The documentary pays homage to Macdonald's prickly comic glee, even as it charts his difficult personality and his bent toward self-sabotage. Stand-up comedians have always had a reverence for what they like to call a “comic’s comic” — a fellow comedian who works with such distilled purity and edge, diving head-first into the gnarly metaphysics of comedy, that the comics end up worshipping him more than the public does. (He’s the stand-up-comedy equivalent of an ultimate cool indie-rock cult band.) Gilbert Gottfried was a comic’s comic. So are Larry David and Doug Stanhope and Maria Bamford.
And Norm Macdonald was one too, except that as you watch Judd Apatow’s juicy and haunting documentary “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald,” you realize that there was a special thing about him. He was a comic’s comic…who everyone else loved too. As the movie demonstrates, Macdonald’s credentials as a comic’s comic were unassailable.
We see his very first network television appearance, on May 9, 1990, on “Late Night with David Letterman,” where he did a bit about the devil commanding someone to kill his family and chop them into bits and stuff the pieces into a duffel bag. (Then the killer learns that the devil is a friend who was kidding.) He speaks in that familiar halting deadpan; he already knows how to draw the audience into his head. On “Saturday Night Live,” where Macdonald, starting in 1993, spent four seasons as one of the all-time great hosts of Weekend Update, he returned, over and over, with a bluntly obsessive fixation that couldn’t be contained, to the subject of O.J. Simpson, and to the fact that Simpson had murdered his wife.
Because every time Macdonald made a joke of it, his assertion of O.J.’s guilt was a way of tapping back into the shocking unreality of it. His every O.J. joke had the effect of a giddy slap. He would not relent, and that wound up getting him fired from “Saturday Night Live” (Don Ohlmeyer, the president of NBC’s West Coast division who was responsible for axing Macdonald, was O.J.
Now that’s a comic’s comic thing to do. On “SNL,” and in his legendary litany of late-night talk-show appearances, and in his stand-up routines, Norm Macdonald had an oxymoronic quality — a slightly disconnected aggression, where he would zero in on a topic, and a joke, that he knew would be prickly, and that might take him “over the line,” but he couldn’t help himself. He had to say the naughty thing, to blurt out the forbidden.
Telling that joke would be a catharsis; it would be comedy. Not telling it would be defeat. At times, he had a streak of Andy Kaufman’s antisocial hostility, as if comedy was his way of testing both himself and the audience, seeing what they would accept, and seeing if they would accept him.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
