{"id":391597,"date":"2026-01-06T18:40:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T18:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/391597\/"},"modified":"2026-01-06T18:40:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T18:40:09","slug":"the-dark-side-of-his-genius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/391597\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dark Side of His Genius"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhen you watch \u201cI\u2019m Chevy Chase<\/a> and You\u2019re Not,\u201d Marina Zenovich\u2019s spry and fascinating dark-side-of-a-comedian documentary, you hear countless tales of Chevy Chase\u2019s casual cruelty and too-wise-for-you attitude and devotion to behaving badly \u2014 or, at least, mouthing off\u00a0so rudely that it became a form of behavior. If you go into the movie wanting to be shocked and appalled, you won\u2019t be disappointed. Off camera, a lot of comedians have prickly and difficult personalities. But there\u2019s prickly and then there\u2019s the unique drive-by karma of Chevy Chase, a comedian who helped to invent \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d who proved to be a singular and hilarious master of ironic barbed detachment, who became one of the most celebrated movie stars of the 1980s, and who was such a famously nasty and unpleasant person to deal with that the word \u201casshole\u201d followed him around as if it was his middle name.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe stories are legion, and they all get told here. According to Chase\u2019s old friend Peter Aaron, who met him at Bard College in 1965, Chevy, in the dining-hall commons, would pull stunts like reaching for the salt and knocking a glass of water over onto someone\u2019s lap. He was a jerk, yet in his way he was already warming up for \u201cSaturday Night Live.\u201d Ten years later, as \u201cSNL\u201d was being pulled together, Lorne Michaels wanted him to be a writer, but Chase insisted that he be on camera. We see his audition tape, and two things strike you about it: that he was shockingly tall and handsome for a comedian, with a puckishness that someone this good-looking wasn\u2019t supposed to have, and that the hostility came off him like plumes of electro-static. Backstage, he was so high-handed that he took it upon himself to give the other cast members notes.<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter becoming a movie star, Chase gave Mike Ovitz a Cartier clock engraved on the back with \u201cKeep getting me the $6 million.\u201d John Carpenter says that working with Chase on \u201cMemoirs of an Invisible Man\u201d (1992) was so hellish it made him want to quit the business. And when Chase hosted \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d in 1985, he fastened on Terry Sweeney, the show\u2019s first openly gay cast member, and baited him for being gay, suggesting that in the midst of the AIDS epidemic there might be a comedy routine in Sweeney getting weighed each week.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI could see right away,\u201d recalls Dan Aykroyd in the documentary, \u201cthat this guy was simultaneously talented and very dangerous.\u201d Alan Greisman, a film producer who became a friend of Chase\u2019s (even though Chevy, on the set of the 1981 movie they made together, \u201cModern Problems,\u201d did as much cocaine as the burnout character he was playing), says, \u201cI don\u2019t think he consciously wants to be an asshole. I think the asshole version of him is somebody who is desperate for something he either lost or doesn\u2019t have.\u201d Based on what we hear in \u201cI\u2019m Chevy Chase and You\u2019re Not,\u201d to say that Chase acted like an asshole doesn\u2019t do justice to his distemper. He was a passive-aggressive bully who perfected his own sadistic brand of Zen flippancy. He was a person who would bait you to your face, then add insult to injury by implying that it was all a joke.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt seemed, at the time, an attitude that was quite contempo in its heartlessness. But Chase\u2019s sense of humor was actually based on something that had its roots in the 1960s. At the time, it was called the put-on. You say something, you don\u2019t mean it (except that maybe, deep down, you do), and it\u2019s all an act of thinly veiled aggression, because you\u2019re putting one over on The Man, or someone you don\u2019t like, or a person who doesn\u2019t deserve to be talked to straight. But Chase ratcheted up the put-on in two ways. He made it crazy and surreal, and unlike Bill Murray, who had an affectionate counterculture shagginess, Chase stripped the put-on of any vestige of social-political morality. He was putting on just because\u2026he wanted to fuck with you. And that became his entire personality.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a documentary filmmaker, Marina Zenovich has long been drawn to difficult celebrities, like Roman Polanski (she made two films about him) and Robin Williams, but it\u2019s not just because she sees the drama in their turbulence (though that\u2019s part of it). She also wants to grapple \u2014 and does, brilliantly \u2014 with what you might call the primal issue of politically incorrect artists. Namely, what are we supposed to do with these figures who create extraordinary things, who are cherished by people around the globe, yet have seriously problematic lives and personalities? Zenovich isn\u2019t doing a harangue against \u201ccancel culture.\u201d She\u2019s asking, in a far more ingenuous and exploratory way: What do we think about someone like Chevy Chase? How do we square his offscreen cruelty with his laid-back comic artistry, especially when you can see a distinct glimmer of the former in the latter?<\/p>\n

