Norm Macdonald has died

[TMC]

Norm Macdonald has died after a long battle with cancer according to multiple sources.

[SarahBellum]

Dang. He was a funny guy.

[RetroGuy2000]

RIP.

[HuntingtonM15]

Wow...this one was a huge shock. I completely respect him for keeping his illness private so he didn't have to have the media in his business and making speculations all these years. But on the other side, I feel badly he had to deal with such an illness for so long.

So sad. May he RIP.

[stevea]

https://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...death-obituary

[TMC]

Norm Macdonald dies: Legendary SNL "Weekend Update" anchor was 61

The Canadian-born Macdonald, one of the most influential and beloved comedians who is known for his laconic delivery of sharp and incisive observations, died today after a nine-year battle with cancer, reports Deadline. "Macdonald’s death was announced to Deadline by his management firm Brillstein Entertainment," explains Deadline's Greg Evans. "The comedian’s longtime producing partner and friend Lori Jo Hoekstra, who was with him when died, said Macdonald had been battling cancer for nearly a decade but was determined to keep his health struggles private, away from family, friends and fans." Macdonald was scheduled to be in the New York Comedy Festival lineup in November. “He was most proud of his comedy,” Hoekstra said. “He never wanted the diagnosis to affect the way the audience or any of his loved ones saw him. Norm was a pure comic. He once wrote that ‘a joke should catch someone by surprise, it should never pander.’ He certainly never pandered. Norm will be missed terribly.” Macdonald was part of Saturday Night Live's cast from 1993 to 1998, but he is best known for hosting "Weekend Update" from 1994 to 1997 -- when NBC fired him for constantly mocking O.J. Simpson, a longtime friend of NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer. Macdonald is widely considered to be one of the best, if not the best, "Weekend Update" anchor. Macdonald was a regular on Conan O'Brien and David Letterman's late-night shows and was responsible for one of the funniest moments in Late Night with Conan O'Brien history. Macdonald, who portrayed Letterman on SNL, appeared on one of Dave's final Late Shows in 2015, where he delivered a stirring tribute. “Mr. Letterman is not for the mawkish, and he has no truck for the sentimental,” an emotional Macdonald said. “If something is true, it is not sentimental. And I say in truth, I love you.” In 2018, Letterman and Macdonald teamed up for Norm Macdonald Has a Show, which Dave helped pitch to Netflix's Ted Sarandos. After leaving SNL, Macdonald famously mocked athletes as host of the ESPYs and starred on the ABC sitcom Norm for three seasons, from 1999 to 2001. In 2003, he starred in the short-lived Fox sitcom A Minute with Stan Hooper. In recent years, Macdonald guest-starred on The Orville, lending his voice to the gelatin shape-shifting Lieutenant Yaphit aboard the USS Orville. He also was a regular on The Middle. Over the past decade, Macdonald was also known for his sports commentary on Twitter, where he frequently tweeted about golf.

ALSO:

• David Letterman was always delighted by Norm Macdonald's "bizarre mind and earnest gaze": "In every important way, in the world of stand-up, Norm was the best," tweeted Letterman. "An opinion shared by me and all peers. Always up to something, never certain, until his matter-of-fact delivery leveled you. I was always delighted by his bizarre mind and earnest gaze. (I’m trying to avoid using the phrase, 'twinkle in his eyes'). He was a lifetime Cy Young winner in comedy. Gone, but impossible to forget. Dave Letterman."
• Conan O'Brien calls Norm Macdonald "the most unique comedic voice I have ever encountered": "I am absolutely devastated about Norm Macdonald," Conan tweeted. "Norm had the most unique comedic voice I have ever encountered and he was so relentlessly and uncompromisingly funny. I will never laugh that hard again. I'm so sad for all of us today."
• Steve Martin, Jon Stewart, Seth Rogen, Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman and more pay tribute to Norm Macdonald: "Norm was in a comedy genre of his own. No one like him on this planet. Please do yourself a favor and watch his stuff. He was one of a kind of all time," tweeted Sarah Silverman. "No one could make you break like Norm Macdonald. Hilarious and unique. F*** cancer," tweeted Jon Stewart. Steve Martin called Macdonald "one of a kind," while Seth Rogen tweeted: "Oh f***. I was a huge fan of Norm Macdonald and I essentially ripped off his delivery when I first started acting. I would stay up specifically to watch him on talk shows. He was the funniest guest of all time. We lost a comedy giant today. One of the the all time greats. RIP." Patton Oswalt tweeted that Macdonald was “never not 100% hilarious.” Jimmy Kimmel added: "Norm didn't just make us laugh, he made us laugh hard. Rest well, you crazy bastard." Fellow Canadian comedian Jim Carrey tweeted: "My dear friend Norm MacDonald passed after a brave 10 year battle. He was one of our most precious gems. An honest and courageous comedy genius. I love him."
• Watch Norm Macdonald's funniest moments, from playing Burt Reynolds on SNL's "Celebrity Jeopardy! to his moth joke to roasting Bob Saget
• One of Macdonald's last appearances was in April 2020 on his YouTube show Quarantined with Norm Macdonald, featuring special guest Roseanne Barr

