All the Times Chevy Chase Got His Teeth Knocked Out

Dick Cavett couldn’t have known in 1978 that Chevy Chase and Bill Murray had recently exchanged blows backstage during a live SNL show. But then again, he might have had an inkling. “In the vapid research that I did on you,” he told Chase, “I found that you had been beaten up a number of times in the past.” 

“Yeah, my teeth were knocked out a few times,” Chase admitted, “but they weren’t knocked out in fights a lot.” 

So how exactly did Chase lose his teeth multiple times?

“The first time they were knocked out, I was playing polo with my brother,” Chase said. The boys weren’t actually on ponies, but it was polo nonetheless, played with wooden mallets at a 13th birthday party. “It started off to be a friendly little croquet game except with 11- to 13-year-old guys of the caliber of my brother, there’s trouble.” 

Chase made “the very brilliant move” of nudging a ball aside just as another kid swung a mallet as hard as he could. The hammer missed the ball but connected with Chase’s chin, and his teeth “were hit very hard.” Chase cried his way to the family porch. “My mother came out half-dead from the noise and sort of tapped” the teeth back into place. They stayed in his mouth although one went dead and turned brown. 

Chase later had the teeth replaced with crowns. An incredulous Cavett stated the obvious: “Those are not your teeth, in fact. They’re artifice!”

“I paid for them,” Chase argued. “They’re mine now.” Since getting his fake chompers, Chase estimated they’d been knocked out an additional five times, give or take. “I knocked them out skiing, I knocked them out in a fight.”

Cavett perked up at the mention of violence, confessing that he had “a terrible temper, and I used to get in fights as a kid.” 

So did Chase. Even though he grew up on a nice block full of brownstones, “just around the corner, a lot of Upper East Side gang types from different persuasions would come around and take my money.” Different persuasions? Say what you mean, Chevy. 

According to Chase, he and his brother Ned learned to deal with the neighborhood toughs by getting into a few fights. “The first time was when I terrorized a very small man who had dirty fingernails,” he said. “I was rollerskating, I was about 12. There was no good reason for it at all. I simply was with a group of other juvenile delinquents and said he had dirty fingernails.”

The man was serving hot dogs out in an open area of the street and didn’t take kindly to losing business thanks to Chase’s accusations of dirty nails. “So he came out and punched me. I almost cost him his job,” the comic confessed. “He had to go to court, and he must have been a poor man. It wasn’t a nice thing for me to do, you know, but he really walloped me.”

Not being poor himself, Chase could just pop those fake teeth back into place.