In Norm: The Tale Of Norm Macdonald, directorJudd Apatow lovingly identifies and helps to explain the moment that, for many, wound up defining the former Saturday Night Live comedian’s career. A thoughtful and affectionate tribute for the late cult favorite, Norm presents Macdonald’s firing from SNL as the key to understanding his relationship with his audience. Apatow makes his case using a wealth of archival quotes from Macdonald, including his guest appearances on late-night talk shows and Macdonald’s own video podcast series Norm Macdonald Live.
In these sometimes candid and often puckishly misleading clips, Macdonald struggles to redefine himself after he was fired by NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer in 1997 for relentlessly joking that ex-football player O.J. Simpson murdered his wife and her friend Ron Goldman as the anchor of SNL‘s Weekend Update. Over the film, we also get a clearer understanding of Macdonald’s style of humor, which treated listeners like unwitting accessories, whether he was delivering a rambling shaggy-dog routine, like his now-signature moth joke, or an interminably anti-climactic speech, as in his appearance on Bob Saget’s Comedy Central Roast episode.
In Norm, Macdonald says that he preferred to define himself as a stand-up comedian rather than by his four years on SNL. At the same time, his earliest and arguably most formative successes on that show evince the same qualities that made him a great stand-up, like his deadpan delivery and rope-a-dope comic timing. Apatow’s observant and detailed collage suggests that Macdonald’s unruly and confrontational style of humor treated both his colleagues and his audience like they were essential parts of his act. Macdonald was also king of understated overkill and vicious running jokes, so it’s no surprise that many fans associate him with his persistent jabs at Sylvester Stallone’s brutally uncharismatic brother Frank as well as his ongoing and, in hindsight, reckless cracks about Simpson’s guilt.
Then again, that kind of smartass risk-taking was always part of Macdonald’s act, as Apatow successfully argues. Several fellow comedians praise Macdonald for being “disciplined” and refusing to chase what they consider to be easy laughs. Conan O’Brien even paraphrases his own wingman Andy Richter when he says that Macdonald “doesn’t care in a way that frightens me.” That seeming fearlessness is also what drew SNL writer Jim Downey to Macdonald in the first place and convinced Downey that Macdonald would be a perfect fit to host Weekend Update.
But what really made Macdonald’s O.J. jokes uniquely his, as well as the way that he subsequently drew attention to his firing by Ohlmeyer, was a matter of style. Macdonald was playfully elusive and sometimes combatively impersonal, so it’s unsurprising that he relished in pushing the envelope of bad taste well past acceptable limits with jokes about Simpson’s apparent guilt. Macdonald even continued joking about Simpson’s guilt after his acquittal, quipping dryly on Weekend Update that murder is now legal in the state of California. Downey says that SNL creator Lorne Michaels used to object to these jokes on behalf of both Ohlmeyer and Simpson. Those complaints obviously didn’t stop Macdonald and, in fact, seemed to energize him.
Apatow also points out how quick Macdonald’s colleagues were to defend him after Ohlmeyer let him go. In an excerpted clip from The Late Show, Macdonald told David Letterman that his main point of contact with Ohlmeyer was a phone conversation where Ohlmeyer bluntly told Macdonald that he didn’t think he was funny. Letterman also perfectly complements Macdonald’s tone when he says, in a mock aside, that, “Ohlmeyer, who, between you and me, is an idiot.” Between you and me and the millions of viewers at home, of course.
Apatow suggests that his prickly subject was more in control of these post-firing interviews than he let on. He pointedly quotes Macdonald, from an interview with Larry King, where the comedian hastily notes that, “I said nothing against Don Ohlmeyer after being fired. Not one thing.” In the next clip, Apatow shows Macdonald ostensibly defending Ohlmeyer as a “troubled man” by suggesting that the media mogul had a reputation for being a heavy drinker and a sex pest.
Eventually, Ohlmeyer’s name became synonymous with Macdonald’s firing, to the point where, as Apatow reminds us, the Hollywood Reporter obituary for Ohlmeyer ran a subheadline that claimed the NBC West Coast president was “also known for firing Norm Macdonald from ‘SNL.'” The stickiness of that association isn’t surprising, given how frequently Macdonald not only named and shamed Ohlmeyer, but also paraphrased his ex-boss’ snide remark about Macdonald being unfunny. Apatow suggests that this calculated repetition was always part of Macdonald’s act when, in an early scene, Macdonald recalls his own father’s habit of repeating a joke to a captive audience, just because it would land twice as hard the second time around. This same spirit made audiences feel like they were in on the bit whenever Macdonald endlessly repeated running gags, like when he told interviewer after interviewer that he was a deeply closeted gay man, but would never admit to it.
