Norm MacDonald: The Art Of The Bomb

Speak your mind, it’s the right thing to do.

norm macdonald

Norm MacDonald was the King of the Bomb. He taught us all that if you believe in a joke, it doesn’t matter what the audience thinks. It’s something he did through the entirety of his career, and something I’ve tried to utilize in my own stand-up comedy as well. Sadly, however, Norm passed away this month at the age of 61 after a private, 9-year battle with cancer. Ever wonder why they call it a battle? Go look at his 2011 record Me Doing Stand-Up and the album’s second track, “Courageous Battle”, where he drops the nugget of wisdom: “In the old days, a man could just get sick and die. Now he has to wage a battle.”

In the wake of his passing, memorials and messages have been pouring in espousing love and exultation for the earth-shaking, gut-busting, and iconoclastic manner that Norm conducted himself throughout his career. Many of these messages have keyed in on the undercurrent running through all of Norm’s work: if a joke was good enough, Norm was going to tell it, and he didn’t care whether the audience laughed or not.

Although it sounds like a misnomer – the stand-up comedian who didn’t care about laughs – Norm’s comedy was exponentially better because of that exact belief. He was a scientist, a comedy scholar who cared so deeply for the work that he did that no one could talk him out of his hypothesis. If a joke was worth telling, he’d go up and tell it, and if you told him to stop he was going to tell it again. Those seemed to be the moments that got Norm in the most trouble throughout his career. Even when asked to leave well enough alone, if he thought something was funny, the jokes were going to keep on rolling.

During the 1997-1998 season of Saturday Night Live, Norm MacDonald lost his job as the host of the Weekend Update. It seems that at the time, President of NBC Don Ohlmeyer was very good friends with Heisman trophy loser O.J. Simpson, and Ohlmeyer took offense with Norm’s brazen tendency to make jokes at Simpson’s expense. Norm was told to ease off the Juice, and in one of the most daring acts of self-sabotage in TV history, all live in technicolor, he just kept on going. Week after week after week, there was Norm on the Weekend Update, and there was a picture of O.J. Simpson projected behind him yet again, as jokes about the knit cap and the too-small glove and O.J.’s assumed guilt continued to roll.

But it didn’t end there. A few months after losing the Update desk, Norm hosted the biggest sports awards show of the year: the 1998 Espys. Not exactly the place to be trotting out material about the Juice. Still, in his opening monologue Norm faced off against a packed crowd and said, “And there’s Charles Woodson, how about that? What a season he had. He became the first defensive player to win the Heisman trophy. Congratulations, Charles, that is something that no one can ever take away from you. Unless you kill your wife and a waiter, in which case…” The camera cut away from Norm to an incredulous crowd, a few audience members chuckling while Charles Woodson held his head in his hands and other patrons tried to collect their jaws from the floor.

Some called Norm MacDonald a comedian’s comedian, but that just meant he loved comedy in a way that his peers could see. Lori Jo Hoekstra, Norm’s longtime friend, partner and collaborator referenced that love– and Norm’s commitment to a bit– in comments to the media, saying “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 brought that belief with him on his talk show appearances, using his time with Conan O’Brien to solidify his standing as the most unpredictable segment on late night TV. Whereas at the time, some comedians respected the traditional talk show interview format, Norm used his brief time on the national airwaves to poke fun at his friends, the hosts, and tell the jokes that he thought were funny. There are unbelievable compilations on YouTube of all those old shows, and the old, 1940s farmer’s daughter jokes with long, drawn out setups and hard-hitting, outdated punchlines he’d perform. Each time, Norm wound up wearing a mirthful smirk while Conan, Andy Richter and the audience let out exasperated groans.

But of course, those groans were just a facade, they all loved what they were seeing. There was no one but Norm MacDonald in the world of entertainment who was so consistently willing to so outrageously test an audience’s patience. After one of Norm’s appearances on Late Night, Richter even commented about this to Conan, saying, “That guy doesn’t care in a way that frightens me.”

During one appearance, Norm went on for three and a half minutes about his old schoolmate Jacques DeGautier, whose name then changed to Jacques DeGatineau. This was a man with all the promise in the world, the hope of a generation, and he suddenly disappeared. The years went by, and no one had heard anything of Old Jacques until Norm found him feeding baby dolphins at an aquarium! “I’m ashamed of you, Jacques DeGatineau,” Norm said. “You could’ve done so many great things.”

“Well,” Jacques apparently responded, “I think I’m serving a youthful porpoise.”

Another time, Norm was asked to do an extra segment on Conan’s show, but he hadn’t prepared any material. So, he decided to break out a 20 second joke that he’d learned from Colin Quinn: a simple joke about a moth who goes into a podiatrist’s office.

It was the type of joke Norm enjoyed, appreciated, and thought he could improve. So, he sat there on live TV and rambled and rambled and ad libbed a new setup for that joke he loved. He strung the audience along for the ride, crafting a one-act tragedy with grotesque, miserable, floundering characters straight out of a Kafka novel. It was a story about inherent sadness and a man’s demise and his deepening levels of despair and then finally, at the end, a simple payout: “Moth, man, you’re trouble. You should be seeing a psychiatrist, why on earth did you come here?”

“Because the light was on!”

How about another example? Norm was invited to the 2008 roast of his good friend, Bob Saget. The two had collaborated on Norm’s Hollywood debut, Dirty Work, in 1998, and their friendship extended back much further, to when both men were just starting their careers as nightclub comics. Saget recorded a video tribute to Norm, and recalled that when the prospect of performing at Saget’s Roast came up, Norm became incredibly distraught.

Even though everyone else at the roast would be slandering Saget and shooting barbs at his good name over the course of the night, Norm couldn’t bring himself to speak ill of his friend. He went against the entire format of the evening, ignored the hive mind ferocity of the other comics, and eschewed any expectation of impressing the crowd. Norm just wanted to make his friends laugh, and show them how much they meant to him.

So, Norm brought a 1940s joke book to the roast. He said at one point, “Greg Giraldo is here. He has the grace of a swan, the wisdom of an owl, and the eye of an eagle– ladies and gentlemen this man is for the birds!” To Gilbert Gottfried, Norm said: “Gilbert Gottfriend, one of my best friends! I love Gilbert. When you go to the men’s room later, you’ll see a sign that says: gentlemen…pay no heed, go right in. There’s no room that says scoundrel on it.”

To his good friend Bob, he said, “Bob has a beautiful face, like a flower – yeah, a cauliflower! No offense but, your face, looks, like a cauliflower!” Then he added, “There are times when Bob has something on his mind – when he wears a hat!”

And then finally, he said, “In all seriousness, Bob was the first comedian that I ever saw perform when I was a boy, live, and I loved him. But one thing that bonds us as comedians is we’re bitter and jealous and we hate everyone else that has any success. But, Bob honestly has never had an unkind word for anybody, and I love him, and I hope everybody else does, so, I just wanted to say that. Thank you.”

Norm MacDonald didn’t go to Bob Saget’s Roast for the standing ovation, or the morning press, or the invitation back to the next one. He didn’t go there with a need to be one of the cool kids that night– he didn’t need that at any point in his career. He just wanted to go out there and say something funny and nice about his friend, so he did. Because in the end, a bomb is a bomb is a bomb, but your integrity will always remain paramount. Norm MacDonald knew this to be a fact, and although he’ll be missed, here’s hoping he’ll be smiling seeing us move forward with that same type of integrity.

And, by the way, if that joke you’re thinking of is that good, I don’t know why you’re still waiting to tell it.

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