National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation star Chevy Chase admits that reading A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live made him cry.
He was born Cornelius Crane Chase, like a name out of a J.P. Donleavy novel, but his grandmother thought he'd be stuck with "Corny" or "Neil" and renamed him Chevy. His grandfather was an equestrian portrait artist, his father a publisher, his mother musical and a good audience for his early humor. His parents separated when he was four and divorced two years later and he has no recollection of them ever being together, although he is close to both of them. It was his father who taught him that a sense of humor is the most important quality a person can have, and to this day he feels his father is the funniest man he knows.
School was a problem for Chevy Chase. He was kicked out twice from the Riverdale Country School in New York for disciplinary problems. He had a problem with authority figures and thought "a lot of the teachers were full of shit." At Haverford College, where he thought he'd major in medicine, the dean suggested that he take a year off and see a shrink. He wound up at Bard, which he preferred because it was coeducational.
He fell in love for the first time at 15 but when the girl kissed him with an open mouth he didn't know how to respond. "She broke up with me after two weeks when she found out that I didn't know that her belly button wasn't the right spot." He took jobs caring for a tennis court in Woodstock, driving a mail truck in Baltimore and working as a motorcycle messenger. He also wrote for Mad magazine and worked on a show called Channel One as well as for National Lampoon's Lemmings. His musical talent was self-learned; his comedy writing was of a high enough caliber to get him jobs writing for Alan King and the Smothers Brothers.
He was hired as a writer and performer for Saturday Night Live when it first began 15 years ago. He stayed for only one year, but what a year it was. His talent for mugging into the camera and falling down stairs, ladders, and tables soon brought him a popularity that landed him on the cover of magazines. Along with John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin, and Laraine Newman, he captured the hip young American audience who came out of the psychedelic sixties. Chase originated Weekend Update, a spoof on TV news, and often began the segment by saying, "Good evening, I'm Chevy Chase. . . and you're not."
He left the show, he said, to follow a girl who lived in California. He also left to follow a movie career, one which has brought him much fortune, if not the kind of critical success he had on Saturday Night Live. Some of his more popular films, like National Lampoon's Vacation, Caddyshacki, Foul Play and Fletch, have grossed between $40 and $70 million, and his most recent movie is National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. He is currently earning $6 million a picture, and is about to move from his well-guarded home in the Pacific Palisades to a two-acre property in Mandeville Canyon. He and his third wife, Jayni, have three young daughters. It is his family that has changed him considerably. He is a much mellower man today at 46 than he was before he became a father. He stopped taking drugs some years ago, and has overcome an addiction to painkillers which he was on for his back -- "degenerative disc disease is what it's called. I realized there were more important things than killing myself and being unavailable emotionally and intellectually to my family."
It's a different Chevy Chase who sits now in his living room, complaining of the smell of garlic from the kitchen and of his daughters having to learn to ride their bikes on the tennis court and not in the street, reflecting on his life and career. It's a Chase who is filled with self-doubt. Whose priorities have shifted from career to family. But who still knows that he's Chevy Chase... and we're not.
CHASE: I've read your book, The Hustons. Jesus, that stuff with Ray Bradbury and Truman Capote... I wouldn't like to have been on the end of that stuff.
Bradbury still can't talk about his experience working, on Moby Dick. But he did finally strike out at Huston.
He should have kicked him in the balls. I feed on guys like Huston, guys who are bullies like that. I love 'em. I know them. I've seen them. And I like them head on. So I hate 'em. What you've done is really comprehensive, you can feel it, it's history the way you handle three generations. A biography is really a responsibility. It's a great book.
Thanks for the plug, but are you just saying that so I won't ask you why all the stories I've read about you always include descriptions of your arrogance, smugness, or of your being annoying?
