Netflix documentary film “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald”, which was released a few days ago, looks into one rather baffling but undeniably funny comedian. While he was probably one of the funniest comedians working in Saturday Night Lives during the 1990s, Norm Macdonald (1959 ~ 2021) was a rather elusive dude usually hiding behind his jokes and gags, and that makes him quite interesting to say the least.
The documentary, directed by Judd Apatow, mainly consists of a heap of archival footage clips featuring Macdoland, and that is more than enough for us to see how funny Macdonald was as a stand-up comedian. He often said very outrageous stuffs such as a joke involved with Hitler’s dog, but he was totally deadpan in his understated delivery, and that was why many of his potentially offensive jokes drew a lot of laughs and chuckles from his audiences even though they would also make his audiences wince more than once.
Unlike many of his peers ranging from Adam Sandler to Sarah Silverman, Macdonald did not reveal much about himself, and we get a bit amused by how often he baffled others in case of his past. As shown from the documentary, he usually exaggerated or fabricated his past in front of his interviewers and audiences, and not even his close friends/colleagues were not so sure about his past. When he published a book named “Based on a True Story” in 2016, many people assumed it was a memoir, but it was actually a heavily fictionalized account of his life as he frankly admitted later.
One true thing about Macdonald’s early life is that he was born in Quebec City, Cananda in 1959. In contrast to some of his preposterous claims, he had a fairly normal middle childhood years, and his older brother Nick Macdonald is actually a prominent TV journalist, which is rather ironic considering that Macdonald was mainly known for playing a TV anchor in the “Weekend Update” segment of Saturday Night Live (SNL) during the 1990s.
During the early years of his stand-up comedian career, Macdonald struggled here and there for any career breakthrough, and then there came an unexpected opportunity via David Letterman, who willingly gave Macdonald a chance on “Late Night with David Letterman” in 1990 even though Macdonald was virtually a nobody at that time. Once he demonstrated his considerable comic skill on Letterman’s show, Macdonald’s career got quickly boosted, and then he soon found himself joining the cast of SNL.
As shown from several archival footage clips from those old episodes from SNL, Macdonald often stole the show with his own comic style, and that eventually led to “Weekend Update”, where he flatly but hilariously delivered a number of amusing “fake news” every week to the amusement of many viewers out there. However, around the time of the trial of O.J. Simpson, he frequently delivered snarky but undeniably hilarious jokes on Simpson, and that unfortunately led to the end of his prime. While many of his audiences were quite amused as usual, a particular top-ranking executive of NBC was not amused at all just because he happened to be a close friend of Simpson, and he eventually got Macdonald fired from SNL after Macdonald ignored his warnings again and again.
Nevertheless, Macdonald kept going as before, though the rest of his career was often bumpy to say the least. He tried more on movie acting via Bob Sagat’s “Dirty Work” (1998), but, though he enjoyed working with Sagat, the movie turned out to be a critical and commercial flop. Besides, Macdonald also felt that he was not so respected much by several veteran actors on the set just because of his professional background (“Actors look on me the way vampires look on Count Chocula.”).
In addition, he made some serious mistakes which tarnished or damaged his public image. For example, Macdonald unwisely got himself associated with George W. Bush during Bush’s 2000 US Presidential election, and he drew some criticism for his rather thoughtlessly apolitical position. Not long after he tried on social media application around the 2010s, he was criticized a lot after he showed sympathy and support to his old colleague Roseanne after she got canceled in public for her blatantly racist joke in 2018, and he had to apology more than once for that.
While being reminded more and more of how his own comic style came to have more potential of being quite insensitive or offensive instead of generating good laughs from audiences, Macdonald became a bit more discreet than before, but he went his way as usual. As some of you remember, he did not only his own podcast show but also a Netflix series named “Norm Macdonald Has a Show” several years ago, and he was ready for more laughs even when the world was going through the COVID-19 pandemic era in 2020.
In conclusion, “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald” does not show much of Macdonald as a human being, but it works as a sincere tribute to Macdonald as a talented comedian to remember. I must confess that I did not know much about him before watching the documentary, but I laughed a lot more than once during my viewing (I was particularly tickled by an excerpt from his short-lived TV sitcom show “The Norm Show”, by the way). In my consequential opinion, that says a lot about how funny he really was.
