you know when you when you look at the pantheon
of modern comedy there is this sort of uh neat
organized hierarchy you've got the stadium fillers
you know the kevin hartz of the world then you
have the sitcom billionaires your seinfelds and
then the cultural critics like a dave chappelle
right they all yeah they all played the game
they understood the rules and they won they won
the game and they got the trophy but then standing
just off to the side maybe smoking a cigarette
and looking slightly i don't know confused by
the whole affair is Norm Macdonald. He's in a
completely different category. It's almost incorrect
to even judge him by the same metrics. How so?
Well, if you just look at his rhythm on paper,
fired from his biggest job, starred in movies
that famously bombed at the box office, a sitcom
that did okay but wasn't a cultural phenomenon,
you might think, well, okay, this guy had a rocky
career. But then you talk to the people who actually
do this for a living, the comedians themselves,
and the whole conversation just shifts entirely.
That's the paradox, isn't it? That's what we're
really digging into today. You have David Letterman,
and this is a man who is famously stingy with
his compliments. Oh, notoriously so. He calls
Norm the best stand -up comic, period. Not one
of the best, the absolute best. And you have
Conan O 'Brien, who has interviewed, I mean,
literally everyone, saying Norm had the most
unique comedic voice he ever encountered. He
even called him the best worst talk show guest.
Which is a compliment in its own way. A huge
compliment coming from Conan. It means he was
unpredictable, that he was dangerous on live
TV. And Jon Stewart, you know, a man who arguably
defined political comedy for an entire generation,
called Norm the funniest person he knew. So you
have this massive disconnect. The industry, the
executives, the marketing people, they often
didn't know what to do with him. They were constantly
trying to fix him, to make him more palatable.
The masters of the craft, the people who really
understand joke structure and timing, they looked
at him and it was just total awe. I think the
easy answer, the one you always hear, is to say
he was a comics comic. But that feels a bit dismissive
to me. It sort of implies he was inaccessible
or that you had to be in on the joke to get him.
And that wasn't true. No. But the more I looked
into the sources for this deep dive, the more
it seems like his entire life was a deliberate
rejection of the way you're supposed to be famous.
He refused to play by the rules of celebrity,
the rules of television, and then eventually
even the rules of medical transparency. Exactly.
And that's our mission here. It isn't just to
retell his famous jokes, though we'll get to
those. It's to try and understand the psychology
of a man who would willingly, almost gleefully,
blow up his own career. For a gag. Yeah. Whether
you're talking about the SNL firing, the gambling
addiction where you almost seem to prefer losing,
or hiding a terminal illness for nine years.
There is this through line of commitment that
honestly, it borders on pathology. It's the commitment
to the bit, even when the bit ruins you. And
I think we have to start with the style itself.
Before we even get into the biography, you have
to understand the instrument he was playing.
Because if you just read a transcript of a Norm
MacDonald joke, half the time it doesn't even
look like a joke. It looked like a rambling statement
from an old man on a porch. That was the architecture
of it. It was masterful. He perfected the shaggy
dog story. Now, in traditional comedy, economy
is king, right? You get to the punchline as fast
as you possibly can. Set up, punch. As few words
as possible. Exactly. Norm would do the absolute
opposite. He would elongate the setup. He would
stretch it out, filling it with these folksy,
almost archaic turns of phrase, intentionally
boring details and absolute non sequiturs. Right.
And what that does is it builds this incredible
tension where the audience is thinking, where
on earth is this going? There has to be a payoff.
And the payoff, the punchline, when it finally
arrived after this long, winding road, was often
deliberately underwhelming. It was anti -humor.
The joke was that there was no joke. Or that
the punchline was so obvious, so stupid, that
the absurdity of the long journey was the real
punchline. Which is infinitely harder to pull
off than a clever pun. Oh, it requires total
command of the room. You are forcing hundreds,
sometimes thousands of people to wait for you.
It's a power move, really. And to understand
where that confidence or maybe it's indifference
to the audience's approval comes from, you have
to look at where he came from. Because he wasn't
a theater kid. He wasn't some guy who grew up
dreaming of being on stage. No, far from it.
