Name: Norm Macdonald on q with Tom Power Oct 2016 CBC Radio
Uploaded: 2022-04-22T05:00:11.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Norm Macdonald on q with Tom Power Oct 2016 CBC Radio' from TickleMeNorm on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-04-22. Transcript available. Be Sad Now #normmacdonald #norm.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Norm Macdonald on q with Tom Power Oct 2016 CBC Radio' from TickleMeNorm on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-04-22. Transcript available. Be Sad Now #normmacdonald #norm.

Norm MacDonald is the kind of comedian who knows how to keep you on edge.
If you've ever watched his stand-up, if you remember him being on Saturday
Night Live,
you've experienced that sort of uncomfortable feeling when Norm says something
so bizarre
or something so beautiful, and all he can really do is laugh.
I mean, just check this one out.
A new study found that men with beards are more attractive than men without beards.
More great work from the University of Bob Seger.
Yeah, you know? You see what I mean?
He's absurd, man. He's unpredictable. He's incredible.
And as a person, Norm is kind of unknowable.
I mean, ask any talk show host. It's hard to get a straight answer from him.
And his new book doesn't really help.
It's called Based on a True Story and Memoir.
And, you know, while Norm's really funny, we talked really kind of deeply
about whether being real is overrated.
So, Norm, you have a new book out.
It's based on a true story, a memoir.
I got that in the right order.
It covers key moments in your life, growing up here in Ontario,
going on Saturday Night Live.
And so many people want to hear the stories, you know, the stories of getting
hired,
the stories of not getting hired, the stories of growing up in Ontario.
But in this book, you kind of tell them as half-truths,
and then you make up stories around them.
So I guess I want to know, why didn't you want to write a traditional memoir?
Why did you want to make some of these stories up?
Well, because I read a lot of memoirs, and they all were horrible.
And then, I mean, as it turns out, like, anything backstage is just by nature
inferior to anything that's onstage.
And backstage is just eating sandwiches, trying to figure out what to do onstage.
So I wanted the book to be its own onstage and have nothing to do with the
backstage of some
other medium.
I wanted it to be a book.
One thing I see as a, and forgive me for being presumptive, or presumptuous,
is that I see a distinction between your love of show business and your love of
celebrity.
So, like, you seem to really like the construct of show business.
People getting onstage and telling jokes, you know, late-night talk shows, you
know, radio.
The forms of entertainment you seem to have a lot of respect for.
However, it does seem like celebrity is something you eschew, like something
you're not as fond of.
So, like, what's the difference there for you?
Well, just that celebrity is empty and vapid, and, you know, we need no better
example nowadays
than all the example we have nowadays.
So it's reached a point where people, you know, listen, it's like Andy Warhol
said,
in the future, everyone will be Colonel Sanders for 15 minutes.
I also like when you said, like Andy Williams said, everyone will be famous for
25 minutes.
Did I say Andy Williams?
You said that to Letterman one time, yeah.
Yeah.
Letterman likes all time.
He does.
He does.
But that's, but you do, speaking of Letterman, like, you have a lot of respect
for those old comics.
You have a lot of respect for Letterman, for Rodney Dangerfield, for George Carlin,
Bob Hope.
And this is, you have a lot of time for comedians that came before you, or
maybe you watched when you were coming up.
But I'm interested.
I know it's a big question.
But how do you feel about comedy now?
Well, I remember there was a comedian named Robert Klein, and he said that when
he started out in New York, there was 100 comics, and only five were funny.
And then there was 500 comics, and only five were funny.
So he thought 500 was a huge amount, but now there's 50,000, and there's only
five that were funny, because it just does not work by supply and demand.
You know, you can't create art because you need art.
So it doesn't, you know, just because you need more paintings doesn't mean
there's going to be a million great painters.
So naturally, it's going to be worse, and the audience doesn't seem to know the
difference, as long as the structure is there and the craft is there.
You know, anyone can learn it the same way you can learn chords on a guitar,
you know.
And you can trick the audience, pretty simply.
Trick them how?
