Chevy Chase’s Response to ‘Saturday Night’ Is, Sadly, Classic Chevy Chase

I enjoyed Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s newest film about the first show in Saturday Night Live’s history. They take some liberties but deliver a movie that, in my opinion, captures the chaotic magic of the show while being reverent but not too reverent. It’s at its best when it takes liberties, like in an ice-skating scene with John Belushi. It’s at its worst whenever it has characters say things like “You won’t even be here in two weeks!” It’s not that we, as an audience, know that isn’t true, they just play that card too many times. Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. I think Chevy Chase did too.

To be clear, it’s not important to me that Chase liked the flick. The infamous curmudgeon/jerk/racist is lucky a generation’s worth of tall white dudes see him as a comedy icon. There will always be people willing to stand up for him, even if he doesn’t deserve it. That’s because he has a firm place in comedy history, both for his films and for being an inaugural cast member on Saturday Night Live. Thanks to that, he is a character in Reitman’s movie and a surprisingly sympathetic one at that.

You don’t leave your seat rooting for Chase. How could you? He’s presented in all his legendary arrogance. What the film does well is show that he was an immense talent, told constantly how special he was, had an enormous chip on his shoulders, could still be humbled by bigger talents, and was possibly a tool of network bigwigs to sway advertisers. It’s a more nuanced portrayal than Chase possibly deserves, especially considering how he reacted to seeing it.

Reitman recently appeared on David Spade and Dana Carvey’s podcast Fly on the Wall, which gives an inside look at the famed show. There, he revealed how Chase responded to the film when it was screened for him. “So, Chevy comes in to watch the movie, and he is there with [wife] Jayni and they watch the film, and he’s in the group, and he comes up to me after and he pats me on the shoulder and goes, ‘Well, you should be embarrassed,’” the director told the former cast members. That sounds exactly like the response I’d expect from a man who has spent decades making himself impossible to work with.

The story got laughs on the pod, as Carvey and Spade are more than familiar with Chase. “You couldn’t even write it better,” Spade explained, with Carvey saying “knows that’s funny, like that’s the roughest thing you could say to a director in the moment, or right up there.” The duo aren’t wrong. The response could be funny, it would just have to come out of someone who isn’t so proudly a miserable prick. Were Chase anyone with even a shred of humility, that would be a funny response. Ironically enough, Reitman tried to give Chase that legacy in the film.

Saturday Night probably isn’t going to change how people remember Chase, but there are scores of idiots on TikTok who think Helen Keller is fake or some such nonsense. Saturday Night could be all people know of Chase in 30 years, and his portrayal isn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, something Reitman lamented. “I’m trying to balance it, because, in my head, I know, ‘Alright, I’m getting my own Chevy Chase moment that’s 1,000 percent only for me right now.’ And from a comedy point-of-view that’s really pure, and that’s kind of cool,” he explained. “But also, I just spent like two years of my life recreating this moment and trying to capture Chevy perfectly, and also even in the ego, find the humanity and give him a moment to be loved — no, none of that shit played. He’s not talking about that stuff.”

It is folly for Reitman to think he’s the one who could break through all of Chase’s horseshit. The man was never going to heap praise upon the director. Hell, Reitman’s dad refused to work with Chase on Memoirs of an Invisible Man due to his aforementioned habit of being an a**hole. There was no chance he was going to be nice about this, despite Reitman’s apparent intentions, and that’s sad. I’m not going to lose sleep over Chase’s miserable existence, but it is undeniably sad that he can’t find it within himself to not be a jerk for two seconds. Even if he was joking, it’s a bad joke because of who he is.

We should all do our best to live a life where if someone hears a s***ty story about us it doesn’t elicit a response like, “classic.” Chevy Chase has done the opposite. Maybe he saw a little bit of humanity in the film and it scared him back on his insecure hind legs. He saw someone try to treat him like a person and all he could do was attack. Seems like an awful way to live.