I don't get that. I was that way 10 years ago. People in the press still feel I'm full of myself, and that until I act as if I'm not full of myself, at least by their standards, they are going to cut me down. And I don't like it. I don't understand it. Arrogant about what? Smug about what? Annoying to whom? The people that I see and work with and am around, including my friends, I don't think any of them would call me annoying or smug or arrogant. It's just not me. So after a while, reading these things hurts. That's the price you pay for being in the limelight. Brando's called arrogant. I suppose in some ways that's a compliment then. This great artist Marlon Brando, this genius, who is annoying, smug and arrogant. But with me, I don't read the genius and great artist part, I just read annoying, smug and arrogant. I don't tend to get nice press.
Why do you suppose that is?
I don't know why. They're not going to write: Here's a nice middle-class guy who cares about his family and works hard and who's really got very good values. Who gives a shit? They don't want to hear that. All the editors are going to say is, "I'm sorry, we can't use this unless you've got some shit on this guy."
But what about the critics, who also don't seem to be in your corner?
Critics are another thing altogether. There are so many movie critics now that are eminently quotable. They are all over the pages. "I give it a 10." Dixie Watley gives it a 4. Who are these people? There's a million of them. And there are only a couple you really want to read.
Like?
I will read Pauline Kael. I don't agree with her opinions of many of the pictures, but I read for the joy of reading something well written. Incidentally, she's never written about a picture of mine. Maybe she just feels my pictures aren't even worth it. Fine. But to go over the line about my best friend Steve Martin's pictures -- they're good, but his pictures aren't all that much better or worse than mine. But to see people like Steve and Robin Williams just being the golden boys consistently, even though they are my best friends, particularly Steve--I'd love to get a little of that myself.
Do you have any theories about why you're not getting the kind of reviews you feel you deserve?
I believe that it depends on what the critics' expectation of the artist they are dealing with is. And if that person doesn't live up to that expectation then they have a right to say something about it. After ten years of not living up to those expectations maybe they ought to lower their expectations and give me a good review for what it is I'm trying to do. Christmas Vacation will probably get panned and dumped all over because it's Clark Griswold mugging and getting laughs. Something that only very few people can do the way I do. And make it work.
**This is your third Vacation movie--one that you're on record as saying would never happen.**
Absolutely.
"It would be a waste of time," you said. "They've been done."
And the fourth one, we're working on now. [Laughs] I guess it had never occurred to me that they might pay me tremendous amounts to do it. That part I hadn't taken into account. But this one's actually quite funny.
Still, it's a sequel of a sequel. In 1985 you said you like to stay away from sequels. In 1988 you said sequels bother you.
Now I say I'll only do sequels. [Laughs] I don't know how I feel about them. Who could care less whether something is a sequel or not? It has to stand on its own. When I did the second one [European Vacation], it was so awful that I just couldn't imagine doing another one. But this third one is written by John Hughes, and he wrote a good script.
Was there a central idea that got you interested in it?
It's about what it's like in anybody's house when everybody comes to visit at Christmas, and if that's like what we do at our house here, Christmas is hilarious, it's mayhem. You feel like you don't know everybody, there're too many presents, too much food, and there are so many funny things to do to the place. I thought of this idea of a Christmas tree catching fire, of some uncle who lights his cigar in the back room and you just hear a phroom! Just the sound that says, I don't think there are any branches left on that tree. And all the presents underneath all went up with the tree. And the uncle is on fire. To me that was a hilarious image. I told it to John Hughes and we laughed and laughed. And he said, "We've got to make a movie about that." About this tree exploding and this guy catching fire. And it sort of took off from there.
Before you got the image, was this second sequel something you had to be talked into doing?
Oh God did I have to be talked into it. Yeah, it was a major negotiation.
Did the money just keep getting bigger and bigger. . . ?
It wasn't the money so much as the promise that I'd have work afterwards. I like Warner Bros, but I wanted a guarantee that I'd have two or three other things to do after that. So we made a deal that was up in the many, many millions of dollars for three pictures.
The numbers we heard were $24 million for four pictures.
Well, if you know, that's what it is. It's a good average. Average of six a picture.
**And they don't all have to be Vacation and Fletch sequels?**
There was another Vacation one, Down Under, written by Eric Idle, but we ultimately decided it wasn't American enough. We were trying to trade in on the Paul Hogan Australian popularity at that point. I think we both felt that it wasn't strong enough. And you can be sure I won't be doing any more Fletch sequels.
