There’s something funny going on with Norm Macdonald.
Not everyone is a fan of his dry, ironic brand of cracking wise, but there shouldn’t be any doubt that Macdonald is a highly gifted comedian, successful by any reasonable standard. Of course, not all standards are reasonable. Some are bogus, including the pervasive one which judges that a comedian isn’t at the top of their game unless they are a movie star or a sitcom headliner or a host of their own talk show.
Macdonald, who has a new book out, is none of those things. So, no matter that he is one of the funniest people alive – “I don’t know anybody who is funnier,” David Letterman has said – there’s the perception Macdonald’s talent has been squandered and that his promise has been unfulfilled. A recent deep-dive feature in The Washington Post, for example, posited that the struggle for the fiftysomething comic has always been “finding the right outlet for his humour.”
But isn’t the “right outlet” for Macdonald on stage, in front of a crowd? The comedian himself believes so.
“I’m not a comic actor,” Macdonald says, unwittingly agreeing with most of the critics who saw the 1998 movie Dirty Work. “I’m a stand-up comedian, and I always want to get better. Honestly, I want to be the best that ever was.”
As for other outlets for his humour, Macdonald may have found it. His hilarious new book, Based on a True Story: A Memoir, is a fanciful yarn with just enough truth to qualify as an autobiography. “A comic novel would have no worth,” Macdonald says, speaking from a train making its way from New York to Washington. (He does not drive.) “So I had to camouflage it as a memoir.”
As memoirs go, the book is bonkers and it is gonzo. But it is revealing in its saner, more reflective moments.
“I think a lot of people feel sorry for you if you were on Saturday Night Live and emerged from the show anything less than a superstar,” the former SNL Weekend Update-segment star writes. “They assume you must be bitter. But it is impossible for me to be bitter. I’ve been lucky.”
The confusion over the status of the simple stand-up comedian is as old as the profession itself. Prior to the 1920s, comedians rarely relied on solo joke-telling alone. Sidekick straight men or the use of props or other on-stage shenanigans were thought to be required. A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer in the pants – that kind of thing.
Frank Fay is considered to be the very first stand-up comedian. They thought he was nuts for appearing on stage with just nerve, jokes and a suit. In fact, when he first hit the circuit in 1917, Fay billed himself as the “Nut Monologist.”
Fay’s chops were dynamite, though, and his winning solo act paved the way for emcees and stand-up comedians for the decades that followed. (Fay was also a jerk and a Mussolini lover, and so his star plummeted around the time of the Second World War. America was not yet ready for fascism; Fay was ahead of his time in that respect.)
For a long time, being a monologist or a stand-up was not thought to be a mere stepping stone toward something splashier (though it often was the case). Nobody asked Mark Twain to take his white suit and snappy “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” catchphrase to Hollywood, and nobody wondered why George Carlin didn’t have his own network sitcom.
Now, we have The Washington Post publishing an article with the headline “Will Somebody Please Give Norm Macdonald Another TV Show?”
But here’s another question: Does Macdonald, whose ABC sitcom Norm ran from 1999 through 2001, even want another TV show?
“I look at sitcoms and I think they’re for kids,” Macdonald says. Accordingly, the sitcoms he says he often watches on television are of the I Dream of Jeannie variety, popular when he was a kid.
“And I don’t have that much interest in comedy movies either,” he says. Macdonald, with his distinctive flat, nasal delivery, has found voiceover work in Hollywood, however. As for the notion that he’s his own worst enemy, as has been suggested, Macdonald doesn’t outright deny it. “It’s hard for me to be collaborative,” he admits.
While some people downgrade the status of the solo comedic performer, others stand up for the stand-up. “I’ve never understood why it’s not enough,” the superb Canadian comic Mark Forward says. “It’s usually the fourth question in any interview I’ve ever done. ‘What are you going to do next? What are your goals?’ But, I’m doing my goal, which is stand-up comedy.”
Canadian comedy-club impresario Mark Breslin, who gave Macdonald his first job in comedy back in the early 1980s at his Yuk Yuk’s outpost in Ottawa, understands what Macdonald is attempting to do. “Norm is a purist. He’s not distracted in terms of a career. He sees a beauty in the purity of stand-up comedy.”
Breslin tells a story about Macdonald’s first show in Ottawa. The young comedian gave a great set to an appreciative crowd, and yet he thought he had bombed. “He left the club quickly, apologizing because he didn’t think it went well,” Breslin says. “But every joke got a laugh. It was a perfectly constructed set, and the club’s manager, Howard Wagman, had to convince him to come back the next week.”
Macdonald remembers the night. “I aim my comedy at myself, and when it came out of my mouth that night I heard it in my ear, and it didn’t sound right to me. It didn’t sound funny.”
And he would know. The audience isn’t always right, and neither are the pundits and the critics. Early in her career, Joan Rivers bombed one night in New York, at the Duplex in the Village. Lenny Bruce, who had caught the set, sent Rivers a note backstage. “You’re right,” it read, “and they’re wrong.”
As for fame, Macdonald has settled into a level he’s comfortable with. “I thought it would get me the best seat in the restaurant, but I never got that. You think you’re going to get girls, but I never got the girls,” the divorced father of one says.
So what does he get?
“I get fat families from Iowa who want to take a picture with me,” Macdonald says. “They don’t know me, but they smile at me. It’s the warmth from strangers on an otherwise cold street. It’s the best thing that I get, and I’m okay with that.”