Stand-up comedians have always had a reverence for what they like to call a “comic’s comic” — a fellow comedian who works with such distilled purity and edge, diving head-first into the gnarly metaphysics of comedy, that the comics end up worshipping him more than the public does. (He’s the stand-up-comedy equivalent of an ultimate cool indie-rock cult band.) Gilbert Gottfried was a comic’s comic. So are Larry David and Doug Stanhope and Maria Bamford. And Norm Macdonald was one too, except that as you watch Judd Apatow’s juicy and haunting documentary “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald,” you realize that there was a special thing about him. He was a comic’s comic…who everyone else loved too.
As the movie demonstrates, Macdonald’s credentials as a comic’s comic were unassailable. We see his very first network television appearance on May 9, 1990, on “Late Night with David Letterman,” where he did a bit about the devil commanding someone to kill his family and chop them into bits and stuff the pieces into a duffel bag. (Then the killer learns that the devil is a friend who was kidding.) He speaks in that familiar halting deadpan; he already knows how to draw the audience into his head.
On “Saturday Night Live,” where Macdonald, starting in 1993, spent four seasons as one of the all-time great hosts of Weekend Update, he returned, over and over, with a bluntly obsessive fixation that couldn’t be contained, to the subject of O.J. Simpson, and to the fact that Simpson had murdered his wife. Why was this funny? Because every time Macdonald made a joke of it, his assertion of O.J.’s guilt was a way of tapping back into the shocking unreality of it. His every O.J. joke had the effect of a giddy slap. He would not relent, and that wound up getting him fired from “Saturday Night Live” (Don Ohlmeyer, the president of NBC’s West Coast division who was responsible for axing Macdonald, was O.J. Simpson’s best friend). Now that’s a comic’s comic thing 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 aggression, where he would zero in on a topic, and a joke, that he knew would be prickly, and that might take him “over the line,” but he couldn’t help himself. He had to say the naughty thing, to blurt out the forbidden. Telling that joke would be a catharsis; it would be comedy. Not telling it would be defeat.
At times, he had a streak of Andy Kaufman’s antisocial hostility, as if comedy was his way of testing both himself and the audience, seeing what they would accept, and seeing if they would accept him. A strange thing that emerges in “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald” is that Macdonald was a compulsive liar, in both his stand-up act and his life, the two planes of existence sometimes entwined around the same deception. That’s part of why he always seemed a bit of a space cadet. You could never really tell whether he meant what he was saying. We learn that he never went to high school…and also that he did (and graduated when he was 14)…that he never went to college…but actually did as well. On the eve of the pandemic, he described himself to an audience as “a young 68” (he was 60 at the time). He also describes himself, to Larry King, as “deeply closeted,” and when King asks if that means he’s coming out as gay, he says no, he’s straight…and then indicates that claiming to be straight is an expression of how closeted he is. You can hear Andy Kaufman chortling in his theater-of-the-absurd heaven.
Yet the thing about Norm Macdonald is that he executed all this with a smiling charm and a winsome agreeability that made him irresistible to a wide swath of fans. He wasn’t a prickly punk — more like a transgressive Teddy bear. In the early days, including the “SNL” years that made him famous, he was quite handsome, with a lean face and twinkly eyes and dimples and a coif of curly hair and a killer grin that made him look like the slightly goofy cousin of Paul Newman. Fifteen years before Norm Macdonald, Chevy Chase had been the first break-out superstar of “Saturday Night Live,” transforming his own Weekend Update quizzicality into big-screen celebrity, and he accomplished this not because he was a great actor but because he had a sublime detachment coupled with tall preppie good looks that he used ironically. His handsomeness was part of the joke, as well as the cushion for it.
Macdonald, though, didn’t use his looks in that way; they just kind of existed alongside the bratty edge of his comedy. And so when he was booted from “SNL,” he acted like he’d been kicked off a cliff. He was still out there in the culture, but he floundered around, and this, as the documentary captures, was related to his strange and slippery personality: his compulsive sincerity (which meant that he didn’t quite know how to package himself), his compulsive put-ons (which meant that he was actually scared to show who he was), his compulsive insecurity (which meant that he didn’t truly believe in himself as a star), mixed with an element of self-sabotage (his way of confirming all those 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, like Howard Stern, reference the rabbit hole you can get into just by going onto YouTube and watching clips of Macdonald on late-night talk shows. He had countless appearances that were gems, because 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 put-ons feel real. At times, he was as philosophical as Lenny Bruce — but Bruce talked about religion only to mock it, whereas Macdonald, at one point, reveals that he’s a Christian who’s a true believer. (This is a man who would introduce his sidekick as someone who jerked off punks for $15 under a bridge.) It’s all part of his mystery.
The movie is spanked along by clips of Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Conan O’Brien, and Dave Chappelle, and Apatow, working with the editor Jake Hostetter, assembles the clips in an entrancing way, so that we feel the underground sprawl of Macdonald’s career. He could be a great impressionist (his Bob Dole on “SNL” may have helped turn the 1996 presidential election; his Quentin Tarantino was inspired). He kept doing stand-up, but didn’t require the comedy stage to be great; just talking to Jane Fonda on his video podcast, “Norm Macdonald Live,” he was insanely funny. We see his appearance change quite a bit over the years, as he evolves into a puffier version of himself, something that happened in part because he spent his last nine years secretly fighting leukemia. (He died in 2021.) Yet the audience stayed with him — at least, more than the entertainment industry did.
Macdonald wasn’t the first “incorrect” comedian to run afoul of the comedy police, but it felt like he was the first such comic of a certain day and age (namely, ours). He should have had his own late-night talk show, but when he learned that he was up for one — and that he had been passed over for the yuppie dullard Craig Kilborn — that was a sign that his comedy was ruffling feathers. At the same time, he cultivated incorrectness in a way that could be mindless. When he went on “The View” and said that Bill Clinton was guilty of “murder,” he claimed that he was just doing a bit, but since the “bit” fed into 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 it out of loyalty (one of his first gigs was as a writer for “Roseanne”) but in a tone-deaf way, as if what she’d said in her tweet was some trivial joke. (It was not; it was egregious.) All of this fed into the perfect shitstorm that was The Decline of Norm Macdonald.
We pretend that comedy is just fun, a means to an end — the end being to make you laugh. But the few who are chosen to be “comic’s comics” occupy that 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 a lot of reasons, but one of those reasons can be when an idea goes off in your head like a small bomb. That’s why comedy can tickle your soul, snap you back to life, cleanse you. And that’s the kind of comedian Norm Macdonald was. He had a devilish gleam, but the laughter he provoked landed on the side of the angels.