Fifty years ago, weeks before the premiere of the show that would become “Saturday Night Live,” Chevy Chase had a camera test.
NBC execs wanted to see how the untested cast of the late-night series looked onscreen. Many of them were nervous. But Chase knew how he looked.
The disarmingly handsome comic adopted the delivery of a smarmy newsman and deadpanned a joke about the hatching of a baby sandpiper, a triumph for the zoo where it was born, until the bird was stomped to death by a baby hippo born a day earlier. He ended with “Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: “I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not” charts Chevy Chase’s rise from breakout “Saturday Night Live” phenomenon to box-office royalty. The film will premiere January 1 at 8 p.m. ET on celebrity.land and will be available to stream next day for subscribers.
That’s how “Weekend Update” came to be. Chase’s version of events has changed over the years (the camera test anecdote comes from the oral history “Live From New York”; this year, he told Vanity Fair that it happened at a table read). But every retelling of that moment features Chase as a news anchor and a poor baby sandpiper meeting an untimely end.
That anchorman was inspired by local TV journalist Roger Grimsby, but with “Weekend Update,” Chase really invented an outsized version of himself. At once arrogant and idiotic, Chase found a charming cocktail that would make him the breakout star of the nascent “Saturday Night” –– and made “Weekend Update” the show’s signature segment.
“Weekend Update” typically lands shortly after midnight, after the first musical performance and most of the topical, political sketches. In the capable but predictable hands of current anchors Michael Che and Colin Jost, it’s more of a showcase for other cast members who appear as quirky correspondents. In his sole season as an “SNL” cast member, Chase made it must-see TV that he owned.
Chase was originally hired as a writer, winning a place in the cast after torpedoing himself into a pothole in the pouring rain after dinner with “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels and NBC executive Dick Ebersol. He sold himself then and there, Ebersol said in “Live From New York.”
The very first “Weekend Update” segment was just over three minutes long, complete with a fake advertisement for arthritis medication and a cutaway segment to Laraine Newman on the scene of a fictional hotel homicide. Chase was self-assured throughout, talking a mile a minute in a plain gray suit and red tie, even though he almost stumbled over the first few words of a now-classic joke: “The Post Office announced today that it is commemorating prostitution in the United States –– it’s a 10-cent stamp, but if you wanna lick it, it’s a quarter.”
Michaels told the New York Times earlier this year that sticking a news parody in around midnight was purposeful: Some stations around the US didn’t start airing the show until around that time, after local 11:30 p.m. news broadcasts had ended. Audiences would join the show in progress, see Chase as a fast-talking anchor and fall right in.
The segment grew in popularity week-to-week. A few weeks into his run, he started saying, “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not.” He’d reliably skewer politicians and public figures (his favorite target was President Gerald Ford, who Chase joked “tied his shoe to his hairblower and inadvertently pardoned Richard Nixon”) and make fake risqué phone calls to an unseen woman. By the end of the first season, “Weekend Update” was extended from three to nearly nine minutes, according to “Saturday Night: A Backstage History of ‘Saturday Night Live.’”
Chase was the only cast member to play himself every episode (and sometimes the only cast member to have a speaking role each week). With his regular pratfalls and a sketch that could never be dropped between dress rehearsal and the live show, he became the show’s most recognizable face. Chase’s rising fame and immodesty rankled some of his cast mates.
“When an audience likes you, they let you get away with more,” Michaels told New York in December 1975, just a few months into the show’s inaugural season. “Chevy really feels the way he sounds on ‘Update,’ but he can make the material neutral. He’s not on a soapbox. And he never acts.”
“I happen to come across relatively soft,” Chase said in the same New York piece. “My hair is short enough, I wear a tie and jacket, so I can do more offensive stuff. But my mind is mean — I’ve got a lot of things I’d like to get out. And it would be harder for some of the others to do it.”
Chase was hailed as the heir to Johnny Carson just months into his stint on “Saturday Night Live.” He spent one full season on the show before departing a few episodes into the second season to pursue a film career that made use of his handsome buffoon persona. He told New York that appearing on “SNL” was “like playing at the top of the minors.” He’d later express regret that he left the series so soon.
After Chase left, Jane Curtin, Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray hosted “Weekend Update” in different combinations. Since then, the segment has had both solo anchors like Norm Macdonald, whose flattening charisma, like Chase’s, would’ve made it nearly impossible to co-host with, and teams like Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon or Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers, who balanced each other’s spikiness and sweetness.
On “SNL’s” 50th anniversary special, Murray appeared on “Update” to rank all the previous hosts of the segment. He ranked Chase, his onetime sparring partner, fourth, under the duo of Curtin and Aykroyd.
“Let’s face it, ‘Weekend Update’ simply would not exist without him,” Murray said. “So it would be wrong to have him listed anywhere but number four.”
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