Chevy Chase and Donald Glover Were Originally Supposed to Be ‘Community’s Troy and Abed
Chevy Chase and Donald Glover don’t exactly get along when the cameras aren’t rolling. That’s thanks to Chase remarks like “People think you’re funnier because you’re Black” in between takes on Community. Show creator Dan Harmon regularly apologized for Chase’s behavior after the fact, but Glover took it all in stride.
“I know there’s a human in there somewhere,” he once told The New Yorker about Chase. “He’s almost too human.”
The acrimony between Chase and Glover (to be fair, Chase got into it with nearly everyone on Community, including Harmon) might be the reason that one of the show’s original ideas went out the window. “Before we started shooting, the writers made a decision that Troy and Pierce would be the Beavis and Butt-Head of the ensemble, always getting up to no good and egging each other on,” Harmon told The Independent. “It seemed like a natural fit.”
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But it wasn’t, of course. Even in his Saturday Night Live heyday, Chase was better at cracking jokes on Weekend Update than he was playing off of Gilda Radner or John Belushi. “Even the most ardent Chevy Chase supporter would say he’s a soloist,” noted Harmon. “Sticking him with another person and saying you guys are going to be Abbott and Costello — it was naive.”
Luckily for Community, another Beavis and Butt-Head made themselves apparent early on. “Donald Glover and I clicked right away,” explained Danny Pudi, who played Abed. “One time we were doing an interview and started freestyle rapping to distract from whatever question we’d got. From that, I think Dan got inspired to write the ‘La Biblioteca’ rap and those end-tags took off.”
“Donald’s such a brilliant improviser,” Pudi continued. “Sometimes we were just given a premise and would run with it. Yvette (Nicole Brown) mentioned that Donald and I were like Bert and Ernie, and the next thing you know, we’re watching YouTube videos and coming up with a bit.”
The Troy and Abed bond was so strong that Harmon didn’t see a way to continue the show without it. (He had no such qualms about moving on without Chase.) “We felt very much like the show would have no chance of survival without (Glover),” Harmon said. “That’s not to disparage the rest of the cast — it’s just the thing was an ensemble. You could only lose so much and to lose half of Troy and Abed and one-seventh of this perfect family. Donald did us the favor of staying on for five episodes.”
It was a good thing for Community that Troy/Pierce became Troy/Abed. “I was at Comic-Con and somebody said people have been waiting hours to get into our panel,” said Joel McHale. “That’s when I first realized people actually liked the show. I didn’t figure people would dress up like Troy and Abed — it was so crazy and wonderful.”