He was born in Quebec City, October 17th, 1959.
And right out of the gate, we have a classic
Norm obfuscation. Little lie. The age thing.
The age thing. For years, if you checked his
bio, it said he was born in 1963. He shaved four
years off. Why? Who knows for sure, but it fits
his philosophy that the truth is malleable if
it serves the story or the persona. He wanted
to seem younger, part of a different generation
of comics maybe. But yeah, records confirm it
was 59. And being born in Quebec City is key.
It's the heart of French Canada. But his experience
there was very, very specific. His parents were
Anglophone teachers. They were English speakers
working at a Canadian Forces military base. And
this detail from the sources stood out to me.
His father forbade him from learning French.
Think about that. They're living in a thoroughly
French province, surrounded by French culture,
and the father insists on an English -only household.
It's like building a little cultural bubble.
It created an isolated environment. He was an
outsider in his own hometown by design. You have
this strict English -speaking household in a
sea of French. It forces you to become an observer.
You're constantly watching the world around you,
but you're slightly fundamentally detached from
it. And he wasn't a slouch. He was smart. The
sources say he studied math and philosophy at
Carleton University. So he had the brain for
abstract logic, for deconstruction. But he didn't
stay in academia. He dropped out. Drifted around
for a bit and eventually landed in a job that
I think is absolutely the key to understanding
his physical presence on stage. The logging company.
He's a choker man for a logging company. And
we should explain what that is because it's not
a term most people know. No, and it often gets
glossed over as just, you know, blue collar credibility.
Yeah. But being a choker man is terrifying. Your
job is to crawl over these massive piles of felled
timber, often on steep, unstable mountainsides,
and wrap steel cables, or chokers, around the
logs. So a machine, a skidder, can then drag
them out of the forest. Precisely. It is wildly
dangerous. If a log shifts unexpectedly, you're
crushed. If one of those steel cables under tension
snaps, it can cut you in half. So that's your
9 to 5. That's your workplace. So consider that
experience for a moment. He spent his days in
a situation where a single wrong step literally
meant death. Now, compare that to the danger
of a stand -up set not going well. It puts it
in perspective. When you've worked as a choker
man, the idea of an audience of strangers staring
at you in silence because a joke failed, it just
doesn't register as a threat. The stakes are
completely different. That explains the fearlessness.
That's why he was so comfortable with silence.
Most comedians are terrified of bombing. It's
their absolute nightmare. Norm seemed to almost
thrive in it. He would stare down an audience
that wasn't laughing until they started laughing
at the fact that he didn't care. He won the war
of attrition. He had inoculated himself against
stage fright, against the fear of rejection,
and he needed that resilience immediately. His
first time on stage was at an amateur night at
Yuk Yuk's in Ottawa. This was 1985. And by his
own account, it was a total disaster. He fled
the club. He literally ran away. He did. He thought
he bombed so hard that he just walked out mid
-set or right after and swore he'd never go back.
The owner, a guy named Howard Wagman, had to
basically chase him down and convince him to
come back. He told him, no, you have something.
It's weird, but you have something. Come back.
It's just a reminder of how fragile these careers
are at the very beginning. One person's encouragement
can change the entire trajectory. And speaking
of fragile, things got very real for him very
quickly. Shortly after that, in 1986, he's diagnosed
with stomach cancer. In his 20s. Yeah, he's barely
getting started, and he's facing his own mortality
head on. It's tragic foreshadowing of the end
of his life, obviously. But it also cemented
that nihilistic streak in him early on. Oh, so?
When you go through something like that so young,
you tend to strip away a lot of the social niceties,
the desire to please everyone. You realize life
is short and you might as well say what you think.
So he recovers from that. He recovers. And by
the time he hits the Just for Laughs Festival
in Montreal, also in 1986, he's already fully
formed. The Montreal Gazette calls him one of
the country's hottest comics. The raw material
was all there. And that gets him noticed south
of the border. He moves to the U .S., does the
whole star search thing. Which is hilarious to
even imagine Norm Macdonald being judged on a
point system by Ed McMahon. It feels like a sketch
he would have written. It really does. But it
worked. It got him in the door. He lands a job
as a writer. First for the Dennis Miller Show
in 92. Short -lived show, but Miller was a big
deal. A very big deal. And then from there...
