Name: Chuck Norris Embarrassed Steve McQueen | David Letterman
Uploaded: 2025-03-10T15:01:09.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Chuck Norris Embarrassed Steve McQueen | David Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-03-10. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Chuck Norris Embarrassed Steve McQueen | David Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-03-10. Transcript available.

you've had a career that people might consider as the american dream don't you
think i yeah i think
so yeah it turned out very well for you what were you like as a kid were you a
tough guy
were you a punk were you a rowdy troublemaker very quiet and shy yeah extremely
extreme then
then how did you become interested in martial arts did you have trouble were
you pushed around and
stuff were you bullied no actually when i went in the service and i went to korea
that's when i got
exposed to for the first time when i went to korea i only heard of judo so i
jumped into a judo
class in base in the second week in the training i broke my shoulder so in the
class in the class yeah
so i'm walking out in the village a couple days later just sightseeing as i'm
walking through the
village i look i'm kind of a knoll and i see these heads popping up i look up i
wonder what's going
on up there so i walk up in the knoll here's these koreans jumping up in the
air doing these fantastic
kicks and i was mesmerized by their ability but i but they look mean so i was
afraid to go over and
talk to them so i went back to the base and that's my judo instructor what it
was he said he told me it's
called tongsudo now called taekwondo yeah now what's the difference there's a
lot of these disciplines
judo is is what essentially judo is like wrestling it's grabbing and throwing
each other um taekwondo
taekwondo is the korean word for karate karate is a japanese word then kung fu
is a chinese word
so each one has their own name uh so but it's essentially it's those three and
they're all
kind of a mixture of each other yeah then they're all offshoots from there and
what is golf what is that
idea i know nothing about that one and uh you you know you were recently at the
white house yeah last
thursday yeah now how did that happen did did you were you angling for an
invitation or did it just in
the mail one day come to the white house no i was here in new york on my book
tour and i got a call
saying i'd been invited to the white house thursday now were you surprised by
that shocked more than more
than surprised i was shocked and anyway so i my wife who was the dinner for i
hate to keep interrupting
here the egyptian president and they put together just a group of uh of uh
interesting americans
to to attend these functions i guess is that how that works yeah it was a con
from everyone you know
everyone business mostly business people there wasn't too many politicians
there i sat at the table
george schultz my set my wife said with uh george bush and it was funny because
george bush is a
these little fib bowls you know water things where you put your fingers in to
wash you had a little
plant in there and so george bush says well this is uh some some plant my wife
says no it's a petunia
george right george says no it isn't diane it's a whatever you call it she says
no let's say it's a
petunia yeah he says why are you doing this he says i just want to argue with
you he says look haven't
i argued enough with dan rather this week and she says look if you'll say it's
a petunia i'll vote for
you yeah did you uh uh did you get a sense that these people actually knew who
you were did you get the
feeling that ronald reagan uh has seen your films and stuff i don't i don't i
don't think he has
i don't think well didn't you feel kind of silly being there then
well i'll tell you silly yeah i see i would feel i would feel like a complete
jerk if i get an
invitation in the mail and it says uh nancy and i would like you to come and
have dinner with us now
i know for a fact the guy has never seen this show so i'm sitting there and you
know he doesn't he
thinks i don't know espn or something well i don't truthfully i don't even know
why why i got invited
you know my i called my wife up in the caribbean i said look we've been invited
to the white house
right and so meet me in dc and uh why they invited me i don't even know what
was the what'd you have to
eat we had veal yeah and what like a big eight course meal or something oh yeah
you know i was
watching to figure out which fork and all this you know it's real fancy kind of
thing and so i'm
watching who cut the president's meat
but did you get to talk to ronald reagan yeah i got yeah in fact i was doing
the larry king show that
night so i had to leave early and so as we're getting ready to leave they said
the president would
like to see you so i tracked it over there and met with him what was the
exchange just just uh
in thanking me for coming and i said thank you it's nice to be here yeah yeah
well that's interesting
i mean it certainly is an experience isn't it oh it's a tremendous experience a
long time ago you
were on our morning show that's right was that uh before you were in films or
were you doing films
i was doing films i just started my career yeah what did you do before you got