[AB]

Very sad news, may he rest in peace.

[MrCleveland]

I didn't even know he was ill...

[icecream]

Originally Posted by MrCleveland

I didn't even know he was ill...

No one did. He kept his cancer from everyone for almost a decade.

[TMC]

Norm Macdonald was a comedy chaos agent and the greatest talk show guest of all time

"You are born knowing that Saturday Night Live was better before you were born," says Rob Harvilla in an appreciation of the late comedian and SNL star, who died Tuesday of cancer at age 61. "And even clueless ’90s teenagers could sense that the show’s true iconoclast superstars—also including Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, and Chris Rock—wouldn’t last on the show for long. Too brazen, too raw, too volatile, too 'completely wrong.' Destined to be fired and destined for greatness. Sandler and Rock, of course, became true superstars; Farley died of a drug overdose in 1997. True greatness, true volatility works like that: It’s all or nothing. Except with Norm. He found, of course, a middle ground, a proud comedy extremist with phenomenally broad appeal, and a widespread rep as, indeed, one of the funniest people alive without any conventional breakout A-lister moment, no blockbuster movie, and no undeniable hit TV show. Any of that would’ve only diluted his genius, or at least tried. So I am grateful for everyone on Twitter right now flagging his great vintage SNL skits, but I gotta say I have virtually no memory of Norm in any plain old sketch: To my mind he was, from the onset, a chaos agent, a cheerful and deadly ghost in the machine, an Andy Kaufman–adjacent destabilizer. A comedy purist in the sense that he was disconcertingly willing to get down in the mud. He got demoted from 'Weekend Update' in early 1998, supposedly for making too many O.J. Simpson jokes, and jumped right onto David Letterman’s couch to talk all about it. ('I’m serious! I talked to a guy who said I’m fired.') He left SNL for good soon thereafter. He starred later that year in Dirty Work, a riotously mean-spirited black comedy that best paid tribute to the Norm Macdonald mythos by bombing. He returned to host SNL in ’99 and put on Burt Reynolds’s hat. That year he tried a sitcom, Norm, that lasted three years. From there he had more time to devote to his true calling, which was being the single greatest talk-show guest of all time."

ALSO:

