Norm Macdonald: A Lost Interview From 2018

In August of 2018, Norm Macdonald was making the publicity rounds for his new Netflix talk show, Norm Macdonald Has a Show. The last time he’d sat behind a desk was as the anchor of Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” segment in the mid-Nineties, a gig that got him tossed from the iconic sketch show reportedly for making one too many jokes at the expense of O.J. Simpson, a longtime friend and confidant of Don Ohlmeyer. (Macdonald famously parried the news of the Simpson verdict by declaring, “It’s official! Murder is now legal in the state of California.”)

As a guest on other people’s shows, Macdonald masterfully pushed the boundaries of acceptable network talk-show chatter, with Tolstoyan one-liners, lightning-fast chirps at fellow guests, and repeated insinuations that he was a “deeply closeted homosexual.” He practically created his own subgenre of late-night humor that left hosts scrambling to figure out what the hell was going on. As ever, when he was on TV, Norm was firmly in control — audience, producers, and network overlords be damned.

His Netflix series was designed to undermine late-night TV. In an era in which late-night hosts are expected to be political, and their guests to stick to the script on whatever project they’re promoting, Macdonald chose to go in the opposite direction. Macdonald avoided politics and reduced the talk show to just people talking, much like his joke-writing. Sure, the guests could seem random, ranging from Jane Fonda to M. Night Shyamalan, Judge Judy, and David Letterman, Macdonald’s friend and idol (who is also credited as “Special Counsel” on the show). The conversations were interesting, personal, and fun.

True to form, the show also included offbeat elements that wrung hilarity out of sheer awkwardness: surreptitiously filming guests during fake commercial breaks, forcing them to read bizarre one-liners, berating his trusty sidekick Adam Eget into total submission.

Norm Macdonald Has a Show was genius in its way, though it never became a sensation, largely because its launch was torpedoed by a public-relations crisis. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter to promote the show, Macdonald expressed sympathy for disgraced comedians Louis C.K. The result was a furore. Macdonald became a third rail for a while.

The chat I had by phone with Macdonald in advance of the show’s debut was nowhere near controversial. We covered his philosophies on comedy and late-night, why he likes Twitter, his run-ins with Trump, and, naturally, the suspension of civil liberties in Canada in the 1970s. The interview was halted from publication due to the hot water that was bubbling around him at the moment. Here it is. It serves as a reminder of Macdonald’s inquisitiveness, openness, and unvarnished nature. Even when I asked, unaware that he was sick with cancer, why he talked about death so often in the show, he was typically matter-of-fact: “It’s not that death gnaws at me,” he told me, “it’s just that I’m not in as much denial as other people.”

Norm! How are you doing?
I’m OK, baby! Are you in Montreal? Is this where you are from?

Yes, I was raised and born here.
I was born in the much more French city — Quebec.

Do you speak French?
Pretty well… Much better than Americans and better than most Canadians, but I couldn’t keep up with a French Canadian. My father hated French culture when I was young. I grew up in an English-only army base. I felt like a minority within a minority. My father was paralyzed by fear that I would either become a figure skater or marry an English girl.

You wrote a beautiful Twitter story about the October Crisis, when the Quebec nationalist group FLQ kidnapped and then murdered the province’s deputy premier, and kicked off a chaotic few months of political upheaval.
It was an army base. I recall seeing everyone with machine guns and stopping them all. It was strange.

This period of Canadian history isn’t well-known.
That’s right! And Americans don’t know we had terror in Canada.

The suspension of civil liberties was also a result.
Trudeau the Elder, a liberal Prime Minister, instituted it. They gave police such frightening power that they drove organized crime in Quebec back a decade.

I’m really enjoying this tangent, but we have to talk about your new show. You’re known for being an incredible talk-show guest. What makes a guest a good host?
I was really young, but I remember Carson’s first guest was usually a funny person, irrelevant of where he stood in show business, like Buddy Hackett or Pete Barbutti — these very odd choices, because they weren’t superstars like all the first guests are now. Back then, you had more of it. They weren’t plugging things. Carson was so great at letting people speak and always valued comedians over everyone else.

What makes a talk-show host a great host?
I don’t really have it, personally [laughs]. The best was Carson, because it’s being able to listen. I’m learning to listen a little bit. Every time people say anything, it reminds me of a story that’s like their story. Lori Jo Hoekstra, who produces the show, told me to think of it as a conversation, and that helped a great deal, because I just said, “Fuck it!” We just have a conversation that we would have regularly and forget everything about asking probing questions.

