Dan Aykroyd

Four planets of his ten occupy water signs and only one in earth, with three in air and two in fire. Water takes the temperature of a room and air works out what is funny about it; the element that would hold a fixed shape is nearly absent. Aykroyd is a Canadian comedian whose record names two titles, both of them built on a premise played completely straight by people who knew it was absurd.

The Sun, Venus and Uranus sit inside four degrees of Cancer, a very tight group, and Uranus is the odd planet in it: the one that breaks the pattern, stationed in the sign that holds on hardest to what it already has. A second trio of Moon, Saturn and Neptune sits in Libra. Comedy built on absolute commitment to a ridiculous idea needs the holding-on and the pattern-break in the same place, which is exactly where this chart puts them.

Jupiter makes easy contact with Uranus five hundredths of a degree away from exact, the smallest separation anywhere in it: the planet of scale and the planet of the unexpected, agreeing completely. For a performer whose two best known films both turned a strange premise into something enormous, that is as close to a thesis as a chart gets. Every planet in his chart was moving forward at birth, with nothing anywhere in reverse.

Jupiter reached its own birth degree in Taurus again on 15 March 2024, at seventy one. Taurus takes its measure from what has accumulated rather than from distance travelled, and six circuits sit behind that date. The two titles the record names both sit inside the third and fourth of them, which leaves rather a lot of lap still being run on the strength of them. A Cancer Sun would not find that a complaint: keeping is what the sign does, and a reputation is a thing to be kept like any other.