Chevy Chase revealed the origin of his catchphase from his days as Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" anchor on Reddit yesterday. Someone posted a snazzy photo from Chase from the 1970s to the OldSchoolCool subreddit, and the first person to comment wrote, "I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not."
Either Chase has a Google alert for his name or he just loves Reddit, because a few hours later, he replied to the thread and told the story about how he came up with that phrase, and why it doesn't make him a bad guy:
“And you’re not” was derived from a Chanel 5 NY news commentator named Roger Grimsby, who would open his news cast with “Good evening, I’m Roger Grimsby, and here now the news.” I found it to be the strangest phrasing I’d ever heard and I never forgot it. Thusly, I said it totally spontaneously with that phrasing somewhere in the back of my mind. It was missread by the audience as a conceit and a take-off on various news anchormen. For some reason it got huge laughs and I stuck with it. But ultimately, I don’t think I said it more than three or four times.
Relax, Chevy! Your fans still loves you.