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Humor & Life Quote by Chevy Chase

"I made about 28 movies, and I think about five of them were good"

About this Quote

Self-deprecation is Chevy Chase's home turf, and this line plays it like a familiar riff: casually brutal, perfectly timed, and just arrogant enough to land. On paper it's a confession of mediocrity. In performance, it's a flex. Only someone with real cultural saturation can joke about a career tally like an accountant and still sound breezily unbothered.

The specific intent is to puncture the usual celebrity mythology - the forced gratitude, the legacy-curation, the insistence that every project was a passion. Chase instead offers a comedian's version of honesty: the laugh comes from the mismatch between the staggering volume (28 movies) and the bluntly low batting average (five). It's an anti-awards-speech, a refusal to pretend Hollywood is a meritocracy where the best work reliably rises. It also slyly reframes success as survival: he kept getting hired, which in the studio system is its own kind of achievement, even when the output is uneven.

The subtext carries a second, sharper edge: Chase is also authorizing the audience's mixed feelings. If you loved Fletch or National Lampoon's Vacation but have blank spots or regrets in the filmography, he's already there with you, beating you to the critique. That preemptive honesty doubles as control - he narrates his own decline, so no one else gets the definitive takedown.

Context matters: Chase's persona has long been built on a patrician cool that curdles into irritability, and his post-SNL career is a case study in how lightning-in-a-bottle charisma can outlast the scripts that try to bottle it. The joke lands because it admits the math without surrendering the legend.

Quote Details

TopicMovie
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Chase, Chevy. (n.d.). I made about 28 movies, and I think about five of them were good. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-made-about-28-movies-and-i-think-about-five-of-46653/

Chicago Style
Chase, Chevy. "I made about 28 movies, and I think about five of them were good." FixQuotes. Accessed February 1, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-made-about-28-movies-and-i-think-about-five-of-46653/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I made about 28 movies, and I think about five of them were good." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-made-about-28-movies-and-i-think-about-five-of-46653/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Chevy Chase (born October 8, 1943) is a Comedian from USA.

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