Chevy Chase Says Animosity ‘Ruined My Performance’ When He Returned to ‘SNL’

After leaving Saturday Night Live a few episodes into its second season, it didn’t take long for Chevy Chase to return to 30 Rock. He hosted in February during the show’s third year, but it wasn’t a pleasant homecoming. 

After receiving a series of smart-ass answers from Chase in October 1978, just a few months after that SNL hosting gig, talk-show host Dick Cavett begged for a straight response. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of getting you to talk seriously about — what can I call it? — the rumored animosity that your friends on Saturday Night Live are supposed to have felt when you left. They thought maybe you endangered their careers and yours.” 

Chase obliged — sorta. “I can talk about that seriously,” he said. “Here?” 

Chase said he wasn’t fully dialed in on the rumors as he didn’t get back to New York much. But “I get calls and they say, ‘Chev, we heard this and that.’ And I must say that they’re right — there was some animosity. But it was only Belushi, and I believe if you ask him about it, you’ll hear…” 

Chase blurted out a cartoonish yelp, then explained that Belushi was “learning to eat with his mouth now.”

“It wasn't nearly as (bad as) what people had thought,” Chase said. “It lasted for about a minute before the show and ruined my performance, I guess, for a good half hour and then it was over with. I wouldn’t say who it was. It wasn’t John or anybody else. It was just a general feeling that I wanted to kick the living daylights out of a few of the people there.”

The laughing studio audience might not have realized it, but Chase was telling all kinds of truths. The animosity that “lasted about a minute before the show” was an actual fistfight with Bill Murray. “It happened just before I went on the air,” he later confessed in oral history Live From New York. “It was not very good timing. That was painful for me.”

However, the idea that “It wasn’t John or anybody else” wasn’t true. Chase had kicked Jane Curtin off her Weekend Update spot that weekend, fueling the actual animosity. And Belushi instigated a lot of the conflict. “John had also, as I later found out, been spreading some pretty apocryphal stories about me out of his anger or jealousy or whatever to Billy Murray,” Chase said in Live From New York.

Belushi got what he had coming as well. While trying to break up the fisticuffs between Chase and Murray, “we both ending up hitting John by mistake,” Chase confessed. 

Laraine Newman agreed that the fight ruined Chase’s night. You can watch the monologue on Peacock, an out-of-breath performance that begins with a sweaty Chase trying to rebutton his shirt. “Watching him from the floor,” she said, “he seemed shattered.” 

Lorne Michaels thought so too, according to Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live. He was watching Chase’s monologue on a monitor when he “whispered to no one in particular, ‘Chevy doesn’t have it tonight.’”

Cavett recognized that, for once, Chase had shared a moment of sincerity. “I thought you wouldn’t be serious about that,” he remarked, “and you surprised me.”  

“Well, I didn’t get detailed,” Chase grinned. “It’s just not fair to Gilda, who has a foul mouth.”