We Can Never Go Back to That Restaurant Again Wife Joke
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Norm Macdonald, Still in Search of the Perfect Joke
He has won a cult following by playing the wise fool, but his comedic ambitions are much greater than that. If he could only hold down a job.
M idway through his third orange Fanta, in the course of explaining why he doesn't talk to strangers anymore, Norm Macdonald told the story of one of his stalkers. We were at the Panini Kabob Grill, an aggressively normal eatery in a planned community of shops and condos not far from his home on the Westside of Los Angeles. It was April, sunny but mild. The night before, Macdonald taped an episode of his new Netflix talk show, and he still had makeup in the crevices around his nostrils when he arrived for brunch. We were sitting with Lori Jo Hoekstra — Macdonald's producing partner for the last 20 years — and a representative from Netflix. The tables were heavily lacquered, the menus were laminated and there were a few discreetly placed TVs. It was the kind of place where Macdonald was both unlikely to be noticed and virtually guaranteed to be the most famous person there.
Macdonald used to linger after his nightclub performances to talk to fans, he explained, but the stalker made him stop. She lived in Florida and was convinced that they'd been conducting a secret affair for decades. Her psychiatrist contacted Macdonald's manager to warn that she might be planning to harm him. His manager did not write down the psychiatrist's number, though, so Macdonald learned only that she was out there, somewhere in Florida. Later, when his manager offered him some Florida dates, Macdonald cited her as a reason not to go. His manager dismissed this concern.
"That loony tunes?" Norm recalled him saying. "She's crazy."
"That's the point!" Macdonald protested. "I'm not going to play chess with her."
Hoeskstra was visibly amused by this anecdote, even though she had surely heard it before. Macdonald went on to say that he often wondered why nightclub comics weren't more frequently murdered. "It would be easy to walk in with a gun and kill one of them," he said. It seemed an insight best kept from reporters. The Netflix representative became deeply interested in a point somewhere in the middle distance, and Hoekstra said "Norm" in a tone of voice that must have been familiar to both of them. In the silence that followed, he turned to me and asked, "Do you find stand-up is no good anymore?"
By all outward appearances, stand-up is thriving. The number of shows and specials, as well as the critical attention devoted to them, has reached heights not seen since the 1980s. This rising tide has also lifted Macdonald, who is still best known for anchoring the "Weekend Update" segment of "Saturday Night Live" from 1994 until January 1998, when he was fired during the Christmas hiatus — not by the show's creator and producer, Lorne Michaels, but by the NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer. The reason has always been a subject of debate. The popular explanation was that Ohlmeyer, who died in 2017 and was a close friend of O.J. Simpson's, resented a string of jokes about Simpson's murder trial that continued long after the former football star was acquitted.
In retrospect, the Simpson trial was eerily suited to Macdonald's sense of humor, in that it centered on an assumption widely held but politely denied. While the news media was obliged to withhold judgment, Macdonald gave voice to the popular belief that Simpson was guilty, delivering joke after joke about how he was obviously a murderer. Macdonald made the number and intensity of these jokes a kind of gag in itself, even after he left "Saturday Night Live." Hosting ESPN's Espy Awards one month after he was fired, he congratulated Charles Woodson on winning the Heisman Trophy: "That is something that no one can ever take away from you," he said, "unless you kill your wife and a waiter."
His refusal to stop saying things like that on TV fits his image, among his fans, as a comedian who prioritizes the joke above all else — even his career. Since "S.N.L," that career has been aesthetically pleasing but commercially uneven. The dedicated fan will identify two patterns in his television work: It is invariably funny, and it is invariably canceled. His longest-running show, the sitcom "Norm," aired on ABC between 1999 and 2001. "A Minute With Stan Hooper" was canceled after six episodes. "Sports Show With Norm Macdonald" lasted nine. He also played the KFC mascot Colonel Sanders in a handful of commercials.