into the films because
you didn't really set out to be an actor no i had karate schools what got me
into films uh i had sold
my schools to a conglomerate with the expectations of going national and it
didn't work out that way
and we went broke and so i lost all my schools so i was teaching private
lessons to supplement you know
to pay for my bills this is in southern california and steve mcqueen was one of
my students and he
said well what are you going to do now that you uh don't have any karate
schools anymore i said i don't
know he says what have you thought about acting i said man i haven't done a
high school play
and he said uh well acting is more than just having experiences as an actor's
presence and he says i
don't know if you have it or not but you should give it a try and i said well
what do i do he said
we take acting classes so i called up the acting schools and they're expensive
you know they run
five or six hundred bucks a month and i didn't have any money so i started
looking through the yellow
pages and i found an acting school i could go on my gi bill so that's how i
started no kidding
yeah what what kind of guy was steve mcqueen he was a great guy he was uh
actually what you
saw on the screen was kind of his persona yeah you know he was great he talked
about presence
he had he had that presence he really did you know we did uh was he a hard guy
was he was he
a tough guy i mean or i gotta tell you a funny story about him you know he was
married to alec
mcgraw when i was teaching him and uh and steve was real stiff he was real
tight and so alex
said why don't you guys come to my uh stretching class she had she went to a
stretching class in
beverly hills and oh so we decided to go down i love these stories a stretching
class in beverly hills
so so we so we go down there and here's susan people here in new york are
eating tires for
lunch and in beverly hills they got stretching classes so we go in there here's
susan day and
shirley jones and uh ali mcgraw and this guy instructor walks up with two
little skimpy little
things about this big and he says put these on one was pink and one was blue
and i grabbed the blue one
so steve got the and there so we walk into a dressing room and he was like
these things you
know i mean that much and we put them on and steve says no way am i going out
like this i said look
steve go out there like we've been doing it for 10 years no one will notice so
he says okay so we
walk out of the room as he walks out i grab the door and i pull the door and i
hold it shut so he can
he's pulling on the door but i won't let him in so finally he walks out there
and i hear the women
laughing up the storm right they're laughing so after about two minutes it
finally subsided
so i walk out there and he's sitting down talking to them and he's giving me
the meanest look yeah
yeah that's funny uh he's one of he's uh he's one of those guys you you would
wish he was still
around because it would be interesting to see how he uh aged on screen you know
just what kind of a
character he would become because yeah he was he got tougher he was he was a
tough karate guy yeah
yeah he was one of the toughest students i worked out how many films you made
17. and these things do
huge business don't they pretty good yeah yeah like what was the the most money
you generated uh
probably missing in action one was my biggest how much dough uh domestically
probably around 40
million 40 million and what did well that's you know like compared to stallone's
it's not very much
but it's what did it cost to produce uh it cost about six million oh my that's
a pretty good return
there yeah uh for canon films not me yeah what was your first speaking part oh
i did a movie 1968
i did a film called the wrecking crew with dean martin i was still fighting i
just won the world title
and the producer of the dean martin matt helm series oh yeah was in the
audience and uh he walks up to me
said uh introduced himself said would you like to be in a dean martin movie i
go yeah you know i got
really excited so he says okay well come by and get a script so i get the
script and i got one line
and the scene is i'm i'm bodyguarding nigel green and elke summer and dean martin
walks into this bar
and as he's walking down the aisle i'm supposed to jump up in front of him say
may i mr helm it means
i want his gun so i start trying to figure out this line for two weeks i'm
saying how should i say this
should i say it cool or you know aggressive or whatever so the day of the shoot
cameras start
rolling he walks in all of a sudden i can feel my body tensing up and my neck
muscles starting to
tighten and just he walks up to me i jump i go man mr helm my voice tightened
up nothing came out
of course they could care less uh anyway uh you've done pretty well in spite of
that
uh the secret of inner strength this is your own story right here oh there's uh
ah get him chuck
go out go out there and drop him just like with a kick or something just go
ahead and kick him in
the don't don't kill him just like in the sternum just like like touch yeah
just bruise him up a
little bit um well dave i was on the show yeah i know you were on the show uh
anyway uh good
luck good to see you again chuck thanks for coming back we gotta pause here