\n\tZenovich interviews the 82-year-old Chevy Chase today, seated at a table in his comfy suburban home in Bedford, NY, and the interview, in its way, is a performative psychodrama. Chevy wants to be honest, he wants to tell it like it is, but he\u2019s also a compulsive cut-up and control freak whose guardedness takes the form of lashing out. \u201cThis is the way I am, at my age,\u201d he says after telling an X-rated joke about Bill and Hillary Clinton. \u201cJust a child. An angry child.\u201d He knows himself too well. A child is exactly what Chase is. He won\u2019t grow up. Early on, Zenovich tells him that she\u2019s simply trying to figure him out. \u201cNo shit!\u201d he says, adding, \u201cIt\u2019s not going to be easy for you.\u201d Why not? \u201cYou\u2019re not bright enough. How\u2019s that?\u201d Then he gives her a frozen smile of triumph. \u201cMy answer is: I\u2019m complex, and I\u2019m deep, and I can be hurt easily, and I react spontaneously to people who want to figure me out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film shows you how he got to be this way: raised by a mother with possible schizophrenic tendencies who would wake him up by slapping him, and by an abusive stepfather. His childhood was a hellhole. His entire \u201cI\u2019m Chevy Chase and you\u2019re not, and by the way go fuck yourself\u201d personality is a damaged person\u2019s defense mechanism. So maybe it\u2019s no surprise that while the Chase we see here is undeniably a dick (at this point it\u2019s his brand), he also has disarming spasms of vulnerability and guilt, and when he wants to be he\u2019s quite sweet. He\u2019s someone who made the choice, over and over again, to be an asshole. Yet his fans adore him. He gets a large bag of fan mail each week, all of which he answers by signing photographs, and we see him at holiday time, going on his annual jaunt to speak at local showings of \u201cNational Lampoon\u2019s Christmas Vacation,\u201d a movie as beloved by children of the \u201980s as \u201cA Christmas Story\u201d is. He treats his fans with grace and something like modesty. He has also been married, for 43 years, to Jayni Chase, an agile sweetheart who appears devoted to him. Does any of this give him absolution? No, but it does make him a complicated asshole.<\/p>\n

\n\tFifty years later, the extraordinary rocket ship of Chase\u2019s career is still a marvel to behold \u2014 how he helped to define \u201cSNL,\u201d inventing Weekend Update as a showcase for his WASP-on-nut-pills aggro deadpan, and how he left the show way too early, because Hollywood was calling (and because his second wife, Jacqueline Carlin, refused to move from L.A. to New York). Over the last year, I\u2019ve called both \u201cAnnie Hall\u201d and \u201cWhen Harry Met Sally\u201d the launchpad of the revival of the romantic comedy, but \u201cI\u2019m Chevy Chase and You\u2019re Not\u201d made me realize I was wrong. Both those films were instrumental, but the launch of the cheeseball genre that the rom-com became really goes back to Chase\u2019s first big movie, \u201cFoul Play\u201d (1978), a film that looks better in hindsight. He and Goldie Hawn had a skewed chemistry in it, and Hawn is on hand in the doc testifying to how much the asshole could, at moments, be a mensch.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Chase, as Mike Ovtiz explains quite accurately, didn\u2019t run his career in a logical fashion. He was sublime in \u201cCaddyshack,\u201d but he didn\u2019t make good on his leading-man promise. The \u201cVacation\u201d films saved him, of course, and he was vintage Chevy in them, but by the mid-\u201980s his shtick had begun to lose its surprise. You could feel that in \u201cDeal of the Century\u201d and \u201cThree Amigos!\u201d and \u201cSpies Like Us,\u201d where the Chase mystique was running on fumes. Even after his career wound down, he never stopped popping up in movies, though by the late \u201990s and 2000s none of his supporting turns could match the comic drama of his contentious appearances on \u201cThe Howard Stern Show.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m Chevy Chase and You\u2019re Not\u201d devotes its second half to Chase\u2019s troubled childhood, and to how he cleaned himself up after too many years in the drug wilderness, and also to the extraordinary war zone that \u201cCommunity,\u201d the NBC sitcom that revived his career, became. The young cast of \u201cCommunity\u201d resented his entitlement; he was 66 years old and still irascible. And when the tension exploded in Chase using the N-word on set, as he was trying to explain how he would use it with Richard Pryor on \u201cSNL\u201d (the doc includes their famous racial-epithet sketch, perhaps the ultimate example of you-could-never-do-that-today), the series became a meltdown. After all of this, is Chevy Chase chastened? Yes and no. You can see that he knows he sometimes went too far, yet during the 50th anniversary show of \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d when he was not invited to perform, even for one moment, that was basically the entertainment industry blackballing him for 50 years of snark-fueled transgression. He admits on camera how much it hurt. You could say, in that way, that he has paid his dues. He\u2019s still Chevy Chase, but by the end of this movie you\u2019re almost grateful you\u2019re not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When you watch \u201cI\u2019m Chevy Chase and You\u2019re Not,\u201d Marina Zenovich\u2019s spry and fascinating dark-side-of-a-comedian documentary, you hear…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":391598,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[71599,88,189958,206],"class_list":{"0":"post-391597","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-chevy-chase","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-im-chevy-chase-and-youre-not","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391597\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/391598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}