Five years after his death, the legendary Canadian comedian takes centre stage in a new documentary from Judd Apatow that explores his extraordinary career, complicated personality and the enduring mystery of the man behind the laughs.
“I could take myself very seriously if I wanted to, but I don’t choose to do that.”
Those are the words of the late Norm Macdonald, the enigmatic Canadian comedian who died in 2021 after a private battle with cancer. Now, five years after his death, a new documentary is paying tribute to the funny man who was widely regarded as the ultimate “comedian’s comedian.”
Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald, directed by Macdonald’s friend and colleague Judd Apatow, offers an intimate portrait of the late comic—or as intimate as Macdonald would ever let anyone get—tracing his humble beginnings in Quebec and Ontario and his rise through the comedy ranks to become one of the industry’s most respected and revered figures. Unlike many posthumous documentaries that rely on talking-head interviews with friends, family and former co-stars, Apatow has assembled Norm entirely from archival photographs, interviews, talk show appearances, stand-up performances and rare home videos, allowing the documentary’s subject to essentially speak for himself.
Macdonald describes his early life in Canada as “dirt poor” and recalls a childhood when he was so intensely shy that he barely spoke. Ironic, given how he would later make his living. He also shares how he always considered his older brother Neil to be “the funny one” in the family. Funnily enough, the elder Macdonald would go on to become a highly respected senior news correspondent with the CBC, while the younger Macdonald would eventually deliver fake news on Saturday Night Live. “I don’t know how that happened,” Macdonald tells us. “He was always the funny one.”
After grinding his way through the stand-up circuits in Toronto, New York and Los Angeles, where he became known for his deadpan delivery, Macdonald caught the attention of Robert Morton, a booker for Late Night with David Letterman, who booked him on the show in 1990. The appearance marked the beginning of what would become a lifelong relationship between Macdonald and Letterman. Two years later, Macdonald was hired as a writer on the Emmy Award-winning comedy series Roseanne. “She gave me my first job in Hollywood,” Macdonald recalls. “She hired me because I was a standup writer, everyone else was from Harvard and she didn’t care for Harvard.” In fact, Macdonald wrote one of the show’s most memorable scenes during its fifth season, in which a harried Aunt Jackie, played to perfection by Laurie Metcalf, calls a hearing-impaired family member to deliver the news that her and Roseanne’s father has died. After repeatedly screaming “Dad’s dead!” into the telephone, she finally gives up and says, “He’s fine, he sends his love.” The scene remains a fan favourite and is widely regarded as one of Metcalf’s finest comedic moments on the series.
Following his stint on Roseanne, Macdonald joined the 19th season of Saturday Night Live after his friend Adam Sandler recommended that SNL producer Jim Downey check out his Letterman appearances. Macdonald was initially hired as a featured player before taking over the Weekend Update desk from Kevin Nealon in 1994. As anchor, he became known for his acerbic, subversive style, his deliberately lingering pauses and, eventually, his unrelenting mockery of O.J. Simpson, who was then on trial for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Hardly a Weekend Update segment went by without Macdonald skewering the former football star. When Simpson was ultimately acquitted, Macdonald opened his broadcast with the now-infamous line, “Well, it is finally official: murder is legal in the state of California.” And while the trial may have ended, Macdonald’s jokes did not, as he continued to openly call Simpson a murderer. His relentless focus on Simpson eventually became intertwined with his departure from the show in 1998, when NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer, a friend of Simpson’s, removed him from the Weekend Update desk. “If I am remembered, it will always be by the four years I spent at Saturday Night Live, and maybe even more than that for the events surrounding my departure from that show,” Macdonald reflects.
While Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald allows its subject to do most of the talking, even after 126 minutes of biographical material, the comedian remains something of an enigma. One gets the sense that Macdonald kept almost everyone outside his small inner circle at arm’s length, and part of his enduring charm was that audiences could never quite tell whether he was being genuine or simply bullshitting them. That uncertainty carries through the documentary itself, which contains almost as many contradictions as revelations. The fact that Macdonald kept his cancer diagnosis private for nine years before his death feels entirely on brand, although longtime fans will know exactly how he felt about describing cancer as a “battle” in the first place.
Still, there are moments of genuine tenderness throughout the film. Home videos featuring Macdonald with his son and mother offer a rarely seen side of the comedian, while his reflections on a gambling addiction reveal an unexpectedly philosophical perspective. Rather than focusing solely on the destructive nature of his addiction, Macdonald equates gambling with hope, explaining that “hope is a wonderful thing to be addicted to.” It may be a difficult perspective to understand, but it also feels quintessentially Norm. Beneath the deadpan delivery, provocative jokes and carefully maintained distance was a man who clearly felt things deeply, even if he rarely allowed the public to see it. “I’m so emotional and so sensitive that I can be broken, and I know I can, so laughter is what really keeps me going,” he tells us.
Perhaps that is the closest the documentary comes to explaining Norm Macdonald. For a comedian who spent his career making people laugh while revealing remarkably little about himself, it is a rare moment of vulnerability that says more than any conventional retrospective ever could. And yet, even with Macdonald telling his own story, there is still the lingering suspicion that the joke, somehow, remains on us.
Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald is now streaming on Netflix.