• Lorne Michaels and SNL pay tribute to Norm Macdonald: “Today is a sad day. All of us here at SNL mourn the loss of Norm Macdonald, one of the most impactful comedic voices of his or any other generation,” Michaels said on behalf of the show in a statement posted to social media. “There are so many things that we’ll miss about Norm – from his unflinching integrity to his generosity to his consistent ability to surprise. But most of all he was just plain funny. No one was funny like Norm.”
• Seth Meyers reflects on how Macdonald made an impact on him: Speaking on Late Night, Meyers admitted he had "to beat Norm's delivery out of me" when he first started anchoring "Weekend Update." Meyers also shared his favorite "Weekend Update" joke of all time, as told by Macdonald. Meyers recalled Macdonald telling him that SNL was "the last place on TV where you can bomb," adding that as a result "he didn't care if he was bombing." Meyers added: "I think for so many of us, we came up watching Norm and we thought we were on the inside with him when we were watching him tell these jokes that we thought were great and that no one in the room thought was good. And you just felt this connection to him. And that ability to just stare into an audience unblinkingly telling the jokes that he believed in."
• Bob Dole tweets he'll miss Norm Macdonald: It was 25 years ago that Macdonald played the then-Republican presidential candidate on SNL for the 1996 presidential election. Dole, now 98, tweeted a photo of him with Macdonald as himself: "Norm," he wrote, "was a great talent, and I loved laughing with him on SNL. *Bob Dole* will miss Norm Macdonald."
• Kevin Nealon calls his "Weekend Update" successor "without a doubt, one-of-a- kind": "So clever, daring, well-read and smart as a whip," Nealon wrote on Instagram. "His comedy was brilliant, irreverent and at times biting. We all loved him on SNL's 'Weekend Update' and I don't actually think he ever got credit for coining the phrase, 'Fake News.' Norm and I often toured doing stand-up and occasionally golfed together. A few years ago we took a road trip to Palm Springs and he insisted on blasting Johnny Cash tunes the entire way, windows down with his bare foot dangling out. Luckily I was driving. Thank you for your unique brilliance and charm, Norm. I miss you already."
• Bob Saget recalls meeting a 17-year-old Macdonald in Ottawa: Saget directed Macdonald in the 1998 movie Dirty Work and was roasted by him on Comedy Central. "Devastated," tweeted Saget. "Met Norm in Ottawa when he was in my audience at 17 years old. Been close for decades. We have lost a comedic genius. No other voice in comedy has been as uniquely prolific, brazen, dark, hilarious, and heartfelt. Love you forever, Norm."
• Macdonald weaved the dumbest punchlines into comedic masterclasses: "Norm Macdonald was responsible for some of the worst punchlines in Hollywood history," says Andrew R. Chow. "'There are times when Bob has something on his mind—when he wears a hat!' the comedian proclaimed stone-faced at Comedy Central’s Roast of Bob Saget in 2008, as Saget, his target, chuckled with clear confusion and discomfort. As the room grew quiet, unmoved by the joke, Macdonald decided not to move past the clear dud, but instead to double down: 'No thoughts at all—JUST A HAT!' But it was exactly this type of delivery and commitment that made Macdonald, who died on Tuesday after a long, private battle with cancer, one of the most unique and irreplaceable voices in modern comedy. Macdonald thrived on the edge of convention and in moments of silence and discomfort; through his unique approach, he weaved the dumbest punchlines into comedic masterclasses. And while other comics turned their desire to provoke into an excuse to bully or punch down, Macdonald’s transgressions were usually more conceptual: he thumbed his nose at the art form of the joke itself."
• Norm Macdonald was the best/worst talk show guest of all time: "It’s one of the ironies of late-night talk TV that the people who are typically handed the reins of that most formulaic, corporate synergy-heavy branch of television are usually comedians, a group of people who do not, as a rule, like being told what to do," says William Hughes. "And yet, more often that not, they do it: Playing nice, promoting their owners’ projects, and generally coloring within the comedy lines that keep the people signing the checks, and the stars they funnel toward TV’s collective late night couches, happy. Norm Macdonald was constitutionally incapable of playing that game, which might explain why he didn’t get a talk show, at least not until the far looser worlds of podcasts and streaming TV made it a possibility—and why, at the same time, he was such a frequently sought-out guest on the talk shows of others. Casually capable of precision cruelty, and endlessly mischievous, Macdonald was the embodiment of the chaos so often scrubbed out of the late-night world, and which its most iconoclastic hosts—especially Conan O’Brien and Dave Letterman, both devoted fans—clearly, dearly craved. It helps explain why so many of the moments being passed around online today, in the wake of Macdonald’s death, have come from his numerous talk show appearances, dropping in to let his more ostensibly successful friends live vicariously through a man who would relish explaining the logic of a premature ejaculation joke for an audience of millions."