Well, I was going to write a book, but then I thought it would be too dangerous,
but I was going to write a book like how to become a stand-up without being
funny at all.
Because those are the most of the stand-ups I've ever seen.
I talked to them off stage, and I'm like, did anyone ever tell you the funniest
guy, like in the room, in the lunchroom, let alone like that you dared to do
this, such a presumptuous thing as to stand on stage?
But what they did was they learned tricks, and I started to realize, because I
started at Yuck Yucks, and I'd go across the country, and it was sort of the
start of the boom.
And I'd go, that guy looks familiar, that opener, and they'd go, he used to be
the bouncer.
I'm like, what?
And then it turned out he would, the bouncer would just watch from the back of
the room and just, you know, either consciously or otherwise pick up on how to,
you know, on techniques of crowd control and saying certain things that made
audiences applaud or, you know, just a number of different tricks that you can
use in lieu of actual comedy.
You also say in the book, sorry, sorry, Norm, I didn't mean to interrupt you,
go on.
I had nothing to say, just fluff.
Because you weren't speaking, so I felt I had to.
But that's a trick, you know, that's a trick, right?
Is that an interviewer's trick?
No, like when we're not in person?
Yeah, that's a thing, like I don't talk, hopefully, that, you know, and
sometimes it works because I'm, you know, I'm not entirely sure what to say
next either.
And I go, I'm going to give him 15 seconds here, and hopefully.
I can see, so you just throw the rope, you just throw the lucid rope.
And it makes me sound so contemplative, you know?
Like it makes me sound, it makes me sound like he's really pondering and
considering what Norm's about to say.
But I do have something to say.
Norm, you seem to have like a gold standard of what a comic should be.
Like, you know, you say things like, well, you know, like you're not going to
be as funny as this, you're not going to be as good as that.
Like the greatest comic in the world is not necessarily going to be that.
Like, I know it's a big question, but like in your craft, like what's your
ideal comic?
Who's your ideal comic?
Rodney Dangerfield would probably be my ideal comic, or Richard Pryor might be
my ideal comic, depending on the type of comic that they are.
Why?
But, well, because they're the best at, it's very hard to be, it's very hard to
be considered naturally funny, which is just a nonsensical phrase.
But it's, you know, it's used as a sort of a put down in some ways that the
person could read a phone book or something.
Of course, no one could read a phone book and be funny.
But it's just that they're so good, they don't look good.
So, on the other hand, if you have someone like Bill Hicks, who's just this
fraud that screams at the top of his lungs and tells you that, you know, multinational
oil companies are not a good thing, then that will attract a wide, wide
audience of, you know, half-smart college or college kids or whatever, you know.
So, to truly conceal everything like somebody like Bob Hope would do, then he
becomes vilified, you know, somebody like Bob Hope, because it looks like he's
doing nothing, which is, of course, the magic of it, you know.
And who's he talking to?
You said that, I know I was probably supposed to give you space there, but, you
know, you mentioned an audience of half-smart college kids.
And, Norm, earlier in the interview, you talked about how you don't really do
comedy for anyone but yourself.
You don't worry too much about the reaction from the audience.
However, you talk about Bob Hope and Rodney Dangerfield, and the reaction
mattered a lot to them.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know how much it meant to them.
Well, they did it for them.
They seem to legitimately be concerned with entertaining the audience.
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
But, no, when I do a gig for – sometimes people confuse what I do for no
money and what I do for money.
Like, if I –
What's this one?
Well, like, I'm not being insanely funny now because it's not the purpose of
what I'm doing, you know.
But if I do stand-up at a comedy club, I will throw away jokes that don't work.
I would not keep doing the joke only because I liked it.
I just mean the creation of the joke is aimed at me.
I don't know how it's possible to – you know.
I mean, I know how it's possible, but it's a bad idea to go, well, what does
the audience think?
And then I'll start there, you know.
So I'll start with Trump's an idiot.
And then you just end – you end with Trump's an idiot, too.
That becomes the entire point of what you say.
And so it's just empty, and they knew that before they showed up.
You know.
So it's not like I would ever, in front of an audience, deliberately do a joke
that I know would not get a reaction.
