Norm Macdonald wasn’t for everyone. Armed with a deadpan delivery, devil-may-care attitude and cracker-barrel charm, the Canadian comic got his start writing for “Roseanne” before earning acclaim as the host of SNL’s Weekend Update, where his unrelenting ridicule of O.J. Simpson for being an alleged murderer — Macdonald was adamant that it wasn’t so “alleged” — eventually got him canned from the show. His one big shot at movie stardom, the Bob Saget-helmed 1998 comedy film “Dirty Work,” bombed spectacularly, and he subsequently presided over the quietly uproarious video podcast “Norm Macdonald Live” before dying from complications from leukemia in 2021 at the age of 61. Perhaps his old pal Larry King said it best, calling Macdonald, “One of the most respected comedians today, though show business has never found a place to put him.”
In the handful of years since his death, however, Macdonald has blossomed into an internet darling, as new generations of comedy enthusiasts stumble upon his hilariously awkward late-night appearances — particularly on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” — Weekend Update segments and podcast clips. Nobody did it like Macdonald, whose downright desiccated sense of humor is sorely absent in today’s doing-too-much comedy landscape. This new cultural appreciation for Macdonald is celebrated in “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald,” a new documentary from Judd Apatow that premieres Friday on Netflix. Apatow’s loving tribute to his late pal contains no talking heads or any of the other conventions of these types of docs; rather, it explores the comedy giant’s life in Macdonald’s own words, largely borrowed from the narration of his absurdist biographical book “Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir,” as well as home videos, photos and archival interviews.
Here are five big takeaways from “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald.”
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The Weekend Update Secret Sauce
Image Credit: ©NBC/Courtesy Everett Collection Next to Chevy Chase, Macdonald is regarded as the greatest Weekend Update host in “Saturday Night Live” history. And in the documentary, he gives a lot of credit to Lori Jo Hoekstra, his longtime collaborator who produced his stand-up specials and oversaw Weekend Update during his tenure. It was Hoekstra, he says, who wanted to make their Weekend Update different from the rest of SNL by hiring a team of outside writers, including Ross Abrash and Frank Sebastiano (who joined Macdonald’s creative partner, the legendary SNL writer Jim Downey), and having its own separate comedy identity. “Lori Jo [Hoekstra] then suggested we hire outside writers so Weekend Update would have a completely different flavor from the rest of SNL,” Macdonald recalls in the doc. “We all agreed that the jokes should be stripped of any cleverness, play on words or innuendo… A joke should catch people by surprise. It should never pander. Applause is voluntary, but laughter is involuntary.”
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His SNL Firing by Don Ohlmeyer
Image Credit: ©NBC/Courtesy Everett Collection “If I am remembered, it will always be by the four years I spent at ‘Saturday Night Live’ — and maybe even more than that, by the events surrounding my departure from that show,” Macdonald admits in the film. And yes, the circumstances of his SNL departure have become an indispensable part of Macdonald’s lore. As the story goes, in the ‘90s, Macdonald, Downey and the Weekend Update team went hard at O.J. Simpson during his murder trial. “O.J. Simpson’s lawyers say they don’t want the families of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman in the courtroom during the trial. They’re afraid the presence of the family members will just remind O.J. of how much killing he still has to do,” Macdonald quipped on Update. When Simpson was acquitted of the murders, Macdonald declared on the show: “Well, it is finally official: Murder is legal in the state of California.”
But Simpson was best friends with then-president of NBC West Coast, the late Don Ohlmeyer, who supposedly became so incensed by Macdonald’s mockery of his controversial buddy that he fired both Macdonald and Downey (Downey was later rehired in 2000) over the jokes, with Macdonald saying that Ohlmeyer called him up personally and told him he was being fired because he wasn’t funny. Ohlmeyer’s vendetta against Macdonald didn’t end there. He later tried to ban NBC from airing promos for Macdonald’s film “Dirty Work” (he lost that battle) and tried to force Conan O’Brien to stop booking Macdonald as a guest on “Late Night” (O’Brien pushed back and Ohlmeyer lost that battle, too).
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Concealing His Cancer Diagnosis
Image Credit: COURTESY OF NETFLIX One of Macdonald’s oldest friends, comedian Harland Williams, reveal in the film via interview clips that the comic quietly battled stomach cancer in the 1980s. In 2013, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and only told his family, agent and ex-wife, choosing to hide it from the public and even his closest friends. He was prescribed dexamethasone, causing him to gain considerable weight. “I was always taught that the nature of art was to conceal, not to reveal. What they do now is ‘confessional comedy,’ but when people confess things and they’re told how brave they are, because they have cancer or something and they talk about it, well, everyone has cancer. It’s not rare at all. The brave thing to do if you have cancer is to not talk about it,” Macdonald says in the doc.
He was inspired to keep his cancer private by Richard Farnsworth, the journeyman actor who, after battling terminal cancer in secret, took his own life with a gun in October of 2000. “I remember Richard Farnsworth was an old character actor and he did a David Lynch movie called ‘The Straight Story.’ It was based on a guy who, in actual real life, drove his riding lawnmower across the state to visit his brother, who was dying. It was Richard Farnsworth’s last movie,” Macdonald explains. “He was very frail, riddled with cancer. So anyways, the point of it is, Richard Farnsworth was nominated for an Academy Award for the movie, and if he’d said he was filled with cancer, he would’ve won, for sure. But instead, he didn’t say it. In fact, no one knew it; he kept it from everyone. He didn’t want to cause people distress, so I thought, ‘Wow, how incredible to go through it alone.’”
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The #MeToo Movement
Image Credit: Getty Images Like many comedians of his era, Macdonald did not have a spotless track record, and the uproar over his comments about the #MeToo movement are briefly explored in the doc. On Sept. 18, 2021, Macdonald conducted an interview with The Hollywood Reporter where he defended pals Louis C.K. and Roseanne, and admitted he was grateful that the #MeToo movement had “slowed down a little bit,” adding, “There are very few people that have gone through what they have, losing everything in a day. Of course, people will go, ‘What about the victims?’ But you know what? The victims didn’t have to go through that.” (He later apologized on Twitter.) Macdonald, who was promoting his David Letterman-produced Netflix talk show “Norm Macdonald Has a Show,” subsequently had his “Tonight Show” appearance canceled and received considerable backlash online and in the media. Two weeks after his much-derided comments, The Daily Beast published a report detailing Macdonald’s alleged history of sexual harassment and the measures comedy clubs needed to take to protect women from him, which is absent from the doc.
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On Death
Image Credit: Netflix One of Macdonald’s quotes that really stuck with me from “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald” dealt with death — something the comedian stared directly in the face over the final years of his life while battling cancer. “Death is a funny thing — not funny ha-ha like a Woody Allen movie, but funny-strange like a Woody Allen marriage. When it’s unexpected, death comes fast like a ravenous wolf; when it’s expected, it comes slow and patient like a snake,” he offers. “The doctor tells you how far away it is, and when exactly it will be at your door, and when it will be at the foot of your bed, and when it will be on your flesh. It’s all right there on their clipboards… I have a theory that people are in deep denial about death, and I’m not.”
