In the upcoming CNN documentary I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, Chevy Chase takes a moment to confess a recent injury: While the 82-year-old Saturday Night Live veteran attended the star-packed 50th anniversary celebrations of the long-running sketch comedy series in February 2025, he was not invited to participate in any sketches. “I expected that I would’ve been on the stage too with all of the other actors,” he says in the doc. “When Garrett [Morris] and Laraine [Newman] went on the stage there, I was curious as to why I didn’t. No one asked me to. Why was I left aside?”
Chase was part of the inaugural cast of Saturday Night Live, and one of the founding anchors of its iconic Weekend Update segment. Allegedly, there were two potential bits for the SNL 50 special that might have included Chase, according to Chase’s wife Jayni. “They were going back and forth,” she says. “And then all of a sudden, ‘No. There’s no bit.’”
In the documentary, fellow star Martin Short defends Chase’s omission as understandable: “There’s 50 years of casts. Billy Crystal – no bigger star than Billy – he didn’t say a word that night. It’s just too many people to fill.”
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SNL creator Lorne Michaels adds that “there were a couple of versions of Update… and we went back and forth on that. There was also a caution from somebody that I don’t want to name that Chevy wasn’t as focused.”
It’s a comment that stands out considering that in a 2022 interview, Chase said he didn’t “give a crap” about the fact that his former Saturday Night Live and Community co-stars don’t like him. “I am who I am. And I like who I am. I don’t care,” he told CBS Sunday Morning. “And it’s part of me, that I don’t care. And I’ve thought about that a lot. And I don’t know what to tell you, man. I just don’t care.”
Chase wasn’t the only one absent from SNL50 this year: Bill Hader and Dan Ackroyd both skipped it entirely for personal reasons. Some of the highlights of the night included an emotional musical tribute from Adam Sandler and a Beatles medley from Paul McCartney.
