Holy Crap

Most anyone over the age of thirty who watched a lot of TV when they were younger will remember that Chevy Chase had his own late night talk show back in the early 90's. It was the golden age of late night talk. Carson was on his way out. Letterman and Leno were at the top of their games. Arsenio was hanging on. Tom Snyder's reincarnation was only a few years away.

Andrew Hearst at the panopticist serves up two delicious posts that accurately represent what all of us viewers got to enjoy when flipping the channel to Chevy Chase's show for the five weeks it was on.

The stink bomb that was The Chevy Chase Show first wafted over the airwaves on September 7, 1993, a week after David Letterman's CBS debut and a week before Conan O'Brien took over as the host of Late Night...

I watched The Chevy Chase Show that first night...The four-minute clip below contains part of Chase's interview with the show's first-ever guest, Goldie Hawn, as well as their truly unfortunate attempts to get the audience dancing—to "La Bamba"—as the show went to commercial break.

That clip is bad enough but if you want to feel uncomfortable (and I mean real uncomfortable) you have to see the opening of that night's show.

This new clip is the first 10 minutes of the show, and Chase is entirely, existentially alone. The phrase "deer caught in the headlights" is a cliche, but it really applies here. He rubs his hands together; he repeats himself; his eyes dart around...

He seems acutely aware that the next hour is going to go very very badly.

I'm surprised Cheney hasn't thought to forcibly show these two clips on an endless loop to the prisoners at Gitmo. Then again, they may be more certain than ever that they do want to carry through with destroying Western Civilization.