Name: Norm Macdonald - BS Report w/ Bill Simmons (April 2011) Full Interview
Uploaded: 2019-05-12T18:57:15.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Norm Macdonald - BS Report w/ Bill Simmons (April 2011) Full Interview' from Happy the Dog on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-05-12. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Norm Macdonald - BS Report w/ Bill Simmons (April 2011) Full Interview' from Happy the Dog on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-05-12. Transcript available.

Norm Macdonald - BS Report w/ Bill Simmons (April 2011) Full Interview

The B.S. Report is a free-flowing conversation that occasionally touches on
mature subjects.
First of all, this is The B.S. Report with Bill Simmons.
It might be cool, I don't know. And if it's not, I don't care.
The B.S. Report with Bill Simmons.
Bill Simmons works for ESPN. He's also named the sports guy, and he writes a
comical sports column.
He must be a popular dude.
Welcome to The B.S. Report.
It's got a real dirty sound, like a rusty steak knife cutting through a well-aged
steak.
Now.
Now.
Here's Bill Simmons.
Welcome to The B.S. Report.
Sunny day here in Southern California, not on the subway, Fresh Tech Hotline,
in studio.
The great Norm MacDonald.
He has a Comedy Central show starting Tuesday night, 10 p.m., the sports show.
Oh, no, sports show. It's not the sports show. It's sports show.
No, the.
It's like your rhythmics.
How are you?
Good.
You taped it last night. I was there. I thought it went well.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm going to like this show.
Oh, awesome.
You're back to your weekend update roots.
Yeah, right.
What made you go back?
What made me go back to my weekend update roots?
Yeah.
Just string after string of failures.
Other than that.
Oh, other than that.
Slipping into oblivion.
Our friend Daniel Kelsen sitting here next to him.
I shouldn't say fizzling into oblivion.
Fizzling into oblivion.
Yeah, I hardly slipped into it.
It was more like I fizzled into it.
Well, the show last night, Act One, you're basically doing weekend update for
10 minutes.
Yes, I'm doing weekend update.
Sports related.
Sports related for 10 minutes.
Then you're going to do, you have a film segment taped.
Yeah, a taped segment.
Then third thing's like a rant.
Third thing is like an editorial.
Yeah, editorial.
I like that.
Yeah, like Eric Severide used to do.
All right.
And then the final one, which was my favorite idea, which right as the show's
ending, garbage
time.
You have 90 seconds just to get off jokes.
Yeah, just 90 seconds left when we throw all the jokes we didn't have time for
in the
rest of the show.
Enjoy that.
They call it the most exciting 90 seconds of sports.
Is that what they're saying?
Yeah, that's what they're starting to say.
I don't know what they're saying.
These guys, man, with their 90 second of sports, you know, the fast 90 seconds.
I don't know where these things start up.
People now call me internet sensation.
I'm like, enough of this.
So, celebrities can go two ways with sports.
Yeah.
Either they're genuinely sports fans.
Right.
Or they pretend to be sports fans because it's cool.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you can pretty much tell within the first minute if somebody's legit or not.
But you're legit.
Yeah, yeah.
One of the reasons that you're legit is you watch all the different ones, but
you also
gamble on the things I gamble on.
Like, you're in it.
Yeah.
I like to gamble on it because it makes it interactive.
That's what I like.
I learned that in college because every football season, the Patriots were
terrible.
And I think like the 1989 Pats or whatever, one of the teams was 1-15.
And then somebody was like, you know, if you gamble on any of the other teams,
they become
your team for that three hours.
You root for them like you root for the Patriots.
I was like, oh, really?
Well, also, you could have a team, too, that's 1-15.
But with the spread, maybe they have a winning record.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, so that's when I grasped the match.
Yeah, yeah.
It's good, though.
Yeah.
So you, but you were pretty heavy in it, and then not as much now.
Yeah, I just got saturated with it.
And then I found like I didn't like any team.
Like, after a while, you're like, tonight, the Green Bay Packers, you know,
damn Ryan Longwell,
you know, versus the Giants.