Now, I've done stuff on television before where I've experimented with joke
structures.
And I did that on Weekend Update, and I did that other places on television.
But that was for my own consideration because oftentimes, you know, I would be
getting, like, $500 for the appearance, you know, let's say on a talk show or
something.
So I go, well, let me try something here because I know I'll be just as good as
the girl talking about her third swimming pool.
Yeah, or the Melrose Place.
The moth joke is a good example of that, Norm, because if, like, you go into
– you tell a really beautiful version of the moth joke.
And if you're listening to this – by the way, this is Norm MacDonald talking
about his new book, Based on a True Story and Memoir.
My name is Tom Power.
You're listening to Q.
I should have said this about 10 minutes ago, and I didn't, and my producer is
now waving his arms in the air thanking me for doing that.
So you do tell the moth joke in the book.
You told it on The Tonight Show with Conan back when he was doing The Tonight
Show.
It was – it's a long kind of joke.
And just a few months ago, maybe about a year ago, it kind of got revived
online, and people were putting it up online, calling it the best telling of a
joke ever on television.
But, Norm, that seemed to me like you were trying – you were experimenting
there.
You were trying to experiment with – you knew the punchline, and you knew the
beginning of it, and you knew it was a pretty straightforward street joke.
But you wanted to experiment with how to get from one point to another.
Yeah, it was both an experiment and – it was an experiment born of necessity
because Conan told me I had to do a second spot, which you'll sometimes do.
But I said, I don't have anything else to say.
I have nothing left to tell you.
And so then I thought of this joke that Colin Quinn had told me, this street
joke.
A moth goes into a podiatrist's office, and the podiatrist's office says, what's
the problem?
And the moth says, what's the problem?
Where do I begin, man?
He goes, I go to work for –
It was just a two-line joke.
It was just a, you know, one-liner times two.
So then I thought, well, how can I do – I started thinking during the
commercial, is it possible to do a one-liner for an entire six-minute segment?
So I thought if I can put in between this very little boy's joke, just a set of
horrifying facts laid end to end, then it could make the sweetness way, way funnier
at the end because they'd have completely forgotten where I was.
And so it ended up working by fluke, like often things will when you're
experimenting.
He says, Doc, sometimes I feel like a spider, even though I'm a moth, just
barely hanging on to my web with an everlasting fire underneath me.
I'm not feeling good.
And so the moth – the doctor says, moth, man, you're troubled.
But you should be seeing a psychiatrist.
Why on earth did you come here?
And then the moth said, because the light was on.
I mean, yeah, and then what happens with the computer is that people put things
on the computer and they live forever.
And you were talking about the Melrose Place thing, which I did with Courtney
Thorne-Smith, where I was just in – you know.
Yeah, just for context, if you're listening to this, this is a kind of a
legendary late-night moment where Courtney Thorne-Smith is the second guest on
Conan after Norm.
She's in a new movie with Caratop called Chairman of the Board.
I hope you don't mind me laying that joke right now.
So she's in a new show and Norm calls it – Norm calls it box office poison.
And then she –
I just want to –
And Norm – and Conan says, no, that's – she's in the show.
And then Courtney Thorne-Smith says, yeah, I'm in the show.
And Norm says, well, no, I'm sure you're a very good talk show guest.
And then she says, no, the movie's called Chairman of the Board.
And Conan says, let's see you do something with that.
And you say –
I bet the board is spelled B-O-R-E-D.
And what was funny about that was – that was before computers.
So then you would just say something and it would just go out into the ether
and people
would go, remember that thing?
And the other guy would go, no.
And they'd go, well, I don't either.
But nowadays it exists forever.
And I don't even know if I would do that joke now.
But anyways, I – you know, now I'll go on talk shows and, you know, I'll go
on first
and then they'll always go like, the next guy that comes, just say anything you
want,
you know.
And then they'll – they'll warn the second guest.
They'll go, Norm might attack you at any moment.
But that's not what I do.
So like sometimes you'll see a guest that'll come out and then like peremptorily
attack
me for no reason at all.
