Joel McHale says Chevy Chase 'stopped hurting my feelings in 2009' after latest “Community” slam

Joel McHale is used to Chevy Chase being... well, Chevy Chase, so he's taking the 80-year-old comedy legend and noted curmudgeon's recent digs at Community in stride.

"He stopped hurting my feelings in 2009," McHale recently told PEOPLE when asked about comments Chase made last month on the WTF With Marc Maron podcast. When Maron turned the chat toward Chase's troubled time on Community, Chase dismissed the show as "not funny enough" for him.

Chevy Chase and Joel McHale

"I felt a little bit constrained a bit," Chase said of the comedy set at a community college. "Everyone had their bits and stuff, I thought they were all good, but it just wasn't hard-hitting enough for me."

"I just didn't want to be surrounded by that table every day with those people," Chase told Maron. "It was too much."

"I was like, 'Hey, no one was keeping you there.' I mean, we weren't sentenced to that show," McHale told PEOPLE. "It was like, 'All right, you could have left if you really wanted that.' But yeah, you know Chevy. That's Chevy being Chevy."

Chase starred as millionaire bigot Pierce Hawthorne for the first four seasons of Community, but left the show after reportedly using a racial slur on set. In March 2018, former Community costar Donald Glover revealed in a New Yorker profile how Chase tried to disrupt his scenes by making racial and insensitive jokes between takes to throw him off.

The House of Villains host added, "I wrote about this in my book, but I was like, 'Hey, the feeling's mutual, bud.'"

He sure did. In his 2016 memoir, Thanks for the Money: How to Use My Life Story to Become the Best Joel McHale You Can Be, McHale recalls tense interactions with Chase and the older comedian's alleged use of racist terms and jokes about sexual assault. McHale has also spoken several times about an incident on set that led to him accidentally dislocating Chase's shoulder.

So it's no surprise, then, that Chase wasn't invited back to the finally forthcoming Community movie — particularly since his character was killed off when Chase left the show. McHale cleared that up on Kelly Ripa's Let's Talk Off Camera podcast.

"Yeah, I don't think so," McHale said when Ripa asked if Chase would be part of the movie. "There wasn't any issues at all when we were making the show," he added jokingly.

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