• It feels pointless to try to write anything like an obituary, because everyone had their favorite Norm: "SNL Norm, sitcom Norm, standup Norm, bit-role Norm, talk show guest Norm, ESPYs Norm, book Norm, roast Norm," says Barry Petchesky. "I can only tell you my Norm: the guy who I saw do a live set once, and mostly ruined the form for me because it was clear how much better he was at it than 99 percent of even the other professional standups; the guy who did **** I literally did not realize you were allowed to do on basic cable; the guy who said stuff that made other comedians try desperately to keep a straight face, and fail. You’ve got your Norm, and if you don’t, there’s no better way to spend the rest of your day than going to YouTube and searching for Norm and watching any and everything that comes up. Because everything he did was funny! Everything! Scores of people around the world are currently sitting in their homes, chuckling and muttering, 'Ladies and gentlemen, this man is for the birds!' because that’s the first thing they think of when they think of Norm. What other comedian could have planted a punchline so dumb into the heads of so many people? Something about the voice, and the delivery, and the deadpan-with-a-barely-suppressed-hint-of-manic package elevated all material, and made him the only person alive who could possibly have pulled off his best stuff. And now he’s not alive, so all that might’ve been can no longer be, but we’ve still got a lifetime of work to go back to. Share your favorite Norm bits, and watch ’em again. He was truly one of the funniest people to ever do it."
• Macdonald discussed cancer in general in a 2018 conversation with Vulture: "I wouldn’t pretend to ever know the truth. But comedy in its highest form always reveals something. Maybe you could call that a truth. But what I don’t like is the idea that suffering, or pain, or being a victim — you could say that leads to art, and maybe it does, but it’s not art in itself." When told there are good and bad forms of every art, Macdonald responded: "But I’m telling you this: I’ve heard people go onstage and talk about cancer or some ****, and I go, 'Isn’t this what happens to everybody?' They seem to think they’re singular in their story when their story is the most common story that could possibly be, which is suffering and pain."
• Macdonald perfectly explained in 2011 why you shouldn't say "battling cancer": Macdonald, who died of cancer, may have already been diagnosed in 2011 when he said in his Comedy Central standup special Me Doing Stand Up: “In the old days, a man could just get sick and die. Now, they have to wage a battle,” Macdonald began. “So my Uncle Bert is waging a courageous battle — which I’ve seen, because I go and visit him. This is the battle: he’s lying in a hospital battle with a thing in his arm, watching Matlock on the TV. It’s not his fault, what the ****’s he supposed to do? It’s just a black thing in his bowel. The reason I don’t like it is because in the old days, they’d go: ‘Hey, that old man died.’ Now, they go: ‘He lost his battle.’ That’s no way to end your life: ‘What a loser that guy was! Last thing he did was lose. He was waging a brave battle, but at the end, he got kind of cowardly with what happen. Then, the bowel cancer, it got brave. You’ve got to give it to the bowel cancer, they were in a battle.'”
• Macdonald was subjected to a "journalistic intervention" in a 2016 Washington Post profile: "The former SNL star can be his own worst enemy. Or maybe he’s a mad genius. Or both," wrote The Washington Post's Geoff Edgers, who spent time alone with Macdonald. Edgers added: "This article isn’t being done because he has an entertainment product to plug, though, in the months after the Oscars, Macdonald will finish his book. Based on a True Story: A Memoir comes out in September. This profile is actually a journalistic intervention. It is about trying to understand why a brilliant, original voice remains virtually invisible at a time when, as his admirer Conan O’Brien puts it, 'every United States citizen who is registered to vote has a talk show.' Comedy Central President Kent Alterman describes Macdonald’s absence from the airwaves as 'one of the great injustices in the world.' 'How,' he asks, 'is Norm Macdonald not on the air?'"