He goes to write for Roseanne from 92 to 93.
And at that moment, Roseanne was the biggest
show on television. It's a monster hit. And a
pressure cooker of a writer's room. But writing
for Roseanne Barr taught him something crucial
about voice. Roseanne had this very specific,
uncompromising, working class voice. And Norm
learned how to write jokes. that fit a persona
perfectly, that sounded authentic coming out
of someone's mouth. A skill set that would take
him to his next job. The biggest job? 30 Rockefeller
Plaza, 1993, Saturday Night Live. Okay, so let's
set the scene at SNL in 93. The cast was crowded
and loud. It was a frat house energy. You had
Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, David Spade, Mike
Myers, Chris Rock. It was a murderer's row of
huge comedic personalities. And then you have
Norm. And then you have Norm. He was older than
most of them. He was certainly more well -read.
And he was slower. And I mean that in terms of
his comedic tempo. Right. While everyone else
was screaming and falling through tables and
creating these huge energetic characters, Norm
was doing these very subtle, very weird impressions.
Like his Burt Reynolds on Celebrity Jeopardy.
The genius of the Burt Reynolds impression. was
that it wasn't really an impression of Burt Reynolds
at all. No, it wasn't. It was just Norm chewing
gum, wearing a cheap toupee, and acting like
an entitled, confused jerk who insisted on being
called Turd Ferguson. It was about the attitude,
not the voice. And it destroyed. He also did
Bob Dole, Larry King, Letterman himself. He was
a solid utility player. But the real revolution
happens in 1994 when Lorne Michaels makes a very
bold choice and gives him the anchor chair at
Weekend Update. This is the moment where Norm
Macdonald becomes Norm Macdonald in the public
consciousness. Before him, Update was usually
a bit goofy with Dennis Miller's rants or it
was political satire that leaned into getting
applause lines like with Kevin Nealon. Norm took
that desk and he turned all the lights down.
He made it bleak. He made it bleak and he made
it dangerous. He stripped away the performer
aspect of it. He wasn't winking at the camera.
He looked directly into the lens with his dead
-eyed stare and delivered jokes that were, frankly,
often horrifying. The running gags? The running
gags were key. He had recurring jokes about prison
rape, about crack whores. inexplicable music
career in Germany. Germans love David Hasselhoff.
It became a mantra. And the Frank Stallone bit.
We have to explain this because on paper it makes
absolutely zero sense. It's the ultimate non
sequitur. He would set up a news story about
something genuinely terrible. Unemployment numbers
are up. There's a nuclear waste leak. A tragic
accident. A real downer of a setup. And then
the punchline with absolutely no logical connector
delivered with total sincerity would be you guessed
it. Frank Stallone. Laughs Frank Stallone, of
course, being Sylvester Stallone's less famous
musician brother. The joke wasn't about Frank
Stallone. The joke was that a national news anchor
was blaming a B -list celebrity for global tragedies.
It was daddiest art projected into millions of
homes. And Sylvester Stallone apparently hated
it. He did. When Sly hosted the show, he actually
went to Norm and asked him to stop. Which is
amazing. Frank Stallone himself, to his credit,
eventually came around and realized it was funny
because it was so random and arbitrary. But Norm
was poking bears. He wasn't just doing comedy.
He was testing the limits of what NBC would let
him say on their airwaves. Which brings us to
the controversies, because he wasn't just being
weird. He was being offensive in a way that got
real serious pushback. Oh, yeah. The John Lauder
joke from 1996 really stands out to me as a moment
where you can just hear the air go out of the
room. So for context, John Lauder was one of
the murderers in the Brandon Pina case. This
was the... Horrific hate crime in Nebraska that
later became the movie Boys Don't Cry, a truly
awful story involving the rape and murder of
a trans man. Just a gut -wrenching story. So
Norm is reporting on the sentencing, and he says,
now this might strike some viewers as harsh,
but I believe everyone involved in this story
should die. Silence in the studio, I imagine.
