🥚They Are the Eggmen; I Am the Walrus🦭
With CNN's new documentary, I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not, dropping on January 1st, we're about to get an authorized yet unfiltered look at one of comedy's most spectacular career implosions. And honestly? It's about time someone said the quiet part loud.
Chase was the guy in the '70s and '80s. Original Saturday Night Live cast member. Caddyshack. Fletch. National Lampoon's Vacation. He wasn't just funny—he was cool funny, the kind of effortless charm that made him seem untouchable. The signature smirk suggested he knew something you didn't, and you were willing to pay $8 at the box office to be in on the joke.
But here's the thing about being untouchable: eventually, someone touches you.
The 2012 Community incident is where the wheels truly came off. Chase, playing Pierce Hawthorne (already a problematic character written to be problematic), reportedly used a racial slur during an on-set argument about whether his character would use that language. The context matters, sure—he was discussing the word, not directing it at someone. But context is also why he's no longer on the show. Creator Dan Harmon had been managing Chase's difficult behavior for seasons, and this was the final straw.
What's fascinating is how little surprise there was. By 2012, Chevy Chase being Chevy Chase was already a punchline. Cast members from multiple projects had stories. The reputation for being arrogant, dismissive, and difficult to work with had solidified into an accepted fact. When the news broke, the collective response was essentially: Yeah, that tracks.
The documentary promises to examine all of it—including revelations that Chase suffered heart failure in 2021, spent eight days in a coma, and now deals with memory loss. It's the kind of third-act vulnerability that might have redeemed a different career arc. But redemption requires accountability, and by many accounts, that's never been Chase's strong suit.
Here's what the documentary title gets right: I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not. That arrogance, that sense of being above the rules that applied to everyone else—it worked until it didn't. The comedy landscape shifted. What played as edgy in 1978 looked cruel in 2012. The difficult genius archetype that Hollywood once tolerated became the difficult has-been that Hollywood quietly dropped.
Notably, Steve Martin and Christopher Guest—two of his Saturday Night Live contemporaries—declined to participate in interviews. Director Marina Zenovich says their absence, speaks for itself. It does. When your peers won't even show up to your documentary, that's not silence. That's an answer.
The tragedy isn't that Chevy Chase got fired from Community. The tragedy is that by then, nobody was particularly surprised or upset about it. He'd become exactly what Pierce Hawthorne was written to satirize: the guy who mistakes being provocative for being relevant, who confuses offense with insight.
I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not was once a calling card. Now it's alarming.