So I just don't say anything.
It's just being unnecessarily hostile to you.
Yeah, I don't – if that ever happens, I never say anything.
So it just seems sort of odd to the audience that Thomas Hayden Church is like
attacking
me out of the blue.
Is there a difference – so is there a difference in how you prepare yourself
for going on a
late night show now than you did back in the 90s?
Yeah, I try to – I try to resist going anywhere towards expectation of the
– what I started
to do very early on, which, you know, could have got me knocked off talk shows
forever.
But I did not understand that when you went on a talk show, that you had to
tell a producer
the stories that you were going to tell on the talk show and then the producer
would go and
tell the host and then you would have to tell the host the same story that he's
just heard.
We don't have that here.
We don't have the money at the CDC for that.
No, exactly.
Yeah.
So then, of course, the host has all these, you know, comebacks in his pocket
and stuff,
you know.
So anyways, the second time I did it on the Late Night with David Letterman
show, I said,
I'll just make up a whole, like, thing.
So I just told the producer a secondary bunch of funny stories and then I didn't
do them.
So then David Letterman go, "I understand you have a cat."
And I go, "I got no cat."
You know, but I was just in Michigan and then he got a kick out of that and he
go, "So,
you don't have a cat.
I like you keep that going for them entire."
Because he knew that I was just going to talk to him.
So then after that, he just let me do whatever I'd want to do.
And Conan, God bless him, also did the same.
Like, do you feel the same comfort with Fallon or Kimmel or with James Corden
that you do,
kind of going anywhere and exploring that you did with Letterman and Conan?
Oh, no, I have complete faith in that.
You know, you're not in this, obviously, these guys were masters, so it's a
little bit different.
Like, I was talking to Howard Stern about it because I'd done Fallon and I said,
"It's
weird when you look over and there's a child sitting at the desk, you know,
and you're like, what?
It's such a surreal thing, you know, because you're used to this giant of a man
whose hands
you could sit in, you know, and now there's a kid."
So, and then Howard said something that hadn't occurred to me, but it made
sense.
He's like, "Yeah, you can't be like the dopey fool, you know, when the guy's 20
years younger
than you, you know, it's hard to."
But somehow I managed to be able to do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You somehow pulled it off.
Norm MacDonald, thanks a lot for talking to me today.
Thank you, Tom.
This was fun.
I had a great time talking to you, man.
Well, I did too, man.
Maybe we'll do it again.
Norm MacDonald, by the way, the moth joke he tells, I think we cut it down to
like maybe
45 seconds in that, but it's six minutes long.
It is six minutes long.
It may be the greatest telling of a joke you'll ever see.
We'll put it up on our Twitter.
That's @CBCRadioQ.
Norm MacDonald's new book is called Based on a True Story, a memoir.
It is beautiful.
Some of it's true and some of it ain't true.

Norm Macdonald on q with Tom Power Oct 2016 CBC Radio

Norm MacDonald is the kind of comedian who knows how to keep you on edge.
If you've ever watched his stand-up, if you remember him being on Saturday
Night Live,
you've experienced that sort of uncomfortable feeling when Norm says something
so bizarre
or something so beautiful, and all he can really do is laugh.
I mean, just check this one out.
A new study found that men with beards are more attractive than men without beards.
More great work from the University of Bob Seger.
Yeah, you know? You see what I mean?
He's absurd, man. He's unpredictable. He's incredible.
And as a person, Norm is kind of unknowable.
I mean, ask any talk show host. It's hard to get a straight answer from him.
And his new book doesn't really help.
It's called Based on a True Story and Memoir.
And, you know, while Norm's really funny, we talked really kind of deeply
about whether being real is overrated.
So, Norm, you have a new book out.
It's based on a true story, a memoir.
I got that in the right order.
It covers key moments in your life, growing up here in Ontario,
going on Saturday Night Live.
And so many people want to hear the stories, you know, the stories of getting
hired,
the stories of not getting hired, the stories of growing up in Ontario.
But in this book, you kind of tell them as half-truths,
and then you make up stories around them.