• Macdonald was every comedian's favorite comedian: 'In the end, he simply and truly provided comedy greatness," says Sean L. McCarthy. "And that has been reward enough for anyone lucky enough to see or hear him."
• Macdonald helped save SNL during its "dark times" of the mid-1990s: "The great advantage of the digital age is that, with a keystroke, you can watch Norm Macdonald in the many genres in which he left his mark — but, if you ask me, his death leaves a major void in the world of 'smart' comedy, the kind of humor that makes you think — and laugh — at the same time," says Michael Starr. "Norm Macdonald didn’t just perform in this style — he owned it."
• Norm co-creator Bruce Helford recounts his decades-long friendship with Norm Macdonald: The Conners showrunner first met Macdonald when he guest-starred on Roseanne. They went on to co-create The Norm Show, AKA Norm, which aired for three seasons on ABC from 1999 to 2001. "We did his Norm show together, which is one of the best shows I’ve ever done,” Helford said. “And it was because he was so brilliant and irreverent and he pretended he didn’t care, but he cared very much and worked really hard to create something unique. He was so admired by other comics because he had that rare gift — a voice that no one else had. Macdonald reteamed with Helford on the 2018 Roseanne revival, with Macdonald serving as consulting producer. “We’ve been close all these years and I will miss him very much,” Helford said. “I remember a joke he made about cancer: ‘You always read about people battling cancer. It’s not a battle. There’s this big black thing and then it kills you.’ But he fought hard and we got to enjoy him that much longer. He also didn’t know how to drive.”
• David Spade remembers his last show with Macdonald: "Non stop laughing with these 2 guys as you can imagine," Spade captioned a photo of him, and fellow SNL alums Macdonald and Dennis Miller. "Would never think it was the last time I’d see him. The comedy world took a huge hit today.
• Scott Aukerman recalls Macdonald running out of jokes on stage: "Saw him do the funniest dismount at a theatre stand-up show where he ran out of jokes or just didn’t want to end on a big closer so he brought the openers back on 'to do some improv,' and walked off the stage. Legend," wrote Aukerman on Instagram.
• James Corden remembered the time Macdonald was on the show and did a bit about Micky Mouse: “It wasn’t a planned bit, he said: ‘Micky Mouse is huge at Disney World," Corden recalled on The Late Late Show. "If you see Micky Mouse at Disney World, you’re like yeah, go, kids! If you see that same Micky Mouse at 7-Eleven, you’re holding the kids back.'”
• Watch Macdonald tell a medical marijuana joke to then-President Bill Clinton in 1997
• Here are Macdonald's most memorable SNL moments, from Burt "Turd Ferguson" Reynolds on Celebrity Jeopardy to "Cobras & Panthers" to his 1999 SNL monologue
• Conan O'Brien's YouTube channel posts Macdonald famously mocking Courtney Thorne-Smith and Carrot Top's movie Chairman of the Board
• Macdonald once hosted a red carpet show in sweatpants
• Aaron Rodgers paid tribute to Norm Macdonald when he guest-hosted Jeopardy! in April with a Turd Ferguson reference -- which caught Macdonald's attention
• Norm Macdonald summed up his life in 2016 memoir Based on a True Story, saying it was impossible for him to be bitter: "Norm always seemed so pleased that he'd written a book. I think it's because his comedic persona was a smart guy pretending to be a dumb guy who really wants you to know that he's a smart guy," tweeted comedy writer Nell Scovell. In his book, which could double as a eulogy for his life, Macdonald wrote: "I think a lot of people feel sorry for you if you were on SNL and emerged from the show anything less than a superstar. They assume you must be bitter. But it is impossible to be bitter. I've been lucky. If I had to sum up my whole life, I guess those are the words I would choose, all right. When I was a boy, I was sure I'd never make it past Moose Creek, Ontario, Canada. But I've been all over this world. Except for Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and South America. Oh, and Antarctica. But that's really splitting hairs. I mean, how many people have been to Antarctica?" Macdonald said that he "never expected to be any (thing) more than a common laborer," declaring that he would have still been "lucky to have achieved that." He added: "But I was blessed with so much more. I'm a stand-up comedian and have been for over a quarter of a century. I've performed thousands of hours, from a small club in Ottawa, Ontario, all the way to a small club in Edmonton, Alberta. Sometimes I get big laughs and think I'm the best stand-up in the whole world, and other times I bomb, and I think I'm not even in the top five."

