He ticked off Johnny Carson after it was rumored that Chase could succeed him on The Tonight Show. "I'd never be tied down for five years interviewing TV personalities," Chase told New York Magazine. Carson replied that Chase "couldn't ad-lib a fart after a baked-bean dinner."
And Chevy wasn’t done fighting with the cast of SNL (a tradition he carried through the end of the century). Lorne brought Chase back to host the show in 1978 and Chevy’s first order of business was to kick Jane Curtin off the Weekend Update desk. “You sit there and you have pieces of your arm bitten off,” Curtin recalls. “But it heals. It grows back.”
The rest of the cast wasn’t thrilled to have Chase back either. Chevy claims Belushi spread “some pretty apocryphal stories,” while Bill Murray was steamed about the way Curtin was brushed aside. Sounds like petty stuff, but it ended in violence.
“I got in a fight with Chevy the night he came back to host,” says Murray.
Director John Landis was there that night and remembers Belushi and Dan Aykroyd trying to get in between the punches.
“Billy was out of line,” says Chevy. “I felt at the time I was a lot tougher kid than maybe Billy might have thought. I had grown up on the edge of East Harlem. I had been in a lot of fistfights.”
But Murray landed the most brutal blow. As the two men were pulled apart, Murray screamed “Medium talent!”
“I thought, “Ooh boy, that’s funny. That really impressed me,” remembers Landis. “I went, “So, Bill Murray— wow, who is that guy?”
Murray and Chase tried to put the fight behind them by the time they got to Caddyshack. Murray tried to empathize with Chevy’s sudden rise to the top: “When you become famous, you’ve got like a year or two where you act like a real a--hole. You can’t help yourself. It happens to everybody. You’ve got like two years to pull it together— or it’s permanent.”