Today marks the 69th birthday of the great Chevy Chase, if not the most critically-acclaimed actor in the world, certainly among the most quotable character actors ever. “Don’t sell yourself short Judge, you’re a tremendous slouch,” was one of a million iconic lines from Chase’s Ty Webb in Caddyshack.
And, there aren’t a lot of 30+ year old guys out there who haven’t repeated Chase’s classic Fletch lines, “It’s all ball-bearings now-a-days” or “Put it on the Underhill tab,” at least once or twice. And with three Vacation movies under his belt (no, we don’t recognize the Vegas abomination), “Look kids! Big Ben, Parliament,” is one of countless quoted lines from Chase’s Clark Griswold.
Anyway, after a heated debate in our office today about Chase’s best movie role, we remembered that we know somebody who does rapid-turn-around polling. So we polled 2,212 people this afternoon and asked them. Here are the results:
It wasn’t even close. Given the time of day we asked, the results needed to be reweighted to represent the full US population but not by much. Clark Griswold won handily across every demographic group. The only correlation we saw at all, in fact, was that men were just slightly more likely to vote for Ty Webb, while women were slightly more likely to say No Strong Opinion.