Posted on 01/12/2026 2:45:26 PM PST by Williams
Except for his early SNL career and the first Vacation movie, I've always considered Chevy Chase to be a poor actor and not particularly funny.
And he has a reputation as a jerk. They didn't let him do a skit or appear on stage at the SNL 50 year anniversary show. Apparently a lot of people don't like Chevy Chase and he's difficult to work with.
A clip from the CNN "I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not" special made him look like he was nasty to the female interviewer, telling her she's not intelligent enough to understand him.
Having watched the show, it seemed to me he has been ostracized by the woke entertainment industry due to two complaints from fellow actors. One gay, the other a black woman.
Chevy Chase is known for irreverent humor. He was in a show with a gay guy and made a private joke to him they should do a segment on AIDS where the gay is dying and they weigh him each week. The gay guy claims (and Chase says he's lying) That Chevy came to his trailer crying and begging for forgiveness after this incident.
The other case was a typical liberal blacklisting for using the N word but not in a derogatory manner. Chevy was upset they were having his show character make too many obnoxious statements and he complained "Next they'll have my character call the black cast members (the N word)".
This resulted in a black female demanding that he apologize. He said "for what? " He pointed out that on SNL he and Garrett Morris would call each other the N word all the time. Chase was fired from the show over this.
Pretty sure this nonsense is why they wouldn't let him on the stage for the SNL anniversary show.
He's a crotchetty old man at this point, suffered heart failure and has memory loss. I don't think he's a good actor anymore. Don't know his politics.
I ended up sympathizing with him and feeling he's been canceled by the jerks in Hollywood and New York.
They didn't say it directly but it was strongly implied.
Chevy was the weak link in those movies.
I remember that—Ford’s gaffe did not surprise me.
Aides can only do so much to protect fool candidates—and Ford was totally out of his league on foreign policy—the whole concept went way over his head.
Very much.
I liked the scores and scenery better than the people in them.
He seems to be an unlikable talent with a deep nasty side that comes out a lot, he truly insults and degrades people with personal digs, but he sure knows comedy, I like his comedy a lot.
At age 82 he has had a pretty good run.
Chevy Chase about Ford.
CNN) — Chevy Chase didn’t look like Gerald Ford and didn’t sound like Gerald Ford. But in the mid-1970s, when “Saturday Night Live” first went on the air, Chase — then a writer and cast member of the show — made his impression of the president, rife with pratfalls and slapstick, the talk of the country.
He also made the president a butt of jokes, which was intentional, Chase told CNN in an interview.
“[Ford] was a sweet man, a terrific man — [we] became good friends after, but ... he just tripped over things a lot,” he said. “It’s not that I can imitate him so much that I can do a lot of physical comedy and I just made it, I just went after him. And ... obviously my leanings were Democratic and I wanted [Jimmy] Carter in and I wanted [Ford] out, and I figured look, we’re reaching millions of people every weekend, why not do it.”
Over the years, “Saturday Night Live’s” political satires have become a mainstay of the show, sometimes to startling effect.
Al Franken — now the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota — and his then writing partner, Tom Davis, wrote a wicked takeoff of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book, “The Final Days,” which included Dan Aykroyd as a bitter Richard Nixon and John Belushi as a toadying Henry Kissinger. In the mid-’80s, a sketch starring Phil Hartman as Ronald Reagan showed the president, often lampooned as forgetful, with a razor-sharp command of the Iran-Contra situation, cutting deals in Arabic and barking orders at his staff.
More recently, Dana Carvey’s malaprop-laden impression of George H.W. Bush, Hartman’s puppy-dog Bill Clinton, Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush and Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin have embedded themselves in the culture.
Though Chase believes the show leans left, and Fey’s Palin is an attempt to hurt the Republicans, Marc Liepis, NBC Universal senior director of late night publicity, had no comment.
CNN: You mean to tell me in the back of your mind you were thinking, hey I want Carter ...
Chase: Oh, yeah.
CNN: And I’m going to make him look bad.
Chase: Oh yeah. What do you think they’re doing now, you think they’re just doing this because Sarah’s funny? No, I think that the show is very much more Democratic and liberal-oriented, that they are obviously more for Barack Obama. [In the ‘70s], out of the Nixon era, and it was not unlikely that I might go that direction.
CNN: I talked to one political pundit who said, I think Chevy Chase cost Ford the presidency.
Chase: When you have that kind of a venue and power where you can reach so many millions of people and you’ve become a show that people watch, you know, you can affect a lot of people, and humor does it beautifully, because humor is perspective and has a way of making judgment calls. ... So I think there was no question that it had major effect and in fact, in speaking with his family and then later him, and even reading some of his books ... he felt so, too.
All one has to do is watch “Caddyshack,” to see how weak Chase is compared to real comedians like Bill Murray or Rodney Dangerfield. Even Ted Knight who was more of a comic actor than a comedian showed some serious chops that totally outclassed Chevy Chase. In the National Lampoon Vacation movies, Randy Quaid stole the screen from Chase every time he appeared.
Phil Hartman as Ronald Reagan showed the president, often lampooned as forgetful, with a razor-sharp command of the Iran-Contra situation, cutting deals in Arabic and barking orders at his staff.
That was a classic. Another classic was Hartman as Clinton, “Jim, let me tell you something – there’s gonna be a lot of things we don’t tell Mrs. Clinton about. Fast food is the least of our worries.”
Why was this individual named for a city in Maryland? And why was that municipality named for a midnight race through the countryside between a number of GM-manufactured vehicles?
The left cancelling the left. Oh Jerry!...
Ford was rewarded for playing ball with the Warren Commission. Single bullet, lone nut gunman, case closed.
Agree with your assessment of Chevy Chase, and enjoyed everyone here dumping on him.
Still I think the left canceled him for the sins of having made black and gay based jokes and cast members making an issue.
Otherwise they would have put him on stage at the SNL anniversary. I don’t think being a talentless jerk was the reason.
I regret, slightly, that I can’t make myself care.
And of course Chevy would mock Franco, the guy who saved Spain from the Communists.
I liked him in the “Fletch” movies.
But that’s about it.
I thought Bill Murray was a great sport to do “Zombieland”.
I liked Funny Farm. Good flick.
I think that portrayal of Reagan was accurate, even the Secret Service says that when Reagan was finished with the days public image Reagan, that he would then retire behind closed doors to read or study/work.
Watch Reagan on shows like Carson or Firing Line, and remember the surprise when people learned he was hand writing his thoughts from memory about world affairs for his radio commentary, Reagan always knew what he was talking about and was always working in an education for the listeners, he was a subtle teacher because he knew a lot.
His being a jerk goes back much further than the woke movement.
He was a prima donna who couldn’t deliver. And he thought he was still great.
Comedy is not pretty.
Life as a comedian is hard.
Everywhere you go and everyone you meet expects you to be funny.
Each time you walk into a room, people expect you to do your job.
I would agree. Lack of talent and a jerk is not a good combination for career success.
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