**You really hated Fletch Lives that much?**
I fought the whole time against it. I said it's not going to work. It was during the writer's strike and I couldn't write for it. We had no script. We had a director who was doing the writing, and he couldn't write. All I could do was go out and improvise. Basically I had to hold that picture together by winging it.
Before you became a producer how much involvement did you have in your films?
I like to have my hand in it in every way. Every picture I'm on, I get very involved in the writing. My name may not be on the picture but I'm involved in the pre-production, the production, and post-production.
And your complaints about the final product have usually been about the final cut, which often changes what you've thought you've made. For instance, on Deal of the Century, you sounded very positive about working with director Billy Friedkin until you saw the results.
The problem was in post-production. Billy went a little bit batshit. He's a very intense man, a brilliant director, but there were a number of things in the script that scared him, so he completely changed the ending around.
**That happened with Al Pacino on Cruising as well. He thought he was making one picture, and Friedkin made another.**
That's what happened to Deal of the Century. But I didn't want to go up against Friedkin. I felt sorry for him. He's not a universally well-liked man out here. I think it's because he has problems with his temper. He had some real emotional problems that I just didn't want to be involved with. Life's too short to go through that. The picture did very poorly.
Since the critics usually attack your films, how would you like a chance to rank what you've done on a scale of 1-10?
I'd give Deal of the Century a five.
**Glad you're playing. What about your first film, Foul Play?**
Everybody seems to like Foul Play, so I'm beginning to think it's a good movie, but at the time I didn't think so. I was very much against them making me fall off the pier into the water for the good old days. I never got over that. I was so pissed about it. I suppose the highest I could go on that is a seven.
Weren't you involved with Goldie Hawn at that time?
Most people who knew us back then knew that we were romantically involved. Particularly during the making of Foul Play. But obviously that changed. Nothing went sour, we just went our separate ways. But yeah, we were very much in love at the time. Very infatuated.
Have you considered working together again in a similar kind of film?
People talk to me and Goldie over the years about doing another similar picture, but I think she would prefer to work with Kurt [Russell]. I mean, I love her and I think we work great together but there haven't been any scripts that have come to both of us. Now that she's at Disney and I'm at Warners I don't see how that's going to happen.
**Back to your rating your films. What about Seems Like Old Times?**
Six. It was kind of the last of those Neil Simon-type pictures that worked and it was great to work with Neil and his lines. I don't think people have the patience for that kind of thing.
Oh, Heavenly Dog!
CHASE: Benji was hot. It was an opportunity to work with a dog. I never saw the picture. I'd give it a two.
Modern Problems.
CHASE: I'd give that a one. There were too many drugs in Modern Problems.
Weren't you almost electrocuted in that?
Yeah. It was awful. I had a scene in which I was to be wired as a landing airplane in a dream sequence and the special effects people had devised it so that these lights would go over my shirt. The director felt that wasn't right, and that it should go under the shirt and attach to my skin. We were all a little nervous about that. They turned on the juice and I just was getting electrocuted and they thought I was kidding, screaming and yelling, "Turn it off!" In fact it was real and I fainted. The paramedics came. I was almost killed, according to the doctor. The burns were to the muscles in my shoulders, arms and back. I was weak for a long time.
**How do you feel about Caddyshack?**
There were too many drugs in that too, but that wasn't a problem. The more I've seen it over the years, the less I thought it was a good picture. I really liked Billy's [Murray] performance, and Ted Knight's. Rodney's just Rodney, not a good actor obviously. It's up there at six or seven.
**Under the Rainbow?**
I met my wife then. She was working as production coordinator. First picture I made $2 million on. It was just a fiasco. Awfully funny script, but it changed.
**The first Vacation?**
I'd give that an eight. I always thought that was one of my best. It had a wonderful spirit and charm and it was so much fun to make.
**The first Fletch?**
CHASE: A six. It made use of me in a way films hadn't -- it showed a more serious side, an ability to behave and act like a detective.
