Chevy Chase Walked Into Bill Maher's Living Room and Refused to Leave

Chevy Chase showed up to Club Random looking like a man who has absolutely nothing to prove and knows it, which is more or less the energy he has operated on since 1975. He and Bill Maher spend the better part of an hour doing what two guys with perfect comic timing do when neither of them has a publicist in the room: they free-associate, talk over each other, get lost inside three separate anecdotes simultaneously, and somehow make the whole mess feel like the best conversation you’ve never been invited to.

The format here is not an interview. It’s more like watching two jazz musicians trade fours until one of them knocks over a music stand. Maher keeps trying to tell Chase about the Burt Reynolds movie ‘The Last Movie Star’ and Chase keeps derailing him. Chase claims he was almost 80. Maher does a double take. Chase admits he had a clove cigarette earlier. Nobody circles back to Burt Reynolds for another ten minutes. By then it doesn’t matter.

The Sinatra Story Is Worth the Price of Admission Alone

Buried somewhere in the middle of this glorious mess is one of the better showbiz stories you’ll hear this year. Chase and Martin Short went to Frank Sinatra’s final Los Angeles performance. After the show they waited backstage, in a small room with maybe twenty other people, for three hours before Sinatra appeared. Chase sets the scene carefully, which is unusual for a man who cannot finish a sentence without a detour through Ionesco.

He comes right up to me, he says, hi chubby. Hi Frank, what are you drinking.

Then Chase introduces Sinatra to Short, a man who has worshipped Sinatra his entire life, and Short begins his prepared remarks with the kind of reverence that only a true fan can generate. He gets exactly three words out before Sinatra cuts him off.

Marty is so taken by this moment that he goes, oh Mr. Sinatra, I… and it gets that far. And Frank says, I think I know. What are you drinking.

Maher immediately declares this the best show business story ever told and he is not wrong. ‘I think I know’ is the perfect Sinatra line. It contains multitudes. It is rude and generous and funny and completely devoid of ego while being entirely about ego. Chase tells it without a wasted syllable, which is remarkable given that he spent the previous twenty minutes being unable to finish a single thought.

John Belushi Stole His Cocaine and He Is Still Not Over It

Chase’s Belushi story lands differently. He describes leaving a small vial of cocaine on the piano during rehearsals for Lemmings, the National Lampoon stage show, and watching it disappear. He confronted Belushi. Belushi denied it. Then, about a month later, Chase was invited to dinner at the Belushi apartment and spotted his empty vial sitting on a shelf. The telling is funny. The undertow is not. These are two men who are young and alive and doing cocaine at rehearsal and one of them is going to be dead at 33.

I’m so glad I just, you put that stuff aside. Me too. Because you wouldn’t be here at 78 if you hadn’t. Because John died at 33.

Chase also mentions John Candy, unprompted, in the same breath. Two best friends. Both gone decades too early. He moves past it fast, the way comedians move past everything real, but it sits in the room for a moment before the next joke arrives.

Still Here, Still Funny, and Extremely Aware of Both

What makes this episode work is that Chase is not doing a nostalgia tour. He is not here to rehabilitate anything. He shot a movie with Dan Aykroyd in Canada literally the week before this taping and he seems genuinely delighted to be working. When Maher asks about Biden falling on the Air Force One stairs, Chase lights up immediately, because of course that staircase fall looks exactly like his Gerald Ford impression from 1975 and Chase is secure enough to find that completely hilarious rather than territorial.

There is a moment near the end where Chase asks, out loud, where all the cameras are, after sitting in front of them for an hour. Maher treats this as a design triumph. Chase treats it as a reasonable question. That exchange tells you everything about why this works. Neither of them is performing for the room. They are just two men who have been funny their whole lives, still funny, a little stoned on a clove cigarette, and genuinely glad to be alive.

When am I going to be guaranteed to be able to ever have this amazing moment with the great Chevy Chase again? No. So I’m going to milk it for all I can get out of it.