Mostly, he does nightclub comedy. He estimates he was on the road 44 weeks last year — a grueling schedule for a 58-year-old man who doesn't drink and describes himself as never having been "promiscuous." Between his stand-up, his short-lived but distinctive TV projects and a series of memorable appearances on late-night talk shows, he has captured an audience that is dedicated and, in many cases, influential. Jon Stewart described him to me as "a master of stand-up"; David Letterman, who is credited as "special counsel" on Macdonald's new show and helped sell it to Netflix, likened him to a "pitcher with five out pitches."
"In my mind, I'm just a stand-up," Macdonald said at brunch, interrupting his thought to thank the waitress for bringing his eggs. He is scrupulously polite. In conversation, he seems to make a point of following other people's remarks with notes of encouragement, saying "that's interesting" or "exactly right." Even on the set of his own show, he speaks quietly, almost to the point of diffidence. He looms at over six feet, though, and he has that voice — flat but resonant, drawn, the comedy version of Buffalo Bill in "Silence of the Lambs." He continued: "But other people don't think that. They go, oh, the guy from 'S.N.L.' is doing stand-up now."
Two decades later, he has yet to recapture the fame he enjoyed when he left that show. To his thinking, though, he has moved steadily closer to his own ideal of what comedy can or should be. Macdonald speaks often about a kind of Platonic form of a joke whose punch line is identical to its setup. He feels he came close in 1995 on "Weekend Update": "Julia Roberts told reporters this week that her marriage to Lyle Lovett has been over for some time," he said, as a picture of the country singer's asymmetrical face appeared behind him. "The key moment, she said, came when she realized that she was Julia Roberts, and that she was married to Lyle Lovett."
At that time, Macdonald was better known for shocking punch lines than for elegant writing, although the elements of his mature approach were already in place. Over the last two decades, he has grown more devoted to the pure joke, even as comedy has turned away from it. Contemporary stand-up increasingly positions the comedian either as a relatable personality whom audiences can follow from role to role or as a righteous truth-teller. Macdonald is neither. He is resolutely nonpolitical in an industry bent on producing new versions of "The Daily Show," an ironist working on the same platform as "Nanette." At a moment when comedians work for applause as much as laughter, by being vulnerable, honest, outspoken, socially relevant, Macdonald is still pursuing the laugh — and nothing more. This anachronistic approach might be limiting his audience, but it could also explain his enduring appeal, because it lends him a kind of moral authority. He is something like a comedy ascetic, demanding a purity that temporal jokes cannot achieve. He seems vital and transgressive again, but pushing 60, he also seems tragic. One thing that makes him a captivating figure onstage is the tension between his refusal to do material about himself and the sympathy you feel for a craftsman who has not been rewarded in proportion to his talent.
At brunch, he cited the '70s stand-up Robert Klein as saying that when he started, there were 50 stand-ups, and five were funny; suddenly, there were 500 comedians, and five were funny. Macdonald thinks the dynamic Klein described has continued apace, and now the ratio is something like 500,000 to five. He rejected the idea that he was just getting older. "I don't understand abstract art, but I'm not stupid enough to think it's worthless," he said. "I don't think comedy, though, is that complicated."
Comedy is a fundamentally social form. You can write a novel at home alone, but it's virtually impossible to develop a stand-up set without an audience. The structure of stand-up is also rigidly proscribed; while narrative comedy can be about anything, stand-up is almost always about one person addressing the audience directly, without costumes or props. When was the last time you saw a lapel mic instead of a hand-held one, much less a duo or a musical act? The combination of strong audience presence and clearly defined expectations in stand-up encourages comics to try to subvert those expectations. This is anti-comedy: a way to succeed not by making people laugh so much as making them think about the form.