Drew Barrymore’s interview is a wonderful example of this.
Drew was fantastic. People come in and don’t know what to expect, and then I would just start talking to them and then introduce them later, so that they’re caught off guard and say, “Hey, we’re doing the show!” Then I would say, “We’re going to the break,” but we weren’t actually going to break.

There is obviously no need for a commercial break on Netflix, so why do you cut to break throughout your show?
We use breaks to allow guests to catch their breath. A break is something guests have come to expect. Lori Jo then stated that guests are curious about what happens during the break. To do this little 15-second task, we took sections from the break. That just came because everyone always asks me, “What did Letterman say during breaks?”

What did Letterman say during breaks?
He says nothing. The band strikes up really loud and he’s surrounded by producers. He would wave them off sometimes and talk to me. But he seemed so nervous about having to talk about his house with an actress that the producers shielded him from their guests.

Your show has a broadcasty, old-school feel with the breaks.
Oh, that’s cool. That’s actually a big thing, the broadcasty part, because I always watch Tom Snyder and Firing Line and Merv Griffin on YouTube all the time. They are my heroes.

A while back you openly lobbied to get The Late Late Show on CBS. Is it a happy coincidence that you found Netflix?
Yes, absolutely. I was a fan of a late-night program when I started my career. Now, I see how much it has impacted my life. You wake up every morning like, “What’s tonight?” I actually wouldn’t have liked that, I just thought I would like that. It’s a good thing that God has not answered all my prayers.

During the same interview, you also mentioned getting rid of talk-show staples like the suit and the desk, but you still have the desk on Norm Macdonald Has a Show.
I talked to Letterman, who’s an executive producer of the show, about that. I asked him, “Why is there even a desk?” It’s like a job interview. It’s so bizarre, it’s such an uncomfortable position to be put in. I don’t know who started that, probably some guy in the Fifties. But then Letterman told me that if you’re going to subvert the show, you have to have all of the trappings of the show. You need to make fun of the show. Like, 10% and 90% doing the actual show.

Adam Eget is your sidekick. Why are you so cruel to him?
I’ve always loved sidekicks. Paul Shaffer was hipper than Letterman. That was something I loved. [Johnny Carson’s sidekick] Ed McMahon wasn’t a funny dunce. But he was funny. He did his job well. I decided to use the Ed McMahon situation and amplify it. It was just like Johnny would rip Ed teasingly. However, if you were just abusing the guy unapologetically. So, I didn’t get a comedian, because I knew I would get blowback. Adam Eget works at the Comedy Store and it’s funny because he doesn’t know what he’s doing and he’s very nice; it allows me to just abuse him very, very hard. I had to stop saying certain things about him because then he gets a million Twitter threats because I just make stuff up, like that he’s a Holocaust denier, or something.

Did people actually believe that Adam Eget is a Holocaust denier?
Yes, amazingly. It was when I read the comments on Twitter that I realized how angry people were about it. I remember when I was at SNL and Lorne Michaels, who is very wise, told me, “You know, [you think] you’re really popular on the show, because people will come up and say how good you are. But all of the people who don’t like you won’t approach you.” He said it to put you in your place, but it’s true. They were thought to be so great by everyone, which is something showbiz people do because there are always people who want to see them. It’s like Trump — how can Trump think he’s unpopular if there’s entire auditoriums cheering him? That’s why I like the Twitter. I actually like the Twitter, because it allows performers to see that no, you’re not that popular.

But “the Twitter” is also a place where people take things very literally and do not pick up on irony.
I trust that if a comedian says it, it’s a joke. I realized that it was wrong to take everything literally and ignore irony. This is something I am noticing more and more. If I was onstage and said, “You know who was great? Hitler!” If you thought that was serious, what a terrible life you have. If you see a comic, then it’s clearly a joke. If you’re in public saying that, then it must be a joke. So, sometimes if I say something about Adam Eget, he’ll say, “Please don’t put that in.” I don’t want him to get murdered or anything.

You use old-timey English, and make obscure cultural references. Your humor is so popular with young people.
I don’t know. When he was 58, my father gave me to him. His friends were all old men, and he went through the Depression and all that stuff. This is what I was taught as a child. I liked the old-fashioned way that men spoke. I found it very funny and enjoyed all of their stories.

