Somewhere in the bowels of Reddit, in the OldSchoolCool Subreddit, someone posted an old photo of Chevy Chase looking sharp in what appears to be a magazine cover from the 1970s. The first commenter replied, “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not.”
Chevy Chase being the kind of guy who apparently trolls Reddit for mentions, took to the site a few hours later and explained the origins of the phrase he was once associated with as SNL‘s “Weekend Update” anchor.
“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.
Here’s a clip of the late Roger Grimsby uttering the inspirational phrase in a video about the Brooklyn Bridge that is very awkwardly edited so that the last phrase he says is, “Good evening, I’m Roger Grimsby, and here now the news. So far, nobody has jumped.”
Interestingly, for a phrase Chase only said no more than three or four times, “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not,” gained an awful lot of traction. It also happens to be the name of his biography.
Source: Reddit