Macdonald is not an anti-comic. He despises anti-comedy, but that has not stopped people from mistaking his work for it, sometimes to his benefit. In 1992, after touring the clubs of his native Canada for the better part of a decade — including a four-month stint opening for Sam Kinison in 1984 — he moved to Los Angeles. There, he heard from another comic that Dennis Miller liked one of his jokes. Macdonald reached out to Miller, who asked him to submit a packet for his new talk show. Macdonald bought a copy of USA Today and went through it article by article, struggling to come up with topical material. He wound up submitting exactly one joke: "Jeffrey Dahmer went on trial today for murdering and cannibalizing 15 men. But I don't like his chances after hearing what his defense strategy is going to be: They started it." Miller hired him, thinking his single-joke packet was, as Macdonald puts it, "some Andy Kaufman move." He wrote for several episodes, then joined the writers' room of "Roseanne" after the titular Barr saw him doing stand-up. The next year, he got a call from Lorne Michaels.
None of these details appears in Macdonald's 2016 book, "Based on a True Story: A Memoir" — which, despite its title, is actually a novel. It recasts the events of his life as the exploits of a drug-addled sociopath desperately recycling the same joke about answering machines. (The joke, mentioned repeatedly, is never revealed.) This kind of strategic withholding is a central element of Macdonald's act. Although he is unmistakably intelligent in real life — Letterman told me he was "maybe the smartest guy in comedy" — he likes to establish a position of ignorance and then lecture his audience from it. Jerry Seinfeld described this approach to me as "sophisticated dumbness" — a technique that makes any glimpse of the real Macdonald feel thrilling. In those rare moments when he chuckles at his own joke or otherwise breaks character, we feel a rush of empathy, as though we have caught the playwright watching from the wings.
This awareness of an amused Macdonald lurking behind the deadpan Norm is what animates his forays into meta-comedy — not the smug refusals of anti-comedy, but genuinely funny subversions that exploit what audiences have come to expect from the form. Consider the moth joke. During a now-infamous appearance on "The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien" in 2009, Macdonald told a long joke about a moth who goes to a podiatrist's office. He described in dramatic terms the moth's complaints — from the boss who delighted in exercising power over him, to the aged stranger he once recognized as his wife, to the son that, he feared, he no longer loved. After nearly three minutes of Tolstoyan elaboration, the podiatrist finally says that he sympathizes, but what the moth really needs is a psychiatrist. "Why on earth did you come here?" he asks. The moth answers, "Because the light was on." After delivering this punch line, Macdonald stared at O'Brien, only just perceptibly smirking, while the audience cheered.
The moth joke is not a shaggy-dog story, one of those ambling anecdotes with no point. As anti-comedy, the shaggy-dog story congratulates the audience for being in on the absence of a joke. The moth joke resembles a shaggy-dog story structurally, but its wrenching punch line reveals Macdonald's mastery of craft. "Because the light was on" is classical. It resolves the tension Macdonald has built up by situating the moth within the dynamics of human psychology and misery, slamming us back into joke territory with a reminder that, actually, it's just a moth. That's what makes us laugh, but what makes us cheer is the audacity of telling this joke on network television for three minutes, when you might be expected to use that time to promote your own career.
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The moth joke rewards a type of person whose lifestyle was not viable 20 years ago: the comedy nerd. Macdonald's talk-show appearances, previously misremembered as anecdotes or entombed as home VHS recordings, are now collected on YouTube. His 2016 appearance on "Conan," in which he plugged his book for 30 seconds and spent the next three and a half minutes doing Catskills-style jokes about how his wife was "a real battle-ax," has over 1.5 million views. Shareable digital archives have allowed casual Norm fans to become cult Norm fans. YouTube also allowed Macdonald to fulfill what seemed like his destiny in narrowcasting with "Norm Macdonald Live," a video podcast with the co-host Adam Eget that featured guests like Tom Green and Caitlyn Jenner, which he uploaded directly to the site between 2013 and 2017.
That podcast became the proof of concept for his new Netflix show. On a set whose sparseness and simple lighting evoke Charlie Rose, Macdonald interviews a single guest each episode. There is no studio audience, although the crew can periodically be heard laughing in the background. The conversational format reveals the friendly autodidact Macdonald has made a career of hiding. "Norm just kind of twinkles, even when he's not playing the dumb guy," Letterman told me. "He's deadly funny, he's incredibly smart, he's wildly personable and he's peculiar."
