Another Lone Nut

Richard Belzer stands on stage to talk about the time Hulk Hogan choked him unconscious on live television. He breaks down the 1985 incident, the resulting lawsuit, and how the out-of-court settlement paid for his home in France, a property he dubbed “Chez Hogan”. He pairs the wrestling anecdote with material about surviving testicular cancer and his genuine obsession with conspiracy theories involving the Kennedy assassination and UFOs. The set is built on his real life, delivered with the irritated sneer that defined his decades in comedy clubs.

The hour-long special aired on HBO in 1997, dead center in Belzer’s tenure playing Detective John Munch on Homicide: Life on the Street. While television audiences knew him as a procedural cop, he uses the stage to lean back into his roots as a political news junkie. He takes aim at Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, and imagines Bob Dylan singing “Like a Rolling Stone” with the cadence of an elderly Jewish man. It is a cynical, conversational set from a working professional treating his own medical history and legal battles as standard joke material.