Joel McHale recalls dislocating Chevy Chase’s shoulder during one of many on-set Community fights

Water is wet, the sky is blue, and Chevy Chase and Joel McHale can’t stand each other. McHale has given his ex-Community co-star a degree of grace over the years, but he’s always been quite frank about his terrible experiences with the comedy legend, including committing Chase’s terrible behavior to the annals of history in his 2016 memoir Thanks For The Money. As McHale recently reminded the world on Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside Of You podcast, one section serves as a “step-by-step on how to fight Chevy Chase.”

The duo had “multiple” physical fights, which McHale described as “advanced horseplay”: “You know, horseplay, and then it always turned into sex,” he joked on the podcast. “It wasn’t fun.” The Animal Control star admitted, “It would get a little contentious. It would get to this point where I’m like, ‘Okay…’ I got in trouble one time because I injured him. I dislocated his shoulder.”

As McHale pointed out, he has not been shy about this story. As far back as 2012—when they were still working together!—he had owned up to the story on The Late Show With David Letterman. And of course, he recounted it in his memoir (via The New York Daily News), where he explained that Chase was frequently trying to mock-fight him and was goading McHale to hit him harder before McHale dislocated the older actor’s shoulder. In the book, McHale speculated that Chase had a hard time with the fact that McHale’s character, Jeff, was “the classic ‘Chevy Chase’ role.” He also shared some of the strange and upsetting outbursts Chase would have on set, from proclaiming that he could “still get erections” to telling an actress “I want to kill you and then rape you.” (McHale granted that the latter may have been a joke, “but everything he said had a weird sense of menace.”) That’s to say nothing of the racial slur that eventually led to Chase parting ways with the series.

The last time McHale spoke about Chase on Rosenbaum’s podcast, he was slightly more diplomatic about Chase’s departure, allowing that Chase had trouble with the long hours of the sitcom. But since then, Chase has been talking a lot of shit, including telling Marc Maron that Community wasn’t “funny enough” for him and that he “didn’t want to be surrounded by that table, every day, with those people.” If there were ever gloves on for McHale—and there weren’t really, the guy dislocated Chase’s shoulder—the gloves have definitely come off.

“My response to that was, well, yeah the feeling is mutual about your attitude, and you didn’t have to be there,” McHale told Rosenbaum of Chase’s comments on WTF. (McHale previously told People that Chase “stopped hurting my feelings in 2009.”) “He’s like, ‘I didn’t want to be around the table with those people.’ And like Gillian [Jacobs] would say, ‘Feeling’s mutual.’ This was not a prison sentence. We were not conscripted into a war. You were being paid a lot of money and getting free food all day long, so you could just walk away.”