You hear gasps, some nervous laughter. But activist
groups, particularly LGBTQ groups, were furious,
and rightly so from their perspective. It sounded
like he was condemning the victim along with
the murderers. NBC had to issue apologies. Did
Norm ever explain it? He sort of did, later.
He said his point was that the entire situation
was so filled with human misery and depravity
that it was just a black hole. But it was a clumsy
way to say it, and it was deliberately provocative.
It was a refusal to be sensitive in a moment
that called for sensitivity. That was his brand.
And then there was Michael Jackson. He was relentless.
Just absolutely savage. This was the mid -90s.
Jackson was still a pop deity to millions. The
first wave of allegations was out there. But
most of the media was very, very polite about
it. They used phrases like inappropriate conduct.
Norm was not polite. Norm was the opposite of
polite. He would just state flatly, Michael Jackson
is a homosexual pedophile. He wouldn't say alleged.
He wouldn't make a vague allusion to Neverland.
He used the specific brutal terms. Even when
Jackson was hospitalized for exhaustion. Especially
then. Jackson collapsed on stage. And Norm's
joke that Saturday was something like, sources
say he's doing better, but don't get any ideas.
He is still a homosexual pedophile. He repeated
it like a mantra. What was the goal there? Just
shock value. I think he was trying to force the
audience to confront the reality of the situation
rather than the celebrity of it. He was cutting
through the hero worship and saying, look at
what this person is accused of. And that absolute
refusal to bow to celebrity to protect a powerful
person is what set up the single biggest conflict
of his entire career. The O .J. Simpson saga.
This isn't just a comedian telling jokes anymore.
This becomes a cultural war fought from inside
a major television network. You have to set the
scene. It's 1995. The O .J. trial is the only
thing happening in America. It's on TV 24 -7.
The country is completely divided, often along
racial lines. But inside NBC, there's a very
specific and, for Norm, a very dangerous power
dynamic. The president of NBC West Coast is a
man named Don Ulmeier. The big boss. The guy
in charge. The man who built NBC's must -see
TV dominance. And, critically, one of O .J. Simpson's
best and oldest friends. It's not just a casual
acquaintance. No. They golfed together constantly.
Ohlmeyer was part of OJ's inner circle. To give
you an idea of the loyalty, after the acquittal,
Ohlmeyer threw a party for the jurors who voted
not guilty. Wow. That is the level of personal
investment we are talking about. So the head
of the entire network on the West Coast is firmly
publicly Team OJ, and the anchor of that network's
flagship comedy news segment is not. Not even
close. Norm, along with his head writer Jim Downey,
decided from day one that OJ was guilty. Period.
And they treated it as an incontrovertible fact.
And the jokes were brutal. They were relentless
every single week. A new book about the OJ trial
alleges that OJ's lawyers knew he was guilty.
In a related story, the sky is blue. Yeah, just
completely matter of fact. And when the verdict
came in, not guilty. The entire country held
its breath to see what SNL would do. Norm opened
Update that night with a very simple, devastating
line. He just looked at the camera and said,
well, it is finally official. Murder is legal
in the state of California. It's just such a
perfect line. And he knew who was watching. He
knew Ohlmeyer was watching. Ohlmeyer was furious.
The sources say he was sending notes constantly.
Lay off OJ. It's not funny anymore. You're alienating
half the audience. What was Norm's response?
Norm and Giuliani's response was to double down.
They wrote more O .J. jokes. They viewed it as
a matter of journalistic or at least comedic
integrity. Passo. Their argument was, if the
single biggest news story in the world is a famous
person getting away with a double murder, a satirical
news show must say that he did it. Anything else
is cowardice. It's bending to power. But Allmire
held the power, and in early 1998, he played
his hand. He fired Norm from the Weekend Update
desk. Jim Downey was fired as well. What was
the official reason they gave? It wasn't the
OJ stuff, right? Oh, no, of course not. The official
reason was declining ratings and a drop -off
in quality. Ohmeyer claimed that his focus group
research showed that people tuned out when Norm
came on. And did Norm buy that? Not at the time.
