Oh, my God. I hope you didn't watch — here's the entire, official title — Comedy Central Presents The NY Friars Club Roast of Chevy Chase. If you did, you saw one of the all-time great train wrecks in television history. If you didn't and you enjoy feeling ill at ease, it airs again December 6, 7, 14 and 24. As a piece of entertainment, it's truly amazing — a "comedy roast" that is largely devoid of humor, affection or even big stars. Steve Martin, Nathan Lane and Martin Short appear via a segment taped elsewhere but otherwise, Mr. Chase is called an untalented, drug-addicted moron by a lot of folks, few of whom have any real connection to him. Talk about shows that make you wonder how they could have happened.
One assumes Chevy was chosen for the honor because someone figured that superstars would flock to participate. They didn't. The Martin/Lane/Short piece looked like a later drop-in engineered by producers who knew they didn't have much of a line-up based on those who actually showed up for the event. Of all the performers who worked with Chevy on Saturday Night Live, the only ones in attendance were Al Franken, Laraine Newman and roastmaster Paul Shaffer. Beverly D'Angelo was there from the Vacation movies…but that was about it for Chase co-stars. Instead, the dais was padded out with comedians who barely knew him…and didn't have anything particularly funny to say about him. Gilbert Gottfried and Kevin Meaney, who have been known to be hilarious elsewhere, were among the many who apparently performed but were edited from the tape. Others, like Richard Belzer, were included but obviously had large chunks of their speeches trimmed in the editing room. Given what stayed in, you have to wonder about the material that couldn't be used.
But the big squirm was seeing Chevy Chase, who seemed to hate every moment of it — and who wouldn't? A line of strangers and slight friends paraded to the podium to announce that he was a doper, a jerk and a performer in crappy movies…and very little of this was said with the kind of loving twinkle we used to see when Don Rickles told Sinatra his voice was bad. Past entries in this series (Hugh Hefner, Drew Carey, etc.) featured a lot of character assassination but you got the idea that most of those on the premises really liked the guy they were smearing. Not here.
What could possibly have been on Chevy Chase's mind when he agreed to this? He'd been roasted once before at the Friar's so he knew the drill. He must have had an inkling that it wouldn't be an evening of Danny Aykroyd and Goldie Hawn reminiscing about what a kick it was to co-star with him. Throughout, the roastee sat wearing sunglasses that failed to mask his discomfort, and feigning slight laughter at an occasional line. He looked for all the world like a man undergoing a painfully slow root canal, sans Novocaine.
Folks have wondered how he could have accepted certain movie scripts and the gig on his short-lived talk show…but at least those can be explained by money. Someone was shoveling millions of dollars at him. So why sit for this public stoning? Given the books and articles that have recently portrayed him in a bad light, you have to guess he either had some terrible, terrible advice that this would help his image…or that it's all true, and he felt the need for some public humiliation as a form of punishment. Either way, the result is pretty much the same.