If you watch Saturday Night Live long enough, mourning the untimely deaths of cast members can become a rite of passage. Baby boomers saw the death of John Belushi at 33 and Gilda Radner at 42, while their Gen X children will remember losing two stars of the show’s golden age, Chris Farley at 33 and Phil Hartman at 49. Such deaths serve as a sobering reminder that comedy and tragedy are never too far apart.
But in processing the news of Norm Macdonald’s recent death at 61 from leukemia, we must resist the urge to sentimentalize what, for many, is a gutting loss. In fact, the comic, who hung his shingle on Saturday Night Live from 1993 to 1998, would have been the last to do so.
Indeed, Macdonald, the single most astringent personality to ever host Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” segment, would surely have waved off excessive weeping and wailing. Not that he was hard-hearted: Perhaps owing to his Christian faith, Macdonald understood that all people were flawed and fallen, and none more than himself. “I don’t know if I’m an idiot, or if everybody else is an idiot,” he once said to David Letterman before cocking his head and admitting: “It’s probably me.”
Throughout his run on Saturday Night Live, but especially in his stand-up routines and plethora of talk-show appearances, Macdonald commented with earnest bewilderment on the passing parade. “My strongest material comes from real life,” he told Conan O’Brien in 2009, which was another way of saying: So much is strange about the modern world, but then again, maybe it’s just me.
A native of Quebec City, Macdonald perfected a tone of honest puzzlement that was accentuated by his drawn-out, deadpan delivery; it made him sound like an everyman in the larger-than-life world of show business. But while he excelled at playing the rube, his smile gave away his intelligence. If you picture him in your mind’s eye, Macdonald is forever wearing a grin that suggests both his amusement at life and his delight with himself for being amused.
One of Macdonald’s signature devices was to define basic, ordinary things as if talking to an alien or a 2-year-old. In another of his dazzling sit-down appearances with Letterman, Macdonald spoke of a trip he took during which he stayed at a bed-and-breakfast, the concept of which he took time to describe: “The idea is you go there, it’s a guy’s house, you live in his room, and then, he makes some breakfast.” He added, with a shrug, “It’s a thumbnail.”
Of course, many great comics rely on pointing out obvious things in fresh ways, but Macdonald somehow seemed less prideful of his powers of perception than, say, Jerry Seinfeld or George Carlin. He suggested a regular guy whose eyes and ears were simply open, and who was unafraid to point out the obvious, even the super-obvious. To O’Brien, he explained certain Olympic sports in a way that made them sound preposterous, including racewalking (“This guy doesn’t get a lot of respect around the Olympic Village from sprinters and stuff: ‘Hey, Fred, good stroll today!’”). In another Letterman appearance, he expressed surprise that at Disney World, the real-life animals on display were, in contrast to Goofy and Pluto, not wearing trousers.
Macdonald’s legacy was burnished thanks to his long-form storytelling. He excelled at digressive, long-way-around-the-bend tales that blended the folksiness of Jean Shepherd with the surrealism of Steven Wright, including, in a famous O’Brien appearance, a shaggy dog account of an anguished moth, inexplicably resembling a character in a great Russian novel, who is drawn to a podiatrist’s office … because the light was on. The ba-dum-dum quality of the joke is not as striking as its overelaborate setup, in which the moth disburdens himself of his existential despair to the bewildered foot doctor.
But Macdonald also had a gift for the quick bite, a talent that was on full display in his “Weekend Update” segments. He was great in the role of rat-a-tat anchorman, delivering the news in an even, uninflected tone that made his frequently outrageous punchlines all the more jolting. Consider his relentless hounding of O.J. Simpson, which often involved an unrelated setup followed by a punchline about the football star murdering his wife. “The pope came out with a book this week, which contains a series of essays concerning faith and morality in today’s secular world and the changing role of the Catholic Church as it approaches the 21st century,” Macdonald intoned in one representative bit. “The book is entitled God Himself Told Me That O.J. Is Guilty.”
Watching Macdonald’s best “Weekend Update” segments again, it’s obvious that the studio audiences bristled at the Simpson jokes and others in which he took aim at unsavory characters who deserved to have the truth spoken about them. Yet Macdonald was undeterred; there was a kind of morality in his determination to call things by their right names. During one segment, Macdonald addressed another favorite target, Jack Kevorkian, who, in the midst of his heyday as America’s most notable practitioner of “assisted suicide,” had just recorded a jazz album: “Don’t quit your day job — you know, murdering old people!”
But there wasn’t the slightest hint of self-righteousness in Macdonald, who told New York magazine in 2018 that he hated satire and politicized humor in general. “That stupid Jonathan Swift thing that everybody talks about — I read that,” he said of Gulliver’s Travels. “It sucked.” Instead, he viewed comedy as a big tent: All of humanity, not just the favored targets of those watching, was grist for his mill.
Macdonald’s immediate post-Saturday Night Live years were nothing to write home about — neither a movie, 1998’s Dirty Work, nor a sitcom, The Norm Show, made much of an impression — but, in time, fans recognized that his brand of self-effacing fearlessness was an increasingly rare commodity. He made us laugh without bitterness or preachiness; he offended without fear or favor.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the American Conservative.
