Did Bloody Chevy Chase Take Another Tumble?

Following Chevy Chase on Instagram isn’t for the faint of heart. A simple scroll through the comic’s timeline might find you staring at a guy with a shiner that would make Rocky Balboa proud.  

Here, he looks like an Escape From New York extra who suffered a compound forearm fracture:

The latest chapter in the Chase cavalcade of calamity dropped today, with his bloody mug grinning out at the world. What in the name of Jay Leno did Chase stumble over this time?

Turns out the latest gorefest was done by makeup artists, as Chase captioned that he “just shot a film called @catnipthemovie and here are some of the wonderful people that worked on it!” 

Seems like Chase only acts in holiday-themed flicks these days — the film’s Kickstarter describes Catnip the Movie as “a horror/comedy Christmas movie about killer cats.” Nice work if you can get it. 

Chase’s nonstop injuries on social media — he also fell off the stage at a live Christmas Vacation event in 2023 — are ironic, given that he built his comic reputation on apparently painful pratfalls. 

But even in the days before social media, Chase couldn’t help injuring himself for real. He insisted on opening each SNL with one of his famous falls, but the violent comedy took its toll. He checked himself into the Betty Ford drug rehab clinic in the 1980s, getting treatment for “‘dependency on prescription drugs relating to chronic and long-term back problems’ resulting from years of pratfalls and stunts dating to his days on Saturday Night Live,” reported The New York Times in 1986.

Comedy costars sometimes blamed Chase’s inexplicably terrible behavior on those injuries. “The worst host was Chevy Chase,” remembered Will Ferrell in oral history Live From New York. The original Not Ready for Prime Time Player wasn’t on his best behavior that week, harassing one of the show’s female writers by jokingly asking for a hand job. “I don’t know if he was on something or what, if he took too many back pills that day or something.”

And we haven’t even discussed Chase’s most painful pratfall. According to Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, Chase as Gerald Ford once tumbled over a podium that was supposed to be padded, but it wasn’t. The official word was that Chase had aggravated an old back injury, requiring him to miss two shows while he recovered. The painful reality: Chase’s testicles took the brunt of the fall. 

Let’s all thank the heavens that Chase didn’t have Instagram back then.