**The second Fletch?**
CHASE: A four.
European Vacation?
I rate it low. It opened bigger than any of my other films because of the expectation after the first one.
**Spies Like Us?**
CHASE: I forgot about that. That was all right, a five or six. I had to work with [John] Landis.
**That was after the tragedy with the deaths of the children and Vic Morrow on Twilight Zone--the Movie. Was Landis, who directed that segment, affected when you worked with him?**
He was affected, but not able to show it very well. If anything, it should have changed the way he dealt with people but it didn't. He's a bit of a bully, to say the least, with the wrong people, the easy shots. He's got a crassness about him. Anybody who can pick on a set decorator or an extra in front of everybody else in a very mean way is lacking something. I would think that an experience like Twilight Zone--the Movie would put some humility into your life. But it didn't.
Landis also directed you, Steve Martin, and Martin Short in Three Amigos!
That was great fun. I put that right up there with Vacation. Landis and his egoism cut out a lot of the funniest, best stuff of that picture. It could have been cut better. But Steve and Marty, we have Amigo dinners all the time. We became best friends in that.
**You had a small part in Caddyshack II.**
A bit part for less than a million bucks. I had nothing to do with it. I just went in for a week and shot my stuff. Had no idea how bad the movie was. That was just a horrible picture. That's down at zero.
**Funny Farm?**
I rank it pretty high, though there's not much to the picture. It's a funny movie. My dad was very upset about the picture. He felt that it made no use of what is intrinsically indigenous and good about what I do. George Roy Hill just did not want me to mug in any way. He wanted pure, real acting and he felt it would be funnier because of that. I learned less is more in some cases, but I was also fighting him the whole way. Ultimately the picture came out dull because it lacked the things that I do give to a movie that people do expect.
**And your latest, Christmas Vacation?**
It has a different look and feel and I'm quite good in it, so I'd have to rank it high. I had a lot to do with it and I chose the director, who is a first-time director. But it's not Moby Dick. It's what I've been sort of forced into doing over the years. It's only there to make you laugh, it's not a particularly deep movie.
You sound almost resigned. Would you like to be making "deeper" movies, working with better directors and actors?
Yeah, but I don't get many calls from them. It's because I'm perceived as being somewhat iconoclastic, and beyond that, a person who is a loner, who does "his own thing," who makes too much money; it's prohibitive for a director to hire him without having to pay the big bucks. Why take the chance when all that he is perceived to make are pictures that are simple-minded and go for big yucks? That really isn't the case, but it's going to be hard to break the mold there.
You mean you're willing to work for less if the quality is upped?
My price can be adjusted. I'm not a guy that has to stick to the big bucks. I'll take points [smiles]. I'd like to do some things that are serious. I've always said over the years that what I really want to do is make people laugh. Well I've made people laugh. Now I'm beginning to think about the art form of acting. If I'm doing it for all these years, why don't I start getting good at that, use a little bit more of my emotions than I have in films?
But?
There's never been a driving ambition in me to get something very deep out there. For the most part, I like making people laugh. But as you get older there are younger comedians coming up that are getting hot, the big box-office guys, the Keatons and Hankses and the Yahoo Seriouses.
Still hard for you to be serious all the way through a sentence, isn't it?
I'd like to use a little more of my acting ability. The word is getting out now that yes, I'm available... and quite open and interested.
Have you ever considered directing yourself?
That would be next to impossible. And the drop in salary that you take in directing would be monumental compared to what I make as an actor. But I feel very confident that I'd be a good director. The question is do I want to spend that kind of time away from my family? I'm spending close to a year on a project anyway. Being a director would be three times worse and one has to make that choice. This is a critical time in my children's lives. They are four and six and one. They need their dad just as much as they need their mom. They need to have a sense of accessibility at home; that he is consistent; that he's their father; that he's not off on some self-aggrandizing lark, or that being a movie star is more important to him than being a father to his children. I think that's a much more important thing.
So the timing isn't right for you to direct or write scripts as well as act?