Test of our day, you know.
He plays for the Giants.
So.
But you just remember New York, you get confused.
But eventually, every team will have a remembrance of something bad.
I agree.
You don't remember good things in life, Bill.
You remember your first great bet.
That's a hell of it.
What?
You remember your first great bet that you won.
Yeah.
And then all the losers, and really nothing else.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cousin Sal and I had a big Steelers bet.
Oh.
On the AMC.
What?
Your phone just.
Why, you guys don't receive messages?
So we had a.
If you're an inner sin sensation, man, you receive the message once in a while.
We bet the Steelers to win the Super Bowl when Charlie Batch was starting.
Sure.
Why wouldn't you?
And the odds were like 12 to 1.
Oh, and then.
Yeah, the odds dropped.
All of a sudden.
Yeah.
You had a good bet on your hands as Batch bowed out.
Well, you would think we would have parlayed this in this sort of magic.
You know, like, all right, we have these great odds.
Now we'll be able to hedge.
No, we ended up losing everything.
Everything we did didn't work.
I've never hedged.
You're not a hedger.
No, hedging is for hedge fund managers.
I read that on a very unpopular selling t-shirt.
What about, is hockey like your number one?
I mean, you're from Canada.
Yeah, I can't get much hockey, though.
I mean, now I get some of it, but for a while.
What do you mean you can't get hockey?
For what?
Dan, you can't talk.
You don't have headphones.
My favorite team is the Bruins, the Boston.
Oh, that's my favorite team.
Number four, Bobby Orr.
That's when it started, yeah.
Yeah, because I lived in Quebec where my dad wouldn't let us.
You didn't root for the Nordiques?
No, they're not the Nordiques or the Canadien, because my father was virulently
anti-French.
And you lived in Quebec?
Yeah, yeah.
How are you virulently anti-French when you're in Quebec?
I don't know.
It was something to do with them liberating their land or something back in the
40s.
I couldn't follow it.
But apparently he liberated them from the clutches of Hitler's iron claw.
And they just never thanked him properly.
That was it.
So then you became a Bruins fan.
Yeah, so my dad said, pick anybody but a French team.
So, you know, it was around number four, Bobby Orr.
Yeah.
Don Orr, Jerry Cheever, Eddie Johnson, Phil Esposito.
Oh, so you go back to the big bad Bruin days.
Yeah, man, I'm old.
I'm two scoring seven.
When I was growing up in Boston, 74 is like the first time I can kind of
remember sports.
And I remember watching the 1-0 Flyers Bruins.
Oh, yeah.
Bernie Perrant just stonewalled us in game seven.
Yeah.
I don't remember if it was a game seven or not, but the Flyers won the cup.
It might have been a game six.
Bernie Perrant, the Flyer.
And I think also we played for the Leafs at some point.
But you used to get those scores.
What do you mean?
Well, I lost a lot of money speaking of gambling because I didn't realize they'd
open the crease.
And all of a sudden, because I always bet hockey unders, and everybody started
scoring like crazy.
You bet hockey unders?
Yeah, that was my big one.
Is it true you're betting English Premier League soccer or some sort of weird?
I have bet soccer.
That's not a lot of fun because it's 90 minutes.
You know, 20 minutes into it, you're down 1-0, you're in a lot of trouble.
Right.
The chance of them tying it up, let alone winning, they only have 70 minutes
left.
So what other stuff did you wager on?
I wagered on...
Is that the weirdest?
You bet on tennis?
Oh, yeah.
I bet tennis.
Golf?
Obviously golf.
Yeah, I bet everything.
What do you do?
What's your strategy for golf?
Well, I made a lot of money betting against Tiger when he was...
They had a weird bet in Vegas for a while when Tiger was so dominant.
It was anybody but Tiger.
Oh, I like that.
And the odds were always skewed because they know that people always thought
Tiger was going to win.
Right.
So the odds would be you'd get them at 1-2 or something like that.
Yeah.
Because everybody would go into a sports book like tourists and go,
Hey, I can bet on Tiger plus that pays 2.5-1.