But this approach, Apatow argues, also stems from something deeper. Apatow quotes Macdonald in an early scene about his addiction to sports gambling, particularly the invigorating moment between placing a bet and seeing its result. In voiceover, Macdonald reads from his own novel, Based On A True Story: Not A Memoir: “It is when the dice are in the air, and as long as they are there, time stops. As long as the red dice are in the air, the gambler has hope. And hope is a wonderful thing to be addicted to.” This indirectly explains why Macdonald couldn’t help making an O.J. Simpson joke in 1998 when he was invited to host the ESPY Awards.
Macdonald couldn’t have known the response he’d get from Heisman-winning football player Charles Woodson when he joked that Woodson’s prize is something that “they can never take away from you. Unless you kill your wife and a waiter, in which case…” Apatow includes a reaction shot of a mortified Woodson, which remains funny for the same reason that, in a successive montage, O’Brien’s helpless laughter at Macdonald’s button-pushing jokes is a key part of Macdonald’s bits. Macdonald turned his anxious listeners into essential proofs of his patience-testing humor.
In the wake of his firing, Macdonald enjoyed moments of mainstream resurgence, including star vehicles like cult comedy Dirty Work and his short-lived sitcom The Norm Show, but all the bridge-burning led Macdonald to what he jokingly referred to as a major demotion in stature: hosting a podcast. But Macdonald also joked about this indignity, like with a running bit about losing the sponsorship of the ManGrate brand of cast-iron grills, whose products Macdonald couldn’t stop himself from laughing at.
Macdonald continued to thrive even with a notably reduced audience, and Apatow exhibits a keen understanding as to why. He points out how Macdonald treated anyone who either interviewed or was interviewed by him like a comic foil. That was always a calculated gamble, but it often paid off in the unfiltered responses he got from seasoned talk show hosts, who he treated like straight men in an unrehearsed comedy duo. Macdonald seemed most at ease on talk shows because his ingratiating and knowing hosts often gave him license to play the kind of pseudo-naïve troublemaker that his fans came to idolize.
Unfortunately, it became harder to appreciate Macdonald’s bulldozer fearlessness when he committed the same blithe sin of favoritism that Ohlmeyer did when he fired Macdonald. It’s one thing to condemn Ohlmeyer for protecting his buddy Simpson and another to insist that “we should be more forgiving” about Macdonald’s pals Roseanne Barr and Louis C.K. To his credit, Apatow doesn’t ignore that wrongheaded episode, nor Macdonald’s series of self-mortifying, backpedaling apologies, many of which only make him look more lost and confounded by public backlash. It’s all the more mortifying to see the comic in this state after he spent so much time singling out Ohlmeyer for defending his own infamous friend.
In this sense, Norm both does and doesn’t satisfy as an apology for Macdonald. Apatow seems to agree with Macdonald’s pleas for tolerance when he shows Macdonald asking Barr about her mental health struggles. And Apatow also predictably takes more time to highlight what Ohlmeyer did in service of Simpson, like how Ohlmeyer continued to punish Macdonald even after his firing by refusing to pay for newspaper ads to promote Dirty Work. Macdonald isn’t held to such high standards; for example, there’s nothing in Norm about Macdonald’s other MeToo apologia, like his comments about Nerdist founder Chris Hardwick.
On the other hand, Norm convincingly presents Macdonald as a comedian whose biggest misstep was not caring enough about who he made fun of, or how he ingratiated himself to his audience. Some mistakenly assumed that Macdonald’s “Weekend Update” persona was his style, based on his frequently critical tone and propensity for flirting with provocative subjects. But as Apatow points out, Macdonald didn’t want to be known for being mean. He says as much in an excerpted conversation with O’Brien, revealing that he regrets making fun of the 1997 Carrot Top vehicle Chairman Of The Board: “I never got into comedy to hurt anyone’s feelings.”
In this case—when Macdonald breaks Carrot Top’s co-star Courtney Thorne-Smith while on the same episode of O’Brien’s show—the subject of Macdonald’s jokes at least gets to agree that the context of Macdonald’s humor does make a difference. These jokes were obviously his characteristic way of turning Thorne-Smith into his unwitting, but clearly game comedy partner. Apatow also shows Carrot Top saying, on a podcast interview, that he didn’t take it personally since “we’re comics” and also “it was a fucking joke, and it was funny.” Norm effectively argues that, in order to fully appreciate or simply understand Macdonald’s sensibility, you have to appreciate that even his most pointed and critical jokes were all in good fun.
Maybe that’s why Macdonald preferred to be known as a stand-up than for his time on SNL, since that became the ultimate proof that he could still bust up anybody, in any room. After all, when you’re a stand-up, the response you get is immediate, so when the response is good and you’re on a roll, you don’t have to wonder if you’re funny or not. That said, by focusing so much on how Macdonald’s style implicitly relied on his rapport with his audience, Apatow also inadvertently relates why Macdonald will likely always be most fondly remembered for what might have been if he had let up on Simpson. But then, that just wouldn’t have been a very Norm Macdonald thing to do.
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