Chase On Ford

Chevy Chase on the the guy who launched was the reason for  his career:

Chase, 63, was an original cast member on the trend-setting late-night comedy television show “Saturday Night Live” and frequently opened the show pretending to be Ford stumbling and falling. The parody in 1975-6 helped reinforce a popular image about Ford’s clumsiness, even though the president had been a star athlete in college.

Chase proceeded to make that (and Fletch, which was basically the Ford bit tacked onto a private eye) his whole career.

Was he grateful?  Well, eventually:

“He had never been elected period, so I never felt that he deserved to be there to begin with,” the actor said about Ford, who died on Tuesday at age 93. “That was just the way I felt then as a young man and as a writer and a liberal.”

“Later on we became friends and he was a very, very sweet man,” Chase said in a telephone interview from a Colorado ski resort. “He took my wife and I on a whole lovely trip through Grand Rapids to show us where he had been as a child and what not. We kept in touch and he was just a terrific guy.

Wow.  Are Republicans supposed to be “terrific guys?”

2 thoughts on “Chase On Ford

  1. Chase did one of the funniest and most surreal bits I’ve ever seen on network TV – I think during a special in the ’90’s. This was after his drug problem was revealed. He made a teary thank-you to his family, who had stood behind him throughout – and introduced a group of people, as his family, who were obviously strangers and randomly selected. I wish you could see it – my description doesn’t do it justice. It was so uncomfortable.

  2. Ackroyd is the only member of the original SNL cast I still have respect for. He’s moved easily between the roles of performer/writer/producer and doesn’t take himself too seriously.

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