Norm Macdonald, the comedian whose mischievous glint and deadpan style carried him to success as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, died on Tuesday at the age of 61 years old. Unknown to the public, Macdonald had endured a nine-year battle with cancer. His friend and production partner Lori Jo Hoekstra confirmed his death, saying:
‘He was most proud of his comedy. 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 born and raised in Quebec City to a couple of teachers. He graduated early from Gloucester High School, and began to earn a reputation as a stand-up in the local comedy clubs including the recently opened Yuk Yuk’s in Ottawa. Following a performance at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in 1986, the Montreal Gazette called him ‘one of this country’s hottest comics’, and after appearing as a contestant on Star Search in 1990 he was ready for television.
First building his resume behind the screen, Macdonald began writing for The Dennis Miller Show before being hired by the hit sitcom Roseanne ahead of the 1992 season. Macdonald was perturbed by the nature of a sitcom script, which from his background in stand-up seemed to be lacking in punchlines, but he was credited as the writer for two episodes of Roseanne before leaving to join the cast of Saturday Night Live, the flagship NBC sketch show and launchpad for so many comedians.
Macdonald first gained attention for his impressions, which would come to encompass Larry King, Quentin Tarantino, Burt Reynolds in the show’s long-running parody Celebrity Jeopardy!, and the ageing Republican senator Bob Dole. From 1994 he served as the anchor for Weekend Update, following in the footsteps of Chevy Chase and Dennis Miller while adding a surreal bent and giddy bite to the influential news satire.
Macdonald made running gags of Frank Stallone and the sexual proclivities of Michael Jackson, and peppered his newspeak with references to crack whores and David Hasselhoff. But while Weekend Update made Macdonald a household name, the sketch would also prove his undoing when it drew the ire of NBC’s west coast executive Don Ohlmeyer. Following repeated jabs at O. J. Simpson, one of Ohlmeyer’s golfing buddies, Macdonald was removed from Weekend Update and lost his job on Saturday Night Live, though he later suggested that the executive had simply failed to appreciate his unique tone as anchor.
Disappointed to lose his job, the rancour continued when Macdonald accused Ohlmeyer of sabotaging the promotion for his 1998 film Dirty Work. Directed by Bob Saget, featuring cameos from Don Rickles, John Goodman, Adam Sandler, and Chris Farley in his final role, the revenge comedy was the first starring vehicle for Macdonald but flopped among critics. Pared back to achieve a PG-13 rating, the film has nevertheless remained a cult classic.
The Norm Show found Macdonald spinning his wheels, stranded alongside Laurie Metcalf, Ian Gomez, and Artie Lange as the ABC show adhered to a conventional sitcom format. He voiced the character of the dog Lucky in the Dr. Dolittle series of movies with Eddie Murphy, and starred opposite Dave Chappelle and Danny DeVito in the comedy Screwed, which much like Dirty Work failed to score at the box office.
A couple of failed pilots and commercial work for the Canadian wireless company Bell Mobility saw Macdonald’s career flounder for the best part of a decade, until Bob Saget’s Comedy Central Roast, stand-in hosting duty for Dennis Miller, and regular guest appearances on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien restored some familiarity to his face on the small screen.
Norm Macdonald thought that he would only be remembered thanks to Saturday Night Live, and was sometimes content in his later years to cut a bemused, comically hapless figure even as he continued to work on new material. And perhaps it was true that after Weekend Update he never quite found the four walls capable of providing a settled home for his roving brand of humour.
But there were fans who had never grown up watching Saturday Night Live or who the show had long since passed by, who knew Norm instead for his roasts and talk show appearances and hosting ventures. And there were no doubt fans who continued to attend his shows and stuck by him all the while, sharing in some of life’s roguish joys and bitter disappointments.
Through video sharing platforms and streaming services, Norm cultivated a new generation of followers, who revelled in the Bob Saget roast and his numerous Conan appearances, who perhaps got to know him for the first time alongside Jerry Seinfeld as he toasted Richard Nixon and Kojak in his episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, who found him through the internet murk of Norm Macdonald Live, or who cherished his exquisitely rendered and tearful goodbye to the Late Show with David Letterman.
The Letterman bit took Macdonald many hours to write, as he sought to pay fitting tribute to one of his comic idols. Tackling big themes, from a man whose tastes ranged from Klondike bars to Russian literature, and returning to the Letterman stage for one final fling 25 years after his debut as a televised stand-up comedian, Macdonald turned his attentions to the absurdity of war and the horrors of petty bureaucracy before expressing his love for his longtime friend and youthful inspiration.
In the meantime, Macdonald had hosted a short-lived sports show and released Me Doing Stand-Up as his first special for Comedy Central. He had recurring roles in the comedies The Middle and Sunnyside, and contributed his voice to offbeat animated films and the adult series Mike Tyson Mysteries. He eventually settled in behind the desk of Norm Macdonald Live, where he played host to his fellow comedians alongside The Comedy Store booker Adam Eget.
In 2016, he published his first book in the form of the semi-fictional retrospective Based on a True Story. The text was well received, though the public clamoured for the seedy tales of married life which they would have no doubt received had the book been a memoir. In 2017 the special Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery arrived on Netflix. And in 2018 his ramshackle podcast moved over to the streaming platform with a new title, Norm Macdonald Has a Show, though by this point his talents thrived best the looser the structure.
His best bits were replayed almost on loop on YouTube and other forms of social media, from the elaborate moth joke which riffed on The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, to his riotous takedown of the film Chairman of the Board starring Carrot Top and Courtney Thorne-Smith, which in other hands might have seemed gratuitous rather than rib-tickling. There was his excoriating introduction to The Espys from 1998, and that Bob Saget roast where he subverted the usual string of put-downs and risque euphemisms with a crafty batch of hayseed wordplay.
He possessed an old school penchant for the careful crafting of a joke and an anarchist sensibility, at least within the confines of comedy, where he loved to juke and scramble as the world about him crumbled and burned. His preferred modes were the faux epic, garrulous and homespun in the style of a bygone oral tradition as he deliberately laboured the joke, piling up absurdities until the winning punchline, and the stunning interjection as he let the air settle after curls from his acrid tongue. In his personal life he appeared to be something of a homebody, and joked about never having travelled outside of North America, but as a comic he rode the waves and sailed high seas.
The ups and downs of his professional life were exacerbated by his penchant for gambling, which resulted in a few sleepless nights and six-figure losses. In search of some message or meaning in the final chapter of his book, Norm wrote:
‘The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes by fast, real fast, and if you’re not careful it’s too late. Of course, the young man will never understand this truth. But looking back now, I can see that my life since SNL has been a full sprint, trying with all my might to outrun the wolves of irrelevancy snapping at my heels. It has all been in vain, of course. They caught and devoured me years ago. But not completely.‘
Norm Macdonald thought that the perfect joke would be one where the setup and the punchline were identical, and he felt himself lucky. His leukemia diagnosis was seemingly guarded from all but a few close family and friends. He was married once, with his son Dylan born in 1993. His death prompted an outpouring from his fellow comics, including Bob Saget, Conan O’Brien, and David Letterman, who wrote ‘Norm was the best. An opinion shared by me and all peers. Always up to something, never certain, until his matter-of-fact delivery leveled you’.