Look at the hours you have in one day. You get up in the morning, and the kids are going to school. Then you have your work day. You have dinner at six with your children, you bathe them and read to them at seven, put them to bed by 8:30. You are exhausted. You get upstairs with your wife and lie in bed and read or watch TV or whatever you do and you are out by 10. Then you're up the next morning doing it again. That's life. That's the way most people are and that's the way I am. When I'm shooting, it's a whole other thing. Up at five, don't see the kids, get home and they are already finished with dinner. It's not as if: Oh, incidentally, I think I'll direct this picture, or, I think I'll just spend a few hours writing. You are too exhausted.
So that novel you're supposedly working on is not really being worked on?
Well, you know the old joke: "What are you doing?" "Writing a novel." "Oh yeah, neither am I." That's basically where I stand on that one.
Does being a father affect your choice of material?
Yes. I want to make pictures that are rich and full and have human relations in them, but at the same time I have to think carefully. Do I want my children at this delicate stage in their lives to see their father in bed with another woman who isn't their mother? And try to explain to them that it's only playacting? It's a tough one. It's a major decision. You don't see too much of the light romantic lead in me lately since I've had daughters. Why? Because I made a personal decision to take it easy on the sex. These are the kinds of considerations that you wouldn't normally expect an actor of my level and caliber to be thinking about, but they are considerations in my life.
Are you speaking out of your own insecurities?
I'm more secure than anybody when it comes to having a great wife and family, and having the money to see that they'll be okay for the rest of their lives. But in terms of my work, I'm never happy. I've never felt that I've quite found the project, quite had the writing. It's not an Oscar, it's not all the critics, it's not the acclaim, it's not the huge box-office success I'm talking about. It's the feeling yourself that you've lived up to what you can do. I don't think I have. Most people I know feel that I can do better. I'm the one who feels, geez, I'm not so sure. Let's look at what I've done and the reality is: this is what I've done. I think of Lee Marvin at the end of his life saying "I have made a lot of shit." And I know what he meant.
Do you also know what Marlon Brando means when he says everybody is an actor, that there's nothing special about it?
I know exactly how he feels about acting. He's very self-deprecating in a dishonest sort of way. It's very tough to look at a man that age questioning what he's done with his life and coming up with fighting for the Indians as being more important than some of the great work he's given us. That's like a child. Intellectually he's not a grown man.
Getting back to your own self-doubts. With the kind of money you're making, do you see yourself at the top of your profession?
I don't think I've ever been on top. I'm amazed that I get what I get. But it's all about opening pictures. Danny Aykroyd's films have made more than mine and he's making half of what I'm making, or a quarter. I may face a time in my life where I have to adjust and say there are other people who are taking over who are doing better than I am, who the studio is going to look at first for their big summer releases.
Do you miss the kinds of things you did on Saturday Night Live?
Absolutely. I really miss it a lot. But it's not something I can go back to. It's over. It was over when I left.
Your popularity on Saturday Night Live stemmed from a lot of physical comedy -- the way you played to the camera, the pratfalls you took. When people first meet you, do they still react to that side of you?
People fall down. There are two famous ones. One was this guy, an actor, 6'8". I was sitting at this outdoor restaurant, The Source, and this guy was alone and he saw me and wrote a little note. He walked by and had a glass of water in his hand and he took a horrendous fall just as he put the note down, thinking that it would get my attention, which it did. The glass broke, cut his lip really good, nice cut, a lot of bleeding. And the note said, "Please come down to the theater and see me in such-and-such a play." I just couldn't believe it.
Another guy fell at a store where my wife and I were looking at couches. He went down and his knee was gone. He had completely blown it, the paramedics had to come. People just don't know how to fall. John Belushi never knew. Whenever he fell he'd hit his head. Every time he did a Joe Cocker imitation he would fall down and hit his head.
What's been your most spectacular fall?
From grace.
Didn't the FCC once censor a bit that you wrote about how Johnny Carson used the word "penis" on his show? What was that about?