[king of comedy]

R.I.P. Norm The last thing I remembered he did was The Orville.

[icecream]

Norm Macdonald bought the farm, e-i-e-i-o. (couldn't resist)

[Caroline13]

RIP Norm, and since I was not a big SLN person I truly don't know of him. Others I do but on the few occasions of SLN never heard his name.

[icecream]

Originally Posted by Caroline13

RIP Norm, and since I was not a big SLN person I truly don't know of him. Others I do but on the few occasions of SLN never heard his name.

You might have seen him on KFC commercials, he was one of their Colonel Sanders.

[TMC]

Norm Macdonald's sensitivity to language and poetic brand of plain talk made him a comedy icon

"Macdonald was not only one of the funniest comics of his generation, but also a sneaky aesthete who elevated stand-up, helping shift its cultural prestige over the past few decades into an art deserving respect," says Jason Zinoman of the late comedian and "Weekend Update" anchor, who died Tuesday at age 61. "His legacy is not clear from his level of stardom or even his list of television shows and specials, although he has some signal accomplishments, including an early stint as a writer on Roseanne and one of the best Netflix specials of the past decade, Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery. Macdonald’s greatness is not on his IMDb page so much as in the number of you-have-to-see-this moments, the kind that friends tell you about at parties and then send you the clip the next day. Many of these came from talk shows, where he was a hall-of-fame guest. He told one of the most justly revered jokes in late-night history on Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show, a preposterous masterpiece of literary suspense-building about a moth in a podiatrist’s office. Another moment on the couch from the same show went viral decades later: He interrupted an interview with the actress Courtney Thorne-Smith to savagely insult Carrot Top, the star of the movie she was promoting, a brutally hilarious act of sabotage. Macdonald had other talents. When it comes to parodies of roasts, he stood alone, turning intentionally awful jokes at the roast of Bob Saget into disorienting performance art that remains one of the funniest bits of anti-comedy you will ever see. And on Saturday Night Live, he may have been at his best on the 'Weekend Update' desk (ultimately getting fired after his jokes about O.J. Simpson), but he also delivered several singular impressions, including a version of David Letterman that was both accurate and far too bizarre to be realistic. Letterman proved to be a key figure in Macdonald’s career, a champion of the stand-up’s work (the talk-show host said no one was funnier) who booked the comic on his show’s final week. Macdonald, breaking from his trademark acerbic style, ended on a surprisingly moving tribute, displaying an emotional side that usually only lurked under the surface of his comedy. In a column from 2017, I argued that what distinguished Macdonald’s comedy was his sensitivity to language, his peculiarly poetic brand of plain talk. He made stylish turns of phrase and folksy flourishes seem conversational and offhand. A lover of Bob Dylan, Macdonald was also a sponge for influences, borrowing and repurposing figures of speech or unusual words to create funny-sounding sentences. But describing him as merely a master of joke writing misses his quickness, wryly deadpan delivery and, most of all, a unique level of commitment. He did not bail out of jokes and never pandered."

