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Norm Macdonald, the acerbic, sometimes controversial comedian familiar to millions as the 'Weekend Update' anchor on 'Saturday Night Live' from 1994 to 1998, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 61.
MICHAEL NAGLE/The New York Times
It was never a good idea to assume you knew what Norm Macdonald was going to do. Across a career as a comedian, writer, actor, all-star talk-show guest, underrated talk-show host and comic sage, the man frequently cited as one of the funniest stand-ups ever to pick up a microphone wasn’t just hard to predict, he was a master at setting you up to believe you finally figured him out before pulling the rug out from under you.
Mr. Macdonald, who died on Tuesday in Los Angeles at the age of 61 of complications from leukemia, applied this strategy as much to his personal life as his professional one. At the height of his fame, starring on Saturday Night Live, he would avoid cast parties, blow off journalists and offer brutal assessments of his castmates when he did speak.
Given the chance to act on screens both big and small – the aspiration of many of his peers – he preferred to spend his time honing jokes on North American tours, though only ever released two proper stand-up specials. Appearing on a talk show to promote his work, he would instead tell grade-school-level jokes disguised as rambling anecdotes, or mock other guests.
“He didn’t think the way most of us think,” his brother Neil told The Globe and Mail. “Which is why he was so good.”
Mr. Macdonald adopted an occasionally crass and mildly clueless public face that couldn’t have been further from his quiet, thoughtful, Russian-literature-and-theories-of-comedy-obsessed self. In an era when baring your soul was a prerequisite for any kind of celebrity, comic or otherwise, Mr. Macdonald took such pains to conceal himself that he omitted facts or outright lied to journalists, fellow comedians and the public about himself at almost every opportunity – though perhaps as much for the comic possibilities as the cover.
Neil, for many years a journalist with the CBC, and as such particularly interested in the truth, would often ask his brother about this tendency, and only ever got one straight answer: “He thought it was fun. He told me, ‘I don’t owe anybody the truth. I owe them comedy.’”
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Norm Macdonald hosts the Canadian Screen Awards in Toronto on March 13, 2016. Macdonald, a comedian and former cast member on 'Saturday Night Live,' died Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2021, after a nine-year battle with cancer that he kept private, according to Brillstein Entertainment Partners, his management firm in Los Angeles. He was 61.
Peter Power/The Canadian Press
Norman Gene MacDonald was born in Quebec City on Oct. 17, 1959 (though for many years he insisted he was born in 1963). His father, Percy Lloyd Macdonald, was vice-principal at the school on CFB Valcartier, where his mother, Ferne (née Mains) was also a teacher. Young Norm split his early years between Quebec City and a family farm near Cornwall, Ont.
His penchant for storytelling and inability to give up on a joke were evident from an early age. He used to spend elementary school class time writing meandering 20- to 30-page stories about classmates, encouraged by teachers who were surprised that a Grade 2 student could manage such a feat. Less appreciative of his talents was his father, who had little patience for Norm’s relentless impersonations, whether of Danny Gallivan during hockey games, colleagues his father had introduced him to, or the old man himself.
“I always told him he was gonna die for that,” Neil said, “and he did get it. But all he could ever say was he couldn’t help it.”
Nevertheless, comedy was not his expected calling. His love of jokes was matched by what Mr. Macdonald himself called a crippling shyness, exacerbated by being skipped past his final two years at Gloucester High School in Ottawa. He studied philosophy at Carleton University, but dropped out with one credit to go, and began travelling and taking odd jobs, including crewing a ship in the Caribbean, selling magic mushrooms on Vancouver Island and retiring to Ottawa to work as an insurance underwriter. “There was no one more unsuited to be an insurance underwriter,” Neil noted.
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Norm MacDonald, right, playing in the character of Sen. Bob Dole during a dress rehearsal for NBC's 'Saturday Night Live' receives a feather boa from Chicago Bulls forward Dennis Rodman on May 11, 1996. Chevy Chase says NBC made a mistake in firing Norm MacDonald from the satirical news segment of 'Saturday Night Live.' TV Guide quoted the SNL veteran as saying MacDonald was the funniest newscaster on 'Weekend Update' since, well, himself.
Mary Ellen Matthews/The Associated Press
It was doing that job in 1985 that Mr. Macdonald first got on stage, at an amateur night at Yuk Yuk’s in Ottawa. In a rarity for an amateur, Mr. Macdonald was greeted with laughter the whole night, but was convinced he bombed. The manager of the club went through the phone book calling Macdonalds until his mother answered, and eventually Norm was persuaded to return to amateur night. After two more appearances, he was offered a spot on the regular roster. “In 45 years of Yuk Yuk’s,” impresario Mark Breslin said, “no one else has been promoted that quickly.”