That was about the size of my dick. Twenty-four feet, [pause] It was a straightforward news story that I had written. Johnny had had Buddy Hackett on his show the night before. I hadn't seen the show but I'd heard about it. Basically Hackett was talking about owning a hand gun and Johnny Carson said something to the effect that there's an old Indian adage that man with big gun have small penis. So I wrote an Update in which I said that Johnny Carson last night on the Tonight Show used the word "penis" and was allowed to say it over the air by the Federal Communications Commission. I quoted the sentence about the old Indian adage and said that the rule was that the word "penis" could not be used in other sentences such as: "Look at the penis," or, "Is that the penis?" or, "I have here a penis." I just said it straight. There was nothing offensive about it. It wasn't as if I said, "The penis has hair on it and herpes." But you just don't say "Look at the penis" on television. At least not then.
Once you left Saturday Night Live did you feel that the quality never returned?
Pretty much. I felt that once I left it wasn't as good. We had done what we had come to do that first year, which was to parody television and to satirize political events. And once you ran out of that either A) because you did all the jokes, or the novelty had ceased to exist, or B) because others were now doing what you had started off doing and were winning Emmys for, or C) because everybody won Emmys and they were all full of themselves and they were starting to write "in" jokes, then the show was not going to be as good and therefore was just going to go downhill. And it seemed to me that after I left that happened.
In one of your Saturday Night Live skits you asked viewers to send in killer dope. Did anyone respond?
We did get letters with joints in them. I never smoked anything, God knows what the hell was in them. Once in a while one particular member of the cast would come in and smoke them. I'm not going to say who it was.
Was there a lot of drug use at the time?
Not too much the first year. I noted it quite a bit more when I went back and visited. And understood it. People were making more money, they were up later, working harder, getting tired of it. But the year I was there none of us had a lot of money to begin with, and coke was not particularly that exciting or interesting. There was pot, but with pot you'd come up with a hundred premises, giggling your ass off, and the next morning two of them were funny.
What was your own experience with drugs?
That started late in life. I was scared of them. People were smoking pot and even taking LSD and I didn't. When I first smoked pot I freaked. I didn't want to lose control. But it was something I'd gotten used to doing back in the sixties when everybody said it's not only okay but probably good to take psychedelics and smoke pot and snort a little coke. After all, we were told that coke was the last thing in the world you could get addicted to. Well, it turned out that isn't true. I never felt coke ever helped my mind. Just sped me up and made me nervous. But pot we used to smoke all the time in the sixties and seventies. It was common then. What's happened to pot today is it's very, very strong. It's a very different drug than it was when we were flying that Mexican stuff back at twenty bucks a shot in 1969. I'm very much against it and very much an advocate against drugs and alcohol.
Was there ever a period in your life, though, when you were very much into it?
The only time that I ever got heavily involved with drugs was during a period when I was very unhappy, during a long separation and divorce that I was going through. And when you're unhappy you tend to do things that are self-destructive. I don't do it anymore, I just don't care too much about it.
Was Belushi self-destructive?
John was a fluke. I don't think he ever put a needle in his arm. I think that somebody else shot him up and he liked it. If I'd known he was doing what he was doing I'd have killed him anyway. It was just way over the line. But he thought he could take it -- or do anything.
Did he ever reach out to you or to anyone else for help?
I think he went to other people for help, but what could you say? Except, "Cut it down a little, John." After he died I thought to myself, goddamn it, there were at least four, five, six people around him for three or four years there -- and I didn't see him more than two or three times in those years -- who knew all the time how much he did. And somebody should have said something. But maybe people were scared to, or maybe he was very defensive about it, or maybe he hid it, or was guilty about it. He wasn't happy, obviously, or he wouldn't have gone that far.
Did you read Wired? Or see the movie?
I read bits and pieces. I don't think it was accurate. There was no way a guy like Woodward was going to get an accurate version of who John was without being around him all the time. I never saw the film. I felt the book was sleaze and why do a film of it? But Wired didn't upset me or hurt me nearly as much as the Saturday Night Live book did [A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live], which I thought was just horrible. They said things about me I couldn't believe. I came away from that book thinking nobody on that show liked me, that I had been an asshole. It was the total opposite of what it was like. An awful book, and that hurt. That one, I literally cried. I read a chapter about myself and I cried. Because that was one of the happiest years of my life. We were very much together like a team. And we were happy.