The program is descriptively titled "Norm Macdonald Has a Show." It offers to fulfill the promise his book subverted: Here Macdonald will be himself, talking with other celebrities about things that actually happened. There is another way to read that title, though: as fatalistic disillusionment with show business. "My idea was 'The Latest Show,' " Macdonald told me. "That's a clever little title." Norm Macdonald has a show, and we all know what happens next.
Macdonald and I made plans to eat dinner in Los Angeles on a Saturday night in mid-July. Those plans did not come to fruition. He thought I was coming the following weekend, and he had a bad cold. Any time your subject has a cold, it wrecks the profile. We rescheduled for the next day, planning to drive up to a seafood restaurant in Malibu. This plan, too, went the way of the buffalo. After considering and rejecting a couple more restaurants, he suggested the Daily Grill, a chain restaurant attached to the LAX Hilton. The staff there greeted him with warm familiarity.
Macdonald is a creature of habit, and many of those habits are not conducive to the advancement of his career. He doesn't go to parties. He doesn't schmooze. He doesn't drive, which in Los Angeles is like being confined to an iron lung. He used to live in West Hollywood, which made it easy to drop by the Comedy Store for surprise sets. But now he lives in a planned community with his adult son, Dylan, next to the home he bought for his mother. He's deep in the wad of office parks and car dealerships near LAX and has to take a hundred-dollar Uber to get to the Comedy Store, so he rarely does. By his own admission, he spends a lot of time at home, going down what he calls "rabbit holes" on YouTube or watching sports on television. The night before our dinner, he stayed up until dawn live-tweeting the World Series of Poker.
Macdonald's life seems characterized by routines that shade over into compulsion. He quit drinking as a teenager, after an initial foray into weeklong binges and blackouts. He was a chain smoker before he stopped 10 years ago — stand-up footage from his youth shows the telltale gesture of index and middle fingers toward mouth — and he said that, if he found he had a few cigarettes left in the pack around bedtime, he would stay up to finish it. He seems to love carbohydrates; in his dressing room after the taping, I watched him consume the better part of an economy bag of SweeTart Ropes. At the Daily Grill, he ate a heroic amount of bread before telling me he would have done "Weekend Update" forever.
"I told Lorne I would hire on like Walter Cronkite, and just take the money as it exists, and never ask for a raise, and just do it until I was 65," he said. He paused a moment before adding, "He didn't like that idea."
As our pasta arrived, Macdonald said he rejects the O.J. hypothesis and has come to believe that he was fired for his material. "We were doing experimental stuff, non sequiturs," he said. "Ohlmeyer would watch Leno kill every night for 15 minutes. Every joke, huge laughs, and then I'd do 10 minutes a week and sometimes not get laughs."
At that time, "S.N.L." was at a critical and popular nadir — Macdonald told me of watching in astonishment as the live audience booed the final installment of the "It's Pat" sketch — and the "Update" writers were trying to break out of it. He hired Frank Sebastiano, a delivery man who had submitted hundreds of handwritten jokes along with his packages, whom Hoekstra credits with the blunt tone "Update" developed during Macdonald's tenure. (After Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley filed for divorce: "According to friends, the two were never a good match. She's more of a stay-at-home type, and he's more of a homosexual pedophile.") Such acerbic jokes felt increasingly at odds with the rest of the show, which was moving toward silly sketches like Cheri Oteri's cheerleaders and Chris Kattan's Mango.
Macdonald often skipped the curtain call, he said, because it made him feel foolish. "When I got 'Update,' I'd just leave right after 'Update,' " he told me. How did the rest of the cast feel about that? "Eh," he said, "not great." He rarely attended the show's famous cast parties, either. Instead, he would take the studio-provided limo to Atlantic City and play craps.