ALSO:

• Courteney Thorne-Smith loved Norm Macdonald roasting her on Late Night with Conan O'Brien: Thorne-Smith's May 1997 appearance with Conan promoting her and Carrot Top's movie Chairman of the Board made the rounds on social media following Macdonald's death. Vanity Fair contacted Thorne-Smith. "A few people have reached out. Everyone is so shocked," she says. "He’s always been there. He did 'Weekend Update.' He’s a part of my comedy consciousness. I feel like I just watched him on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. It’s stunning." Thorne-Smith says she was a fan of Macdonald's before her appearance on Late Night. "I’ve always been a fan of Norm Macdonald, which made it extra super thrilling. Yeah, I loved his take on things. That’s why my dad was so taken when Don Rickles made fun of him. When you’re a fan of a comedian and they make fun of you, is there anything better? It’s just heaven, ’cause you’re in their joke. They may be laughing at you, but it doesn’t matter, ’cause you’re in that moment with them." Was Conan concerned she was upset? "How could he possibly have been there with me and not known I was having a good time?" she said. "He’s such a nice man, and I would run into him later and he was afraid that I was offended. I told him absolutely not. You know those great nights you go out with your friends and you start laughing and you can’t stop, and you have that satiated feeling? That’s how I felt. I didn’t expect to have an amazing time, and I had an amazing time. That’s what I walked away with; just giddy with how much fun it was. I had a ball. By the way, Macdonald was prophetic. According to Box Office Mojo, Chairman of the Board grossed less than $200,000 on a $10 million budget." Thorne-Smith and Macdonald reunited in 2000 when she guest-starred on his ABC sitcom Norm.
• Norm Macdonald was Tolstoy in sweatpants: "He loved great books, old country music," says Geoff Edgers, who profiled Macdonald in 2016 and who frequently texted with him until as recently as July. "He loved his mother, Ferne, his son, Dylan, and his ever-present producing partner and friend, Lori Jo Hoekstra. (His father died in 1990 and Macdonald’s only marriage ended in the late 1990s.) He had a gift for math and more than a streak of obsessive compulsiveness, which may explain his issues with sports gambling. He could work cleaner than Mister Rogers or bluer than Redd Foxx, depending on what the joke required. Norm’s informal delivery, his ease onstage, could give the false impression that what he did came effortlessly. Fans sometimes even speculated that he was performing drunk, though I never so much as saw him sip a beer in the 15 or so times we were together. The Norm I saw was meticulous about his comedy. There was the concept and there was the execution. Both required deep thought, lots of lined paper and practice. This is how you become so good that virtually everything you do goes viral."
• Norm Macdonald mastered the art of being himself: "Keeping things simple was always when MacDonald was at his best," says Brian VanHooker. "Famously, he did a super-clean roast of (Bob) Saget in 2008, rifling off cornball jokes like, 'Bob has a beautiful face like a flower — yeah, cauliflower!' Over the past decade, I’ve rolled my eyes time and again when I’ve seen people refer to this as 'a brilliant piece of anti-comedy,' making use of a trite, nonsense description that MacDonald himself hated. It wasn’t anti-comedy, it was straight-up comedy. Yes, the jokes were bad in that set, but that’s not why they were funny. Norm MacDonald was funny. His delivery in that set was the same as it was in Dirty Work and “Weekend Update,” and that’s why it worked. Besides, MacDonald’s style of joke-telling didn’t come from nowhere. When asked who influenced him, his most common answer was Bob Newhart. If you’re familiar with Newhart’s comedy, it’s easy to see why. Much like MacDonald, his style of delivery was always more important than the actual jokes. His nervous hemming-and-hawing is what made him a household name, and for MacDonald, his hesitating delivery was a big inspiration. Along these lines, I’d like to bring your attention to a piece MacDonald did on a comedy album in 2006, which featured a hilarious sendup of 'The Twelve Days of Christmas.' It was his personal tribute to Newhart’s brand of comedy; it’s nowhere near as well-known as the Saget roast, but it’s right up there in the amount of laughs it delivers."
• Norm Macdonald wasn’t normal at all, and nobody was more dedicated to exploiting that abnormality: "When that news broke in the afternoon, every white guy my age used the occasion of Norm’s death to pass around all-time clips of him doing jokes that only Norm Macdonald could have ever pulled off, and to earnestly note that Norm taught them how to be ironic," says Drew Magary. "These were very nice tributes. 'He was a comedian’s comedian' … all that tired s—t. It’s just that there isn’t a man on Earth who would have disdained a 'nice' tribute more than Norm Macdonald, a man who abhorred sentimentality almost as much as he abhorred O.J. Simpson. If you REALLY admired Norm, you would have said, 'Actually, I never cared for the man.' Because Norm Macdonald lived in that avant-garde comedic space where the line between deadpan and serious is so blurry that only a handful of people really got it (NBC exec Don Ohlmeyer infamously never got or liked Norm’s OJ jokes on Saturday Night Live and had him fired from the show in 1998 after four years on the job), and even some of that handful weren’t entirely sure they were getting it. Even I didn’t get it sometimes, and I worked for Norm Macdonald once. Almost a decade after the conclusion of ABC’s Norm (1999-2001), I went a five-day audition to join the writing staff of what would become Sports Show with Norm Macdonald on Comedy Central (which lasted nine episodes). Now that’s one lazya** title for a show. But since Norm named it, it took on a post-ironic color where you could think of it as a brilliant gag and then, five minutes later, wonder if you were a f—king idiot for thinking that. I didn’t get the job."
• Macdonald delivered jokes in a way no one else did before him: "The first time you hear it, his odd intonation stops you in your tracks," says John Roy. "You can’t place it: He’s from Canada, but it isn’t iconically Canadian. It’s just … odd. His delivery is almost the opposite of the typical comic, who takes pains to emphasize each precisely ordered syllable. Their voice will go up on the setup, pause for the optimum number of seconds, then hit their punch line loud for maximum effect. Macdonald did none of this; instead, he seemed to actively defy the speech conventions of stand-up. His delivery was somehow casually tossed-off and full of enthusiasm at the same time, like he was so excited to give you these words that he couldn’t bother to arrange them before he released them to the world. Unlike the meticulously composed bits of Jerry Seinfeld, Paul F. Tompkins, or John Mulaney, Macdonald didn’t care if he included ums, repeated words, or you knows. His excitement was contagious, and whatever he lost in polish he more than made up for in conversational naturalism...Macdonald took things we look past every day and found a fundamental absurdity that, somehow, we all missed. When you have insights that original, you can’t worry about cadence or emphasis, you need to get them out now. Macdonald simply saw things differently than almost everyone."