At the time, he saw it as pure censorship. But,
you know, years later in interviews, Norm actually
admitted that Allmire might have been technically
right about the ratings part. Really? He conceded
the point. He did in his own way. He said something
like, look, I was doing jokes about prison rape
and crack whores and long rambling stories. I
knew they weren't crowd pleasers. He understood
that from a purely corporate ratings driven standpoint,
he wasn't servicing the audience. He was servicing
the comedy. He was servicing the comedy and his
own conscience. But at the time, in 1998. He
did not go quietly into the night. He went to
war. A media war. Oh, it was a scorched earth
campaign. It was incredible. He immediately went
on his friend David Letterman's show on CBS,
NBC's biggest rival, and just unloaded. He flat
out accused Omeyer of firing him to protect his
murderer friend. He didn't pull any punches.
None. He went on Howard Stern's radio show and
did the same thing. calling Ohlmeier a liar and
a thug in the New York Daily News. He made it
a huge public fight. And Ohlmeier retaliated.
He was petty about it, too. Extremely petty for
a powerful network executive. Norm had a movie
coming out called Dirty Work. Ohlmeier blocked
NBC from running any advertisements for it. Just
a vindictive move. It was. But Norm's response
was perfect. He went to the press and said, the
best revenge against Don Ulmeier is for everyone
to go see the movie, specifically because he
won't show the ads. He turned the censorship
into a marketing tool. Exactly. There's this
incredible, awkward coda to his SNL tenure, though.
He's fired from the anchor desk, but he still
has a contract as a performer. So he has to stay
on to do sketches. Can you imagine the awkwardness,
walking those halls, seeing the executives who
just publicly humiliated you? It must have been
miserable. He said he hated it. But he does one
final sketch that I think is his true defiant
farewell to the show. It was a sketch called
Who's More Grizzled? With the musical guest,
Garth Brooks. Right. They're playing these two
old grizzled prospectors trying to one -up each
other. And at one point, Garth Brooks looks at
Norm's character and says, Completely in character.
You know, I don't much care for you. And Norm's
reply. And Norm, looking almost directly at the
camera, just says flatly, a lot of people don't.
It's the meta commentary. He's acknowledging
the firing, Allmire's hatred, all of it right
there in the middle of a silly sketch about cowboys.
It was his way of getting the last word, his
way of saying, I know what's happening. I know
you all know what's happening and I'm still standing.
He was dismissed from the show shortly after
that. So he leaves SNL, this huge platform, under
this massive cloud of controversy. And this kicks
off what some people called his wilderness years.
Right. He's out on his own. He makes that movie
Dirty Work, which was directed by his friend
Bob Saget. It's a cult classic now, but at the
time. At the time, critics hated it. And it didn't
do well at the box office. No, but it's a very
funny, very norm movie. It's literally a revenge
comedy, which fits his mood at the time perfectly.
Then he gets his own sitcom. The Norm Show, which
was later just called Norm. And it ran for three
seasons on ABC. You know, that's not a failure
by any means. Three -season run is respectable.
He played an ex -hockey player who gets busted
for tax evasion and has to become a social worker.
It was a pretty standard sitcom setup, but it
was a vehicle for his persona. It let him be
Norm. But what's really interesting about this
era is how he starts popping up in the weirdest
places. He becomes this prolific voice actor.
Lucky the dog. In the Eddie Murphy, Dr. Dolittle
movies. He's the voice of a wisecracking dog
in a huge family film franchise. And death on
Family Guy. The voice of death itself. He's Frank
the Beaver in commercials for Bell Mobility in
Canada. For a short time, he was even the voice
of Colonel Sanders for KFC. They replaced him
pretty quickly, didn't they? They did. Apparently
his version was a little too norm. But it's so
jarring, isn't it? You have this subversive,
dark, intellectual comic, this guy who just fought
a war with a network president, doing voices
for children's movies and fast food commercials.
But he took the work seriously. He had a distinct,
memorable voice, and he used it. The money was
good. But the defining moment, the artistic high
point of this whole post -SNL era, has to be
the Comedy Central roast of Bob Saget in 2008.
