Chevy Chase is a notoriously difficult person to work with.
How bad you ask?
He’s physically violent, argumentative, insulting, abusive to just about everyone as well as being vocally racist.
(Chevy Chase. By numerous accounts, and consistently over the years, he’s shown himself to be a first class asshole.)
To give some context here to the insane degree of asshole we’re talking about:
Chase once got into a fistfight with Bill Murray in John Belushi’s dressing room on-set on Saturday Night Live. While the fight was probably as much Murray’s fault as Chase’s, most people don’t try to beat their coworkers up.
Over the years on-set on SNL as he did guest appearances, he was an outright ass to just about everyone, chronically heaping scorn and verbal abuse on any cast member he could.
By the mid 90’s it got so bad, despite Chase being an original cast member of SNL, he was permanently banned from the set. Again, physical violence was at play – Chase slapped Cheri Oteri in the back of the head during a rehearsal. This apparently pissed co-star Will Ferrel off enough that he took it directly to Lorne Michaels. Michaels, sick of the perpetual problems Chase caused, 86’ed him after that.
This makes him the only former cast member to have ever been banned from SNL.
He was also written out of the show Community for getting into numerous public arguments with the show’s creator Dan Harmon and using racist slurs on-set.
(If it wasn’t bad enough to be banned from SNL, Chase’s assholery cost him another show, too.)
When co-star Joel McHale confronted Chase about his racist bs, Chase apparently claimed Richard Pryor had given him permission to use the n-word. Of course, that probably only meant Chase could use it in Pryor’s company without offending Pryor. Pryor, by the way, had been dead for nearly a decade when this all came to a head.
And again, McHale alleges that when he continued to confront Chase for his insistence on using racist language, Chase would become physically violent, and, yes, try to start a fight.