That's a good deal, you know?
That's what, you know how they also get the Red Sox and the Cubs fans that way.
Oh, by what they know.
Because if Daniel goes to Vegas, he's got like, you know, some family member or
something saying,
Hey, when you're there, can you put 20 in the Red Sox for me?
Yeah.
Those are the two teams that everybody does that for.
So they jack the odds really low.
And they also...
How do they know which team is going to play...
Because they know...
How do they know which team is going to show up?
Their goal with the futures...
Oh, you mean if...
Not if they're playing each other, but...
No, no, no.
Yeah, the future, the World Series.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, put 20 in there.
Oh, yeah, of course.
The odds would be low.
And you know the other team they do that with?
The Lakers.
Right.
Because you get so much people driving in from Los Angeles to Vegas, so they
know they
can skew the odds...
Yeah, that makes sense.
Basically toward the Lakers.
Hey, what about this?
What have you...
I've always wondered this.
You know when you drive from Vegas to...
I mean from Los Angeles to Las Vegas?
Yeah, you should.
And then there's that thing where you hit the Vegas border.
Yeah.
And it's a casino, right?
I don't know what that town's called, but as soon as you cross...
Yeah.
It's a town that's like for people who have such bad gambling problems, they
can't wait
to get to Las Vegas.
They can't wait to get to Vegas.
I got to pull off now and bet.
I can't take it.
But don't you think it's happened where like a person is flown in from some
former country,
got to L.A., driven, seen that, figured it was Vegas.
Oh, and just spent like the weekend there?
Yeah, and then came home.
Doesn't that have a rock in the name?
It's like something rock or rock something.
Yeah, it is rock something.
Red rock or...
Little Rock.
Little Rock, Arkansas?
Oh my God.
Explain to me...
Daniel's not exactly Watson over here.
Explain to me why there are no Canadian hockey players named Norm.
Well, there's Norm Allman.
Norm Allman?
Was he the only one?
Canadian hockey player Norm Allman who played beside Paul Henderson, who of
course was
the...
Oh, now you're going back to early 70s.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's not a lot of norms, to tell you the truth.
Not a lot of Canadian norms.
You might be the only Canadian norm.
When you know your own name, you see it in popular culture used, you know, and
Norm
is always like...
I noticed this ever since I was a kid.
When I was very young, there was a show called Peyton Plays with Ryan O'Neill
as a
sexy brother.
Norm is a deeply closeted man.
And it didn't say it straight out, but he was tortured.
And then they had the rollicking comedy, Norman, Where Are You?
with Red Fox.
I barely remember that.
Yeah, Red Fox's son was a gay American.
Is that true?
Yeah.
Oh, was that one of those they were trying to...
This was early 80s, right?
They were trying to get out of that whole gay wave.
Right.
Red Fox is going to be the bigoted guy who's got the gay son.
Yeah.
I remember that.
And then they had, of course, Norman Cheers was a big fat guy.
And the list goes on and on.
So Norman Cheers and then Norman Fell.
And Norman Fell.
Who's probably the most famous Norman.
Here's how stupid I was when I was starting my stand-up career.
Yeah.
I would go across Canada, you know, and do my stand-up.
In these little yuck yuck clubs, you know?
Yeah.
And so they'd introduce me.
Hey, here's Norm MacDonald.
And I'd go on stage and people would go, Norm, Norm, you know, from that TV
show.
Right.
Because Norm was out at the time.
So they would all yell, Norm, from that Cheers.
But I thought I was catching on.
Oh, you didn't make the connection?
I didn't make the connection.
So I was like, wow, there's some grassroots going through.
Because I was in Calgary six months ago.
I had 400 people and the word is growing.
Yeah.
They go, Norm, Norm.
Thank you.
But no, it wasn't a Cheers thing.
What was your job before SNL?
Like, how'd you end up on SNL?
I was doing just stand-up.
And then somebody saw me do stand-up.
I just get stuff through stand-up.
They hired you as a writer, performer, or a writer?
They wan