This is legendary. For people who are into comedy,
this performance is like the Zapruder film or
something. It gets analyzed frame by frame. And
context is absolutely key here. A Comedy Central
roast, especially at that time, was a bloodbath.
It's a competition to be as offensive, as raunchy,
as shocking as humanly possible. People say unspeakable
things about each other. It's a contest of cruelty,
basically. That's the whole point. Exactly. So
Norm is on the dais and everyone expects him,
as Saget's friend, to just destroy him with these
dark inside jokes. Instead, he walks up to the
podium, pulls out a stack of index cards and
starts reading these jokes. That sound like they
were written in 1955 for a Friars Club roast
of Milton Berle. Bob has a beautiful face, like
a flower, a cauliflower. There's a rumor going
around that Bob Saget had an oral fixation. Of
course, I don't believe it. He's a great guy.
Yeah. It was pure. unadulterated anti -comedy.
It was G -rated. It was intentionally beautifully
bad. And watching the audience reaction is the
best part. The civilians in the crowd, the celebrities
who aren't comedians, they are just baffled.
They're thinking, is he bombing? Is this the
end of his career? But then you look at the deus.
You look at the other comedians. Gilbert Gottfried,
Cloris Leachman, Jeff Ross, Saget himself. They
are crying with laughter. They're beside themselves.
They get it. They realize what he's doing. He
is subverting. the entire premise of the roast.
He is proving that he can get the biggest laughs
of the night by not being mean in a room that
is entirely dedicated to meanness. It was a protest.
It was a total act of defiance. He refused to
be shocking just because the format demanded
it of him. It was the most punk rock thing you
could possibly do at a roast. And he ended his
set with this incredibly sincere, heartfelt tribute,
calling Sagit a gentleman and a scholar and a
true friend. It was sweet. It was confounding.
He was brilliant. Now, we have to pivot here
a little bit because while he's doing these masterful
sort of high concept deconstructions of comedy
on stage, his personal life is being deconstructed
by a very serious addiction. Norm was a massive
gambler. And addiction is the right word, but
Norm analyzed it like a philosopher. He didn't
just gamble. He went to the absolute edge where
he went broke, totally bankrupt, twice. He admitted
in his book and in interviews to losing everything
he owned three separate times. Three times. Imagine
making millions of dollars and losing it all,
not once, but three times. The numbers are staggering.
He talked about winning six figures at a craps
table in Atlantic City early on, and that's what
hooked him. But the losses were way bigger. He
said his largest single loss was $400 ,000. Gone
in one night. Vaporized. I can't even process
the anxiety that would come with that. But Norm
said something about the losing that I find completely
fascinating. He said he almost preferred it to
winning. This is the key to his psyche, I think.
He said that winning was just more money. It
didn't fundamentally change anything, but losing.
Losing everything. He described it as a feeling
of profound relief. He said it cleared the mechanism.
Because you don't have to worry about protecting
your pile of chips anymore. Is that the idea?
Exactly. It stripped him down to zero. It forced
him to rely only on his wits and his talent again.
It was a reset button. For him, it seems he was
addicted to the risk, to the feeling of being
on the precipice, not necessarily to the reward.
He wasn't just a casino gambler either. He was
a serious poker player. A grinder. A real grinder.
He competed in the World Series of Poker. He
cashed in 2007 for over $13 ,000. But he was
also obsessed with online poker. Right. This
was in the boon years of online poker. And he
would play up to 20 tables at once on the Internet.
Just sitting there, click, click, click, click
for hours and hours. He said it was the only
thing that could shut his brain off. And he made
this incredible claim that when the U .S. government
shut down online poker, it saved his life. He
was serious. He said the constant grind was keeping
him awake for days at a time. He was just fueling
himself with caffeine and adrenaline. He was
replacing sleep with the dopamine hit of the
next hand. It was about occupying his mind. Occupying
the mind so the darker thoughts, the philosophical
anxieties couldn't get in. And speaking of deeper
thoughts, this is another one of the great contradictions
of Norm Macdonald. You have this guy who tells
jokes about crack whores who loses millions of
dollars at the craps table. And he was a devout
Christian. And not in a casual, I believe in
a higher power sort of way. He was serious about
it. He was deeply read in theology and religious
literature. In the comedy world, that's not the
norm, so to speak. Religion is usually the punchline.