Ever since I started doing comedy, I would use more old words and literate words and I found that mixing the two would create a very good comedy quiver. I believe that young people are hipper and more fun than older people. I’ve always had a young audience, I’m not quite sure why. I think it’s because of the internet. Straight-up comedy is what young comedy fans love.

Ask your guests many questions about death. Are you apprehensive about mortality?
My first comedy gig was when I really loved Seinfeld. He would take small things and get very upset over them. But I realized, that’s what makes it work: He puts such importance into such a trivial matter, that’s such a funny way to do it. And then I wondered if the flip could work, because I’m always trying to see the other way to do it. I began to wonder if it was possible to talk about big issues in an off-handed and trivial manner.

So, it’s not that death gnaws at me, it’s just that I’m not in as much denial as other people. There are things people just don’t want to hear or talk about, and one is death. Child molesters are another big problem. I try to just deal with them on a very surface, commonsense level, so that people get relieved when they hear that there’s an actual joke at the end of a very grim, you know… grimsicle. It’s a grimsicle!

Did you just invent the word “grimsicle”?
It was my invention, yes. I didn’t know what to say after “grim,” so I freaked out and thought that.

What is it that makes late-night talk shows so popular?
I don’t know. I don’t know why anything is popular. I don’t watch sitcoms, I don’t really watch talk shows. My goal is to make my stand-ups and all that I do timeless. Or at least not time-stamped. I’ll never talk about a politician or an issue, because I want the show to work 20 years from now. Second, and this may sound strange, my show should be comic relief to the existing talk shows. Everyone is now commanded to be a pundit on politics as a host of talk-shows.

What happened to talk-shows to make them more political?
Now, in the old days, that wasn’t the case, and then Jon Stewart came around and he was very good, and he was a political guy. That was when they forced everyone to do it, even Jimmy Fallon. I was there the night that he messed up Trump’s head and nobody thought anything of it, because it’s Jimmy! Jimmy does lighthearted things, likes everyone and is funny. It seemed absurd to me that he would be mocked for not attacking Trump. So I found writers who were simply funny to surround myself. I had no political axe to grind one way or another, and said, “Let’s be the comic relief that comedy needs at this point,” which is sort of sad.

Did you hang out with Donald Trump backstage at The Tonight Show?
I’d met Donald Trump a couple of times before. A year earlier, they had SNL’s 40th anniversary, and Donald Trump had a terrible seat way in the back — I’m just saying that to show how quick things change. When I did The Tonight Show, I had never been second guest before on a talk show, and they said Donald Trump was going to be first guest. And I said, “Oh, I’ll take it.” Because I wanted to see it, it was right at the end of the campaign.

One funny thing happened though. I know Donald Trump so I know that he does funny things. I was backstage and I go, “Hey, Donald!” And I didn’t know if he remembered my name. He said, “That’s a funny guy!” Because we had met a few times. So I go, “Can I get a picture?” And he says, “Yes, hold on, let me get a picture with you, one second.” Then he walks down the hall with the Secret Service men and gets on the elevator and leaves! I was laughing because it was so funny. That’s where the difference is between people nowadays. That was an extremely funny thing he did. It was considered very rude by them. It was both, I suppose.

Looks like our allotted time is up — thanks, Norm.
Why don’t you take my phone number in case any more questions occur to you?

That’s very generous of you — they are already occurring. I have a picture of you with my uncle Bob and Ricky [Robb Wells] from [the Canadian mockumentary series] Trailer Park Boys on the Paramount lot in L.A. in 2003. Do you have any memory of that?
Oh sure, I remember. You can text it to us.

Of course.
[Norm, via text message] Wow! That is crazy. I have a vivid recollection of that because I had long known of the Trailer Park Boys but had never seen them. Your uncle must have been one of them, I’m pretty certain. I also wore the sweater yesterday.

Now, let’s get to the show.
The debate was raging over whether or not to have a monologue. I wanted jokes to be seen for what they were: written and then read. We stayed with this format because a lot of times a joke will spark something in the guest; it’s a mild hypnotic state they are in while reading.

The late Burt Reynolds, who you impersonated on SNL, would have been a great fit for the show.
We tried our best to get Burt. I was on the phone with him [for] an hour trying to convince him. He really wanted to, but he just wasn’t in shape for it.

Is there a second season, and if so, which guest would you choose?
We will know within 30 days if there is a second series; it will be decided by the people at home. Robert Blake is my ideal guest.

This would be a great interview. Norm, thanks for the opportunity.
We appreciate your kind words.