A six-figure win on one of these trips changed his relationship to gambling forever. Instead of cashing out, he took the chips home in a paper bag and stashed them in his refrigerator. He couldn't go back to playing $25 craps after that. Macdonald has had long runs of compulsive betting on poker, craps, blackjack and sports book. Although he spoke candidly about his tendency to gamble in problematic ways, he hasn't quit. At one point he went to Gamblers Anonymous, but he said listening to all those stories about gambling only made him want to gamble more. As the check arrived, he talked about other people's tales of hitting bottom, losing their houses or their children's college funds. "I never got close to that," he said. "So you never went broke?" I asked. "No, I did go broke," he said immediately. "But I always had a job, so it was different."
It is tempting to conclude from this kind of statement that Macdonald is sad. When he says he doesn't care about money, it must be a mechanism to defend himself from regret over his gambling losses — because who wouldn't regret that? Likewise, when he laments the state of contemporary comedy, it is easy to assume he is lamenting the state of his own career. But to make these judgments is to succumb to the fallacy that he values what most people value. Maybe Macdonald really is just in it for the jokes and the admiration of his peers, and what looks by other standards like a series of disappointments is, to him, success enough.
After dinner, Macdonald and I joined Hoekstra and five friends at the Hollywood Park Casino, where he had reserved a dealer for a single-table tournament in Texas Hold 'Em. Macdonald played well, and in the end he and Gabe Veltri — a former sound engineer who recorded Adam Sandler's comedy albums before he quit to play poker full time — agreed to split the prizes for first and second place. Macdonald still insisted on counting out their chips, though, to see who was ahead; his stack exceeded Veltri's by less than 10 percent.
It was after 1 in the morning, but Macdonald was amped up. As we drove back to his place, he talked about the Henny Youngman one-liner "Take my wife, please." Youngman delivered this joke without a pause before the last word, which, Macdonald pointed out, does not make sense. The terminal "please" is funny because it shifts the meaning of "take my wife [for example]" to "take my wife [away from me.]" He wondered whether Youngman intentionally removed the pause to further increase the efficiency of an already stunningly economical joke, or if it became so popular he delivered it as a catchphrase. The latter possibility seemed tragic to him, a joke's equivalent of death.
We stopped in front of his condo, where Macdonald opened the door, put one foot on the curb and talked to me for the next 90 minutes. He talked about how bewildered he felt when he heard that Mo'Nique got $10 million for a Netflix special — a rumor that the actor and comedian debunked only recently — when he was paid a fraction of that. He discussed the galling experience of being asked to "audition" for his own comedy special — "Hitler's Dog, Gossip and Trickery," released last year — by having content executives attend one of his performances. (Netflix initially passed on the special, only to reverse its decision later.) He talked about his desire to overcome these kinds of attachments, and the satisfaction he found in working on his next book, a 600-page straight novel that he plans to publish under a pen name. The process was maddeningly difficult, but he liked the way it organized his days. "If I can not watch sports and not gamble, so much time opens up," he said.
At 58, he said, he was having the disturbing experience of recognizing some of his own opinions as the thinking of an old man. There were new ideas about gender identity that he knew were right but couldn't quite get his head around. He recounted what Dylan said to him when he broached this subject: "Why do you always need to feel you understand things?" The question had set him thinking, and he related it to me with a father's uninhibited pride.
Many of these remarks he prefaced with the caveat that he knew he shouldn't say them in front of a reporter. He couldn't help it, though; he seemed compelled to speak honestly, the way he once felt compelled to finish a pack of cigarettes at bedtime. He even talked about politics. Mostly, though, he talked about his desire to transcend such things — current events, popular wisdom, even the quotidian details of his own life — to operate in the realm of the pure joke, one that's still funny 100 years from now.
"Making people laugh is a gift," he said. "Preaching to them is not a gift. There are people who can do that better." His eyes seemed to glimmer in the light from the dashboard before he completed the thought: "Preachers."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/magazine/norm-macdonald-still-in-search-of-the-perfect-joke.html
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