You're supposed to be a cynical atheist. And
Norm just refused that. Yeah. He read Tolstoy.
He read Dostoevsky, Chekhov. In interviews, he
would compare his views on faith to Søren Kierkegaard
and Cardinal Newman. These are not lightweights.
I remember seeing him on the reality show Last
Comic Standing. He was a judge. That was such
a telling moment. There was a young contestant
who did this very lazy, very predictable set,
mocking the Bible and comparing it to Harry Potter,
just standard religionist fairy tale stuff. And
Norm stopped the show. He wasn't angry, but he
was serious. He said, I don't think the Bible
and Harry Potter are comparable. He then quoted
a J .K. Rowling interview to the guy to make
his point. He wasn't offended as a Christian,
it seemed. He was offended as an intellectual.
That's it, exactly. He hated lazy thinking. His
point was, if you're going to attack something
as foundational to Western civilization as the
Bible, you better know what you're talking about.
You better have done the reading. He respected
the text. It goes back to that same integrity,
that refusal to just go along with the crowd.
The comedy crowd says religion is dumb, so Norm
says, actually, let's talk about Kierkegaardian
leaps of faith. And he played with that idea
of truth versus fiction in his book. Right, based
on a true story, a memoir. Which he subtitled,
Not a Memoir. It's a semi -fictional memoir.
He wrote a book about his own life. that is filled
with the most obvious fantastical lies. He has
a ghostwriter character who is a real person
in the book following him around. He tells these
elaborate stories that clearly never happen.
He does. Why do that? Why not just write a straightforward
confessional autobiography? It probably would
have sold better. Because Norm believed that
the truth of a person isn't a list of facts and
dates. It's the vibe, the voice, the spirit of
that person. He felt he could tell you more about
who he really was by making up a crazy funny
story than by telling you what he had for breakfast
on June 5th, 1994. The fiction was truer than
the facts. Which brings us, in a very heavy way,
to the ultimate truth that he hid from absolutely
everyone. The final chapter of his life. The
secret. This is the part of his story that when
you learn it, it recontextualizes everything
we've just talked about. Okay, so it's 2013.
Norm is enjoying a bit of a career renaissance.
He has his brilliant podcast, Norm MacDonald
Live. He's about to get a show on Netflix. He's
revered by this new generation of online comedy
fans, but privately. Privately, he is diagnosed
with multiple myeloma. It's a cancer of the plasma
cells in the bone marrow. It's a serious, often
terminal, blood cancer. And he tells. Who? Almost
nobody. His immediate family, his agent, and
his producing partner, Laurie Jo Hootstra. That's
it. Lorne Michaels didn't know. David Letterman
didn't know. His best friends in comedy, like
Adam Sandler and David Spade, had no idea. The
public certainly didn't know. For nine years.
Nine years. He underwent chemotherapy. He took
heavy medications. He was in and out of hospitals.
He faced the prospect of his own death. And he
did it all in total, absolute silence. Why? I
mean, in this day and age, a public figure battling
cancer. It's a PR opportunity. You get the magazine
cover. You get the Oprah interview. You get the
bravery award at some gala. That is exactly what
he despised. That is what he was running from.
He said explicitly to the very few people who
knew that he did not want the diagnosis to affect
how he was perceived by the audience. You don't
want pity. He said, I don't want the audience
to look at me and think, oh, they're poor man.
He wanted the last to be clean, untainted. Because
if you know a comedian is dying, you laugh differently.
You laugh because you want to be nice. You laugh
out of sympathy. And Norm viewed that as a fundamental
corruption of the art form. A fake laugh. A fake
laugh. For him, the transaction had to be pure.
You laugh because the joke is funny or you don't
laugh because it isn't. There could be no other
variables. And you have to think about the physical
toll this took on him and how he let people misinterpret
it. He gained a lot of weight in his later years.
Dexamethasone. It's a powerful steroid that's
a common part of myeloma treatment. It makes
you bloat. It gives you that moon face look.