Though Mr. Breslin recalls Mr. Macdonald as unusually reserved for a comedian, there was one experience where he “completely cut loose,” as he recalls: a group trip to Las Vegas, during which he saw a side of Mr. Macdonald he did not know he had. Gambling would become a major factor in Mr. Macdonald’s life; he claimed to have gone bust twice, won and lost more than a million dollars in a single night, and briefly visited Gamblers Anonymous, which he eventually quit because “It made [him] want to gamble too much.”
Mr. Macdonald appeared at the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal in 1986 and toured regularly around Canada, marrying Connie Vaillancourt in 1988 before moving to Los Angeles. (They divorced in 1999, after the birth of their son.) His reputation growing, he eventually secured a spot writing for The Dennis Miller Show in 1992, and then worked on Roseanne Barr’s self-titled sitcom in 1993, a job he got after performing at her son’s bar mitzvah. (He remained forever grateful to Ms. Barr for the opportunity, but the friendship came back to bite him when he publicly defended her after she made racist tweets in 2018.)
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'Saturday Night Live' cast members Will Ferrell as U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno talking to Darrell Hammond as Bill Clinton, while Norm Macdonald as Bob Dole looks on.
NBC
Mr. Macdonald reached his peak in 1993, when he was hired as a cast member on Saturday Night Live. Though he performed notable impressions of the likes of talk-show host Larry King, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole and actor Burt Reynolds – originating the now legendary Celebrity Jeopardy sketches – he found his true calling behind the Weekend Update desk, delivering what he proudly called the fake news.
He proved to be something of a lighting rod in the position. Though some critics, and many comedians, loved his absurd, and often absurdly blunt, style, he also drew serious detractors, most notably NBC West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer, who fired him for “not being funny,” in what was widely believed to be a response to Mr. Macdonald’s relentless and unfiltered mocking of Mr. Ohlmeyer’s friend O.J. Simpson. (“It’s official,” Mr. Macdonald declares in one of the most often-shared clips from his time on the show, reacting to the Simpson verdict. “Murder is legal in the state of California.”)
After SNL, Mr. Macdonald released the movie Dirty Work; starred in two short-lived sitcoms, The Norm Show (later simply Norm) and A Minute With Stan Hooper; and continued a career of varied supporting roles and voice-acting work in films and TV shows such as Dr. Dolittle, Sunnyside and The Orville.
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'The Norm Show' consisted of cast members Norm Macdonald, center, Laurie Metcalf, right, and Ian Gomez.
Bob D'Amico/ABC
In 2008, public opinion began to catch up to Mr. Macdonald’s stellar reputation in comedy circles when his roast of Bob Saget achieved early buzz on its way to becoming one of the most iconic performances in comedy history.
Using an old joke book his father had given to him when he began as a comedian, Mr. Macdonald turned the relentlessly crude, cruel affair into something gentle, ridiculous and entirely unexpected, to the delight of the comics onstage and the confusion of the audience.
“Even early on, Norm would never pander, would never change his act,” Mr. Breslin said. “He enjoyed bringing people up to his level. That’s why comics loved him.”
Respect for his work grew even as Mr. Macdonald continued a string of acclaimed but often ignored or underappreciated projects, including two highly regarded stand-up specials: 2011′s Me Doing Stand-up and 2017′s Hitler’s Dog, Gossip and Trickery. His lack of mainstream success was seen by fans as a badge of honour, and seemed to fit with the spirit of a man who regularly claimed to want only to be a stand-up, despite also producing a sports show, two talk shows and his bestselling 2016 pseudo-memoir, Based on a True Story.
The last decade of his life saw his esteem grow in comedy circles, while he worked almost tirelessly, particularly remarkable given that he was diagnosed with leukemia in 2013. Mr. Macdonald concealed the diagnosis from the public at large, and also from many friends and colleagues. His reputation for being erratic and insouciant helped immensely: If he abandoned a gig or a party because he was too sick to attend, or wolfed down fried chicken to cover up the weight gain that resulted from the steroids he needed to survive chemo, people simply chalked it up to Norm being Norm.
“He didn’t want it to affect how anyone saw him, but more than that he wanted to protect his son,” Neil said of his brother’s privacy. “It did not, that I could detect, make him any more morbid or weird – he was already morbid and weird.”
Norm Macdonald leaves his mother, Ferne; brothers, Neil and Leslie; and son, Dylan.
In Based on a True Story, he reflected on his career and legacy, expressing sentiments made more poignant given that he had received his leukemia diagnosis three years before the book’s publication. He noted that he would likely always be known simply as the guy from Saturday Night Live. With a tone of acceptance and grace, he wrote that he was comfortable with that fate.
“It can be difficult to define yourself by something that happened so long ago and is gone forever,” he wrote. “The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast, and if you’re not careful it’s too late.
“I think a lot of people feel sorry for you if you were on SNL and emerged from the show anything less than a superstar. They assume you must be bitter. But it is impossible for me to be bitter. I’ve been lucky.”