I have this memory of watching some sort of action film on TV when I was a kid (1960s or 70s) starring Paul Newman where during a chase scene he suddenly breaks the fourth wall, looks at the camera, and says, “What? Me worry?”
I am guessing this was after Alfred E. Neuman’s motto was firmly entrenched, and was some kind of inside “I’m the OTHER Newman” joke.
Is this just a figment of my imagination or did it really happen?
Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie? It sounds like a Mel Brooks gag, and Paul Newman was in it (but it’s one I haven’t actually seen).
IIRC there was only one line in that movie, said by Marcel Marceau, a mime.
There was only one spoken line in Silent Movie, but there were lots of lines in title cards.
I found an issue of MAD Magazine where Nixon and Agnew are drawn on the cover as a parody of The Sting. Nixon takes Paul Newman’s place. It’s issue 171 from December, 1974.
I also found an article in The Austin Chronicle describing Bruce Willis’s Joe Blake in Bandits (2001) as being like a “What, me worry”-faced reimagining of Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).
Probably not what you’re looking for.
~Max