Joel McHale Responds to Chevy Chase Saying He Didn’t ‘Want to Be Surrounded’ by ‘Community’ Cast: ‘No One Was Keeping You There… The Feeling’s Mutual, Bud’
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Joel McHale was asked by People magazine to weigh in on Chevy Chase’s recent diss of “Community,” the NBC sitcom they starred on together as series regulars for four seasons (McHale continued with the show for two additional seasons), to which McHale said: “He stopped hurting my feelings in 2009.”
Speaking on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast, Chase said “Community” wasn’t “funny enough for me, ultimately,” adding: “I felt a little bit constrained. Everybody had their bits, and I thought they were all good. It just wasn’t hard-hitting enough for me.”
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Asked about his character, millionaire Pierce Hawthorne, Chase added, “I didn’t mind the character. I just felt that it was… I felt happier being alone. I just didn’t want to be surrounded by that table, every day, with those people. It was too much.”
McHale told People that his first thought upon hearing Chase’s criticisms was, “Hey, no one was keeping you there.”
“I mean, we weren’t sentenced to that show,” McHale added. “It was like, ‘All right, you could have left if you really wanted that.’ But yeah, you know Chevy. That’s Chevy being Chevy… I wrote about this in my book, but I was like, ‘Hey, the feeling’s mutual, bud.’”
Chase was fired from “Community” after using a racial slur on set. Cast members such as Donald Glover have spoken out in the past about Chase’s problematic set behavior. Chase said on the “WTF” podcast he has no ill will against Harmon for axing him from the show.
“I have no idea if we’re okay,” Chase said, noting he hasn’t seen Harmon since 2012. “I’ve never been not okay. He’s kind of a pisser. He’s angry. He called and said he was sorry. I love him now.”
Glover told The New Yorker in 2018 that Chase repeatedly made racist jokes on the “Community” set. According to the profile, Chase “often tried to disrupt” his scenes with Glover by making “racial cracks between takes,” one of which was the following: “People think you’re funnier because you’re Black.”
“Chevy was the first to realize how immensely gifted Donald was, and the way he expressed his jealousy was to try to throw Donald off,” Harmon said at the time. “I remember apologizing to Donald after a particularly rough night of Chevy’s non-P.C. verbiage, and Donald said, ‘I don’t even worry about it.’”
Was Chase difficult to work with? “I don’t think people really felt that way,” Chase told Maron. “I don’t know what my reputation was among people. I just always assumed I was okay.”
Harmon and the “Community” cast are currently gearing up to reunite for a long-awaited film version of the sitcom. McHale told Variety in June that Harmon and co-writer Andrew Guest had almost finalized the film’s script before development paused amid the Writers Guild of America strike. The film is set up at Peacock.
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