And people online and even some critics were
cruel about it. They made jokes. They said he
was getting fat, that he was letting himself
go, that he looked like an old lesbian, a joke
he would sometimes lean into and make about himself.
And he let them. He let them mock him for being
out of shape rather than admit that he was sick.
That is a level of commitment to the bit. The
bit being, I'm just a regular guy that I can't
even wrap my head around. He would rather be
ridiculed for his appearance than pitied for
his tragedy. It's unbelievable. He also suffered
from peripheral neuropathy, another side effect,
which caused pain in his hands and feet. He had
to quit golf and tennis, things he loved, but
he never explained why. And he kept working right
up until the very end. He was recording voiceovers
for a Seth MacFarlane show, The Orville, from
his hospital bed. He was planning and writing
a new hour of stand -up. And then he died on
September 14th, 2021. He was 61 years old. And
for the entire world, it was a complete shock.
It was a shockwave because nobody saw it coming.
It was like a magician's final trick. He was
there, vibrant and funny, and then he was just
gone. But he left one last thing behind for the
audience. Nothing special. His final stand -up
special. He had this whole new hour of material
ready to go, but he couldn't film it with an
audience because of the pandemic and his declining
health. So in the summer of 2020, before he was
going to go into the hospital for a major procedure,
he thought he might not wake up from. What did
he do? He sat down in his living room, put on
a shirt and a sports coat, put on a pair of headphones,
turned on a single camera, and he did the entire
hour -long set. With no audience, no laughter,
no feedback. Just a dying man talking to a lens.
And Netflix released it posthumously. And it's
brilliant. It's maybe the most essential Norm
Macdonald performance there is. It was nominated
for three Emmy Awards. Because it proved that
his timing, his sense of rhythm, was so internal,
so perfect, that he didn't even need the audience's
feedback to know where the pauses and the beats
were. He was performing for an imaginary audience
in his head, and he nailed it. It's the purest
distillation of his comedy, just the man and
the words. It is. And the tributes that followed
his death. From Chappelle, from Letterman, from
Lorne Michaels, from everyone. They weren't just
mourning a friend. They were mourning a standard,
a standard of artistic integrity that doesn't
really exist anymore. And there is one final
perfect irony to all this. In April of 2024,
O .J. Simpson died. And what happened? Instantly,
all over social media, what went viral? Norm's
weekend update jokes. 25 years later. It was
like a final victory lap from beyond the grave.
All his old clips, murder is legal in the state
of California. All of it was everywhere. Conan
O 'Brien pointed this out on his show. He said
that because Norm refused to move on or be polite
or forget about it, he ended up creating the
definitive, lasting, historical record of how
a huge portion of the world actually felt about
that trial. He was the only one honest enough
to keep saying it. So his version became the
one that history remembered. So we've looked
at the logger, the anchor, the gambler, the believer
and the secret warrior. When you put it all together,
what's the final takeaway? What did Norm Macdonald
represent? I think it comes down to what we talked
about at the very beginning. Risk. Norm Macdonald
lived his entire life with all his chips on the
table. He risked his physical safety in the woods.
He risked his entire career for a joke about
a murderer. He risked his financial stability
over and over for the thrill of the dice. And
in the end, he risked his own legacy by refusing
to explain himself or his suffering. He never
asked for our sympathy. He only asked for our
attention. And even then, it felt like he only
wanted it on his own terms. Which is why he remains
so compelling. In a world of constant brand management
and therapeutic oversharing, he was the last
great mystery. And that brings us to the final
thought I want to leave with you. Go ahead. Norm
Macdonald went broke gambling, he destroyed his
own biggest career opportunity for the sake of
a joke, and he refused to monetize his own tragedy
for sympathy points, which is something our culture
almost demands now. So the question is, in an
era where a career is a brand to be managed,
was his refusal to compromise his greatest act
of self -sabotage, or was it the very thing that
made him a genius? Was destroying the career
the only way to perfect the art? Something to
think about. Thank you for listening to this
Dimp Dive. It's a reminder that sometimes the
funniest thing you can do is simply tell the
truth no matter who gets mad. Or who gets fired.