Stand-up comedians have always had a respect for what they like to call a “comedian” – a fellow comedian who works with such purity and daring, diving headfirst into the gnarly. metaphysical of comedy, that the comics end up loving it more than the public. (He’s the cult band’s equivalent of cool, stand-up indie-rock.) Gilbert Gottfried was a comic strip comedian. The same goes for Larry David, Doug Stanhope and Maria Bamford. And Norm Macdonald was one too, except when you watch Judd Apatow’s juicy, haunting documentary “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald,” you realize there was something special about him. It was a comic strip…that everyone loved too.
As the film shows, Macdonald’s credentials as a comic were unassailable. We see his very first appearance on television on May 9, 1990, on “Late Night with David Letterman”, where he talked about the devil ordering someone to kill his family, cutting them into pieces and putting the pieces in a duffel bag. (Then the killer learns that the devil is a friend who was joking.) He speaks with that familiar hesitant deadpan; he already knows how to get the audience in his head.
On “Saturday Night Live,” where Macdonald, starting in 1993, spent four seasons as one of Weekend Update’s all-time greatest hosts, he returned, again and again, with a frankly obsessive fixation that could not be denied, about OJ Simpson, and the fact that Simpson had murdered his wife. Why was it funny? Because every time Macdonald made a joke of it, his assertion of OJ’s guilt was a way of tapping into the shocking unreality of the situation. Each of his jokes about OJ had the effect of a dizzying slap. He didn’t back down, and it ended up getting him fired from “Saturday Night Live” (Don Ohlmeyer, the president of NBC’s West Coast division who was responsible for Macdonald’s firing, was OJ Simpson’s best friend). NOW It is It’s a comical thing for a comic to do.
On “SNL,” and in his legendary litany of late-night talk show appearances, and in his stand-up routines, Norm Macdonald had an oxymoronic quality – a slightly disconnected aggressiveness, where he focused on one topic and one joke, which he knew would be piquant, and which might make him “over the line,” but he couldn’t help it. He had to say mean things, to let the forbidden slip away. Telling this joke would be a catharsis; it would be a comedy. Not saying it would be a defeat.
At times he had a touch of Andy Kaufman-style antisocial hostility, as if comedy was his way of testing himself and the audience, to see what and if they would accept. him. One strange thing that emerges from “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald” is that Macdonald was a compulsive liar, both in his stand-up act and in his life, the two planes of existence sometimes intertwined around the same deception. That’s part of why he always seemed like a bit of a space cadet. You could never really tell if he meant what he said. We learn that he never went to high school…and also that he did (and graduated at age 14)…that he never went to college…but that he did that too. On the eve of the pandemic, he described himself to the public as “a young 68-year-old” (he was 60 at the time). He also describes himself, to Larry King, as “deeply closeted”, and when King asks him if this means he comes out as gay, he replies no, he is straight… and then indicates that pretending to be straight is an expression of his closetedness. You can hear Andy Kaufman laughing in his theater of the absurd paradise.
Yet the thing about Norm Macdonald was that he executed it all with a smiling charm and seductive agreeability that made him irresistible to a wide range of fans. He wasn’t a prickly punk – more of a transgressive teddy bear. Early on, including in the “SNL” years that made him famous, he was quite handsome, with a thin face, twinkling, dimpled eyes, a mop of curly hair and a killer smile that made him look like Paul Newman’s slightly awkward cousin. Fifteen years before Norm Macdonald, Chevy Chase had been the first superstar of “Saturday Night Live,” turning his own Weekend Update quirk into big-screen stardom, and he accomplished this not because he was a great actor but because he had a sublime detachment coupled with a great preppie good looks that he used ironically. Her beauty was part of the joke, just as she was the cushion.
Macdonald, however, did not use his appearance in this way; they just sort of existed alongside the brawling side of his comedy. And so when he was kicked off “SNL,” he acted like he’d been thrown off a cliff. He was still present in the culture, but he was floundering, and that, as the documentary shows, had to do with his strange, slippery personality: his compulsive sincerity (which meant he didn’t really know how to present himself), his compulsive artifice (which meant he was actually afraid to show who he was), his compulsive insecurity (which meant he didn’t really believe in himself as a star), mixed with an element of self-sabotage (his way of confirming all these anxieties about himself).
After all that, “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald” is rooted in what a beloved comedian Norm MacDonald was and still is. In the opening montage, several people, such as Howard Stern, refer to the rabbit hole that you can enter simply by going to YouTube and watching clips of Macdonald on late night talk shows. He had countless appearances that were gems, as he always invested his talk show time with a spark of danger. He couldn’t just be a straight shooter, but he had to make his set-ups look real. At times he was as philosophical as Lenny Bruce – but Bruce only talked about religion to make fun of it, while Macdonald, at one point, reveals that he is a Christian who is a true believer. (This is a man who would introduce his sidekick as someone who wanked punks for $15 under a bridge.) It’s all part of his mystery.
The film is peppered with clips of Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Conan O’Brien and Dave Chappelle, and Apatow, working with editor Jake Hostetter, stitches the comedy bits together in a haunting way, so that we feel the underground sprawl of Macdonald’s career. He might be a great impressionist (his Bob Dole on “SNL” may have helped overturn the 1996 presidential election; his Quentin Tarantino was inspired). He continued to do stand-up, but didn’t need the comedy scene to be great; Just talking to Jane Fonda on her video podcast, “Norm Macdonald Live,” he was incredibly funny. We see his appearance change a bit over the years, as he evolves into a more pumped-up version of himself, which happened in part because he spent his last nine years secretly battling leukemia. (He died in 2021.) Yet audiences stuck with him — at least more so than the entertainment industry.
Macdonald wasn’t the first “incorrect” comedian to run afoul of the comedy police, but he felt like the first such comedian of a certain era (namely ours). He should have had his own late-night talk show, but when he found out he was up for one — and that he’d been ignored by yuppie idiot Craig Kilborn — it was a sign that his comedy was ruffling feathers. At the same time, he cultivated inaccuracy in a way that could be nonsensical. When he went on “The View” and said Bill Clinton was guilty of “murder,” he claimed he was only doing a little bit, but because that “bit” fueled right-wing conspiracy theory, it seemed like an episode of sour derangement. And when he defended Roseanne Barr, after her racist tweet in 2018, he did so out of loyalty (one of his first gigs was as a writer for “Roseanne”), but in a tone-deaf way, as if what she said in her tweet was a trivial joke. (It wasn’t; it was blatantly obvious.) All of this fueled the perfect shit storm that was The Decline of Norm Macdonald.
We pretend that comedy is just a pleasure, a means to an end – the end being to make you laugh. But the few people chosen to be “comic comics” occupy this rarefied stratosphere because they know that comedy is more than laughter, and that laughter is more than we give it credit for. You laugh for many reasons, but one of those reasons might be when an idea pops into your head like a little explosion. This is why comedy can tickle your soul, bring you back to life, purify you. And that’s the kind of comedian Norm Macdonald was. It had an evil glow, but it caused a laugh that set you on fire and lifted you up, landing you on the side of the angels.
Gn entert
