Norm MacDonald: Funny?

TED BERG: Norm MacDonald is one of my heroes, but I understand why his humor might be difficult to appreciate. Heck, I was once guilty of that myself.

For a long time, Kevin Nealon hosting Weekend Update was my favorite part of Saturday Night Live. Nealon’s style was dry, but clever, and nearly all of his jokes had distinct punchlines. Plus he was quick, so he packed a ton of material into a short segment. Always topical, too.

So when Norm took over, I remember thinking, “Who the hell is this guy?” and ripping him to my friends: He didn’t even tell funny jokes, he just said really obvious or really random shit in a silly way.

Needless to say, he grew on me.

Norm’s jokes are anti-jokes. He has mastered the art of turning the obvious into punchlines.

On Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson’s irreconcilable differences: “She’s more of a stay-at-home type, and he’s more of a homosexual pedophile.”

On O.J. Simpson: “It was revealed that in his first interview with police, Simpson refused to take a lie-detector test. His reason? It detects lies.”

His work on Weekend Update often relied on repetition, and the same lines I found stupid at the beginning of his tenure I found brilliant by the end: Germans love David Hasselhoff, Frank Stallone, etc.

In his standup routines, Norm employs overwhelmingly awkward deliveries for the same obvious punchlines. “The worst thing about prison is, ahh, you know, ahh, the ahh, you know… the anal rape!”

Maybe it’s an acquired taste. He gets me every time.

I think the most telling thing I’ve seen in regards to his style came in a recent interview with Tom Green. Norm asks Green what the first joke a child learns is, and Green says, of course, “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

Norm points out, brilliantly, that the joke is an anti-joke. The chicken joke should be a play on a different joke, some chicken pun or something, as Norm suggests. But there isn’t one. It stands alone. It sets people up for something clever, and then knocks them down with something obvious.

And that’s Norm Macdonald in a nutshell. With pitch-perfect delivery and utter ruthlessness, he has made a career — a brilliant, hilarious career — out of chicken jokes.

AKIE BERMISS: There was a time, long ago (in High School) when I thought I was a funny guy.  I used to tell all sorts of jokes and I was in the drama club and I would do improv and — well, I thought I was funny.  Years later it would dawn on me — I’m not funny at all!  There are people out there who are actually really, really funny.  They say anything to anyone — and its funny.  Norm Macdonald is one of those guys. A masterfully funny guy who chooses to make us laugh by telling us jokes that are the opposite of funny.

I can remember seeing Macdonald on SNL during my adolescent years.  It was a curious thing to see a guy so dedicated to the anti-climactic punchline.  You’ve got to respect the guts it takes to go out there and week after week, tell the same corny jokes in a dry, unsuspecting monotone.  Now, part of my love for Norm is probably out of my desire to be counter-culture (an extreme passion of mine back in the late 90s).  EVERYBODY hated him, everybody said he wasn’t funny, and everybody wanted him gone.  But I saw something deeper there.  A guy couldn’t just go out there and suck that hard just from lack of skill, could he?  Of course he could — but with Norm it was obvious, once you stopped waiting for the regular punchlines, that he could be really funny.

Ted is right, Norm’s jokes are constructed from humorous betrayal.  We think we know what’s funny, we hear a set up — and we expect the joke to go in a certain direction.  But Norm often doesn’t even seem to go for a joke.  He says… well, nothing funny at all.  He says obvious, blatant things.  But the delivery is superb and what you get is basically a mastery of bad jokes.

And I love me some bad jokes.

But its not just that, you see.  Because, to me, Norm Macdonald is one of the most stolen from comedians of the 21st century.  Look at the shows that now dominate television comedy: the Office, 30 Rcok, My Name is Earl.  Movies like Anchorman and 40 Year Old Virgin.  All those characters and the dead-pan deliver owe a great debt to Norm Macdonald.  Now bad jokes are a huge part of our lexicon.  We love those characters that deliver the crappy jokes like they’re funny.  We walk around saying “that’s what she said” like its actually a really funny joke. Oh sure — now we all know its funny because its really not funny at all.  But a decade ag0 it was a real gamble.  I remember going to see “Dirty Work” in theaters.  Looking back now, its impossible to believe that it came out in 1998.  So much of its material (even despite its obvious late 90s mores — sometimes looking at Macdonald’s wardrobe is just too much to bear) fits in better with the Judd Apatow era of quirky, strange films about self-conscious unattractive men.

Macdonald is a trail blazer.  In an era when many have forgotten how a joke is supposed to be told; When comics lack even a basic mastery of craft; And, indeed, when audiences are full of morons like me who think THEY know what funny is — Norm Macdonald is just a funny-ass guy who can make you laughing by showing you how NOT to make people laugh.

Its a special gift.

ZOË RICE: Ugh. Before writing this, I rewatched Norm Macdonald’s most recent appearance on Conan O’Brien, and I got to dislike him just a little bit more. Like Ted and Akie, Norm first appeared on my radar on SNL’s Weekend Update. I really didn’t like him. It wasn’t the jokes so much, but the way he told them. Norm’s tone of voice strikes me not only as obnoxious but also entitled. The subtext of his delivery seems to say, “If you’re not laughing at my jokes, screw you.” It’s not that nothing funny ever comes out of Norm Macdonald’s mouth. I just happen to find him completely unsympathetic.

But more than that, he’s kind of just rude. Later in that Conan episode, he kept interrupting Thomas Hayden Church, to the extent that Church got riled, saying, “Norm, you’re killing my flow here” and later, “Norm, when’s the Prozac gonna kick in?” Perhaps Norm fans will root him on for this, but it came across as awkward for all involved throughout nearly the entire clip. I found myself hoping to never see Norm Macdonald on Conan again. I think it’s this: If I knew Norm in real life, I would hate hanging out with him.

So, do I find some of his jokes funny? Maybe once in a while. But also many are excruciating. And the funny ones aren’t funny enough to keep me from changing the channel.

Tags: Norm MacDonald

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