We've recently lost another member of that team. Did you see much of Gilda Radner in the years before her death?
No, I didn't see much of her at all the last couple of years. I didn't feel it was easy to get to her. And she was sick. On the other hand, people said, "Well, you could always call her at home." I tried that on a bunch of occasions but she was sick and I didn't want to bother her. I had the impression that her close friends had a hard time, and that it had something to do with her marriage to Gene [Wilder], I don't know if that's the truth or not, so I won't talk about it.
You took a shot in Playboy at Elliott Gould, who was an early and popular guest host on Saturday Night Live. You said if you had suddenly become box-office poison you would move in with Gould and open a pig ranch together. Why hit someone who's down at the moment?
That was a rude thing to say. I didn't know he was down at the time. I was making fun and hoping he wouldn't take it seriously. Sometimes you say things like that and you just figure, "Oh well, they'll never see it." If I thought for a minute Elliott would read that I would have felt like a shit. It was just a cheap shot and there's no excuse for it. I shouldn't have said it.
Care to take some cheap shots at some figures who could use a good barb from the old Chevy Chase? Starting with President Bush.
CHASE: I wasn't as upset by his winning as I was about Reagan. The Quayle thing drove me nuts. I still don't understand that. And I don't understand a man with his apparent intelligence and perspective allowing himself to get caught up in the burning of the American flag issue, and allowing his stance on the abortion issue. The American flag is a joke to me. It's so clear that the right to burn the flag is what the American flag stands for. Does this mean I can burn a little model of an American flag on my birthday cake or is that illegal? And the pro-choice issue -- I disagree with him. I don't see the workings of an intellectual mind there. I think the man is pandering, I don't think he's telling the truth, I don't believe that's how he really feels. It's the woman's prerogative to make that kind of decision. The guy who does Bush well is Dana Carvey on Saturday Night Live.
Two stand-up comedians, Roseanne Barr and Jackie Mason, currently have high-ranking TV shows. What do you think of them?
Roseanne I don't get. I saw her as an overweight, whining stand-up comedienne and I thought this is about as bad as stand-up comedy gets. But I can't be fair to her because I haven't seen her show. Jackie Mason seems self-destructive but not very bright. I saw his act and it was no different from what he'd been doing for 20 years. It was always as incongruous as it is now. Flip remarks, some of which are funny, most of which aren't. They're unstudied and dangerous in some ways. I think that he should be careful about what he says. He's a relatively warm fellow who is a rabbi's son and really not a well-educated guy. He's the kind of guy who would say, "They say that fat's bad for you now, is that true?" Yeah, well we've been reading about that now for twenty-five years Jackie, better take that pastrami and let go and have some oat bran.
Who among your contemporaries tickles your funnybone?
Steve Martin, Marty Short, Christopher Guest. Robin Williams on certain occasions, as a stand-up, is unbeatable. He's very quick. Richard Belzer can make me laugh. I make me laugh. I make them laugh. I make money making you laugh. I may have just made in my pants. Sorry.
Do you think you'd ever be interested in a half-hour TV show of your own?
I'm sure I could have it any time I want. What I'd do with it, I don't know. And I'm sure at some point I will. If the outcome of that would be something similar to The Cosby Show, I don't know that that's living up to what I can do. Nothing against The Cosby Show, some of it is very endearing, but it's the kind of TV that I was making fun of when I was on Saturday Night Live 15 years ago.
So having a hit show like Bill Cosby's would only continue your self-doubt about what your true potential might have been?
I guess I'll never feel I've lived up to quite what it is I can do. But I'm not sure what it is I can do. I may always live wondering what I could have come up with. And maybe the answer is: Aw, not much.
Lawrence Grobel is the author of The Hustons and Conversations with Capote, and writes for Playboy, The New York Times and Redbook.