• His persona was droll, but he cared seriously, even ebulliently, about what comedy could be: "I was caught off guard by how sensitive he was to creative work generally: he was a serious and studious reader, especially of the Russians, keen to get into the weeds with me about Tolstoy," says Nathan Heller, who profiled Macdonald in 2015. "And he gave off lambent joy about his art. My favorite moment of our day was back in his hotel suite, after the failed expedition, when he spontaneously delivered a kind of craft lesson to his assistant, Steere, an aspiring comic who was working on a bit about dogs. It was a long, winding exchange, but certain turns stuck with me."
• Macdonald did not give a f**k about what forces he might run afoul of, sometimes to his great cost: "Today, Macdonald’s 'Weekend Update' stuff is recognizably of a different comedy era," says Kyle Smith. "It feels like forbidden material that was smuggled out by dissidents when the regime was distracted by cracking skulls elsewhere in the cultural empire. There’s a nine-minute reel of Norm’s meanest Hillary Clinton jokes. Norm bashes, slices, sets fire to, and generally destroys Hillary Clinton, and I know what you’re thinking: somebody was mean to Hillary Clinton? On Saturday Night Live? The show that, after one of the funniest moments in U.S. history, the Hindenburg-style crash of Hillary Clinton’s political career in November of 2016, sent out its top talent to sing a mournful ballad in Hillary’s honor?"
• Macdonald was always in on the joke, making him one of the truly great smartasses of our time: "The thing about the smartass is that, while he works in shades of irony and deflection, really committing to smartassery requires a truly brave, possibly nuts sensibility," says Jason Diamond. "Thinking something is funny, no matter what other people think, is one thing. Turning that sensibility into a career requires a different sort of commitment: to making a joke that might totally bomb, and then to grinning through it, sitting there as the audience stews in how much they didn’t like the joke, and then repeating the punchline again, defiant. That was what Norm Macdonald did. Nobody committed—while often appearing to not commit at all—quite like him. David Letterman once said that Macdonald 'could be the funniest man in the world'—and the double meaning there, that he might be but also that he might choose not to be—was central to his appeal. There are numerous examples. Macdonald’s most famous impression is probably his Burt Reynolds, tag-teaming with Darrell Hammond’s Sean Connery to make Alex Trebek’s (Will Ferrell) life a nightmare on SNL’s 'Celebrity Jeopardy!' Sketch. For my money, though, the impression to beat is Macdonald’s Letterman, repeating 'Got any gum' over and over. He was doing an imitation of Letterman, a guy who made an art form out of take it or leave it comedy, and putting his own spin on it. His spin, of course, wasn’t too far from the source material besides the fact that Macdonald didn’t look like Letterman or sound like him. It wasn’t a spot-on impersonation—that wasn’t what he excelled at—so much as one comic communing with another who shared his sensibility. He’d often work like this, keep the joke going just because he wanted to. And often times, the repetition became the funniest part about it. (His comedic posture occasionally aged in strange ways: one signature bit wouldn’t hold up today, but might still be the best example of his yearslong commitment to it.)"
• Macdonald hated comedy that pandered to a like-minded crowd, once saying in an interview that stand-ups should hunt for laughter, not applause: "His love of pure joke-telling, where craft and timing are far more important than any bearing on reality, is captured in the hours of material from his online show Norm Macdonald Live, during which he would catch guests off guard by having them read offensive lines off printed cards," says David Sims. "As a 'comedian’s comedian,' he landed in hot water after giving an interview in which he sympathized with comics accused of harassment and racism, such as Louis C.K. and Roseanne Barr. (He later walked those comments back.) In that interview, he also offered a surprisingly protective view of traditional stand-up, dismissing other idiosyncratic approaches to the form, which surprised me, given his talent for innovation as a stand-up. But even though Macdonald excelled at challenging expectations and sometimes seemed to revel in the silence following a failed joke, his philosophy was firmly rooted in the magic power that skilled comedians have, to get a rise out of the toughest audience. He hated comedy that pandered to a like-minded crowd, once saying in an interview that stand-ups should hunt for laughter, not applause." As Macdonald once said: “There’s a difference between a clap and a laugh. A laugh is involuntary, but the crowd is in complete control when they’re clapping. They’re saying, ‘We agree with what you’re saying; proceed!’ But when they’re laughing, they’re genuinely surprised. And when they’re not laughing, they’re really surprised. And sometimes I think, in my little head, that that’s the best comedy of all."
• Rob Schneider likened his former SNL colleague to jazz legend John Coltrane: "You could tell a joke and it could get nothing, and he could tell that same joke and murder with it,” Schneider said, adding: “Norm would have this incredible ability to tell a joke and you have no idea where it’s going, and then you get lost and you think, ‘Oh man, I know where this is going.' But then the next thing you know, you forget. He was a master of turns and sleight.”
• SNL's Darrell Hammond recalls Macdonald being a no-frills kind of guy: "He wasn't seeking fame and he wasn't seeking fortune or power. He just was living his life, trying to be funny," Hammond said. "And so when you're around him, it seemed so unremarkable at the time, it was just Norm being funny and being him — which was no filter between your brain and your mouth, and you say the thought that is formed on the way out."
• Frank Stallone never met Macdonald, but loved being the butt of his "Weekend Update" jokes: “I realized it was really fun. He wasn’t really attacking me, it was just randomly thrown in there,” Stallone said of the Macdonald's jokes targeting him. “That’s what made it funny, because it made no sense — nuclear war, then putting my name in there.”