This is the first post in a new series we’re going to be featuring here on Nashville’s Dead called THE SHREDITORIAL. It’s going to be a weekly thing? Bi-weekly? Monthly? Daily? Hourly? It’s going to happen sometimes. It’s basically the musings and mind-melts of our good buddy, and we think everyone needs to read it. This one’s about Chevy Chase

Shreditorial #1

Everything I ever heard about Chevy Chase is about how he isn’t funny anymore, but in actuality his Past Master is blowing my mind in a way that isn’t even funny, because its totally a serious Mindsweeper! This guy was jabbing at George Bush Sr. when he was the head of the CIA and accusing Ronald Reagan of combing his hair with buttered toast in 1976. Did your dad do that? If not, I bet he is funnier than Chevy Chase.

Thankfully, Eric Wright let Joey and I borrow the first season of SNL when we left the land of Silence and Darkness as brothers eternal and ascended Witch Mountain. I was thinking, “Yeah, this guy is going to make fun of the president by falling over while I gurgle Bold and Hearty Chex Mix in a ‘Fuck Bush’ T-Shirt and spit at a microphone,” but my mind got cracked in half and the bats came out! All human history, in America, for the last like 30 years, strictly limited to media culture involving Chevy Chase became clear: there is a model based off of Chevy Chase (that he himself followed created by the work of his predecessors).

SNL was sort of a media hijack. A smart, normative minded, group of talented young people getting together with the help of some investors and occupying a newly accessible medium squatter style, debatably making the world a better place. The political rhetoric was implied for national TV and rudimentary humor was used as the numbers and the implied premise as the formula to get the math answer which is: the total bridge between ‘”fuck this” and “fuck you” in American political media.

Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert definitely stepped up to the plate (and kept me from thinking I was completely insane for high school/college), but the model we see now is shaped by Chevy Chase. Somewhere in between then and now, a corporate whore gave birth to Chase’s ideological love-child as a Bart Simpson doll in a small town K-mart, but playing the social deviant card in American culture TOTALLY isn’t dead. I mean, look at Mike Huckabee: he can try to run for president, play the funky bass, and be a talking head on Fox News but its serious instead of funny like Chevy Chase, and that’s what “ethos” mean in 2009.

However, Chevy Chase is different from Huckabee in the sense that he doesn’t insult my intelligence as a sentient being. This dude can shred: Chase utilized the essence of the social deviant model and expressed its particular as a slick political satirist with serious ideological undertones, who used rudimentary humor to convey an important message in the late 70’s on national television: the coming of the Reaganites. I wonder what this looks like in 2009? Probably the opposite of fat and happy, whatever that means. So stay bad America, you look good in leather.

Reading fucking sucks,

Daniel Pujol

Nov. 2009

More SHREDITORIAL coming soon.