkle in his eye, Belzer came at you with knives out.
While Belzer the comedian may have come out of the womb fully formed for all I know, I suspect that his mother’s death from cancer when Belzer was just 18, and his father’s suicide just four years later may have played into his caustic nature. Belzer was also a heavy drinker and lover of nose candy. Bill Maher once said he never saw Belzer do a set sober, which is astounding considering how rapier-sharp he always seemed to be when armed with nothing more than a spotlight and a microphone. Later in life, I came to appreciate Belzer’s act more. I suppose there’s something about unapologetic bravery that calls to me, even when packaged in barbed wire.
Despite (or perhaps because of) his disagreeable nature, Belzer was a very successful stand up. Between 1975 and 1980, he often served as the warm up comedian for Saturday Night Live (he also appeared on the show three times). He also opened for Warren Zevon during Zevon’s tour for his hit album “Excitable Boy.” The mind reels thinking of the coke and whiskey fueled conversations those two must have had on the road.
Of course, most of the population knows Richard Belzer as the aforementioned John Munch, a character that seemed to have been written with him in mind. While network TV may have toned down Belzer to meet the standards of free viewing, you never once forgot that Belzer was Belzer. While Homicide was a true ensemble show that had to make room for several characters, Belzer never wasted any of his typically short lines or felt false.
John Munch proved so popular that after seven seasons on Homicide (1993-1999) the character moved over in full to Law & Order: SVU. Belzer had already played Munch four times on the original Law & Order before joining SVU, and the transition fit like a glove. While I’ve never been much of a fan of the Law & Order franchise, I always admired how Munch added an element of eccentricity to a formulaic procedural that otherwise had none. I seldom watched SVU by choice, but every time he came on camera, I could feel the corner of the right side of my mouth turn up. Belzer was a great creator of smirks. You just knew when he turned up he was going to deliver his lines, no matter how rote, with a sense of irony and pessimism that both prickled and amused.
All told, Belzer played John Munch in 460 episodes and one Homicide TV movie over 23 years. A staggering sum. In fact, the character was so iconic that Munch would occasionally turn up on shows that had no relationship to Law & Order at all, including Arrested Development, The Wire, 30 Rock, and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Yes, you read that correctly. Richard Belzer played John Munch on the otherwise incredibly sunny Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
Off screen, Belzer was as peculiar as they come. He was a true conspiracy theorist who wrote five books that questioned everything from the JFK assassination to the Malaysian jetliner that disappeared over the South China Sea in 2014. He appeared on the Alex Jones show multiple times, and even claimed that the Boston Marathon bombing was a “false flag.”
I don’t really know what to do with any of that, so I’ll let the dear reader decide.
What I do know is that he was a singular figure, a true iconoclast who somehow made an incredibly lengthy career out of playing a version of himself. According to his friend and author Bill Sheft, the last words Belzer ever spoke were “Fuck you, motherfucker.”
How fitting. He was the Richard Belzer until the very end.
Richard Belzer died yesterday. He was 79 years old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz-JGUfaGnI