So I guess I want to know, why didn't you want to write a traditional memoir?
Why did you want to make some of these stories up?
Well, because I read a lot of memoirs, and they all were horrible.
And then, I mean, as it turns out, like, anything backstage is just by nature
inferior to anything that's onstage.
And backstage is just eating sandwiches, trying to figure out what to do onstage.
So I wanted the book to be its own onstage and have nothing to do with the
backstage of some
other medium.
I wanted it to be a book.
One thing I see as a, and forgive me for being presumptive, or presumptuous,
is that I see a distinction between your love of show business and your love of
celebrity.
So, like, you seem to really like the construct of show business.
People getting onstage and telling jokes, you know, late-night talk shows, you
know, radio.
The forms of entertainment you seem to have a lot of respect for.
However, it does seem like celebrity is something you eschew, like something
you're not as fond of.
So, like, what's the difference there for you?
Well, just that celebrity is empty and vapid, and, you know, we need no better
example nowadays
than all the example we have nowadays.
So it's reached a point where people, you know, listen, it's like Andy Warhol
said,
in the future, everyone will be Colonel Sanders for 15 minutes.
I also like when you said, like Andy Williams said, everyone will be famous for
25 minutes.
Did I say Andy Williams?
You said that to Letterman one time, yeah.
Yeah.
Letterman likes all time.
He does.
He does.
But that's, but you do, speaking of Letterman, like, you have a lot of respect
for those old comics.
You have a lot of respect for Letterman, for Rodney Dangerfield, for George Carlin,
Bob Hope.
And this is, you have a lot of time for comedians that came before you, or
maybe you watched when you were coming up.
But I'm interested.
I know it's a big question.
But how do you feel about comedy now?
Well, I remember there was a comedian named Robert Klein, and he said that when
he started out in New York, there was 100 comics, and only five were funny.
And then there was 500 comics, and only five were funny.
So he thought 500 was a huge amount, but now there's 50,000, and there's only
five that were funny, because it just does not work by supply and demand.
You know, you can't create art because you need art.
So it doesn't, you know, just because you need more paintings doesn't mean
there's going to be a million great painters.
So naturally, it's going to be worse, and the audience doesn't seem to know the
difference, as long as the structure is there and the craft is there.
You know, anyone can learn it the same way you can learn chords on a guitar,
you know.
And you can trick the audience, pretty simply.
Trick them how?
Well, I was going to write a book, but then I thought it would be too dangerous,
but I was going to write a book like how to become a stand-up without being
funny at all.
Because those are the most of the stand-ups I've ever seen.
I talked to them off stage, and I'm like, did anyone ever tell you the funniest
guy, like in the room, in the lunchroom, let alone like that you dared to do
this, such a presumptuous thing as to stand on stage?
But what they did was they learned tricks, and I started to realize, because I
started at Yuck Yucks, and I'd go across the country, and it was sort of the
start of the boom.
And I'd go, that guy looks familiar, that opener, and they'd go, he used to be
the bouncer.
I'm like, what?
And then it turned out he would, the bouncer would just watch from the back of
the room and just, you know, either consciously or otherwise pick up on how to,
you know, on techniques of crowd control and saying certain things that made
audiences applaud or, you know, just a number of different tricks that you can
use in lieu of actual comedy.
You also say in the book, sorry, sorry, Norm, I didn't mean to interrupt you,
go on.
I had nothing to say, just fluff.
Because you weren't speaking, so I felt I had to.
But that's a trick, you know, that's a trick, right?
Is that an interviewer's trick?
No, like when we're not in person?
Yeah, that's a thing, like I don't talk, hopefully, that, you know, and
sometimes it works because I'm, you know, I'm not entirely sure what to say
next either.
And I go, I'm going to give him 15 seconds here, and hopefully.
I can see, so you just throw the rope, you just throw the lucid rope.
And it makes me sound so contemplative, you know?
Like it makes me sound, it makes me sound like he's really pondering and
considering what Norm's about to say.
But I do have something to say.
Norm, you seem to have like a gold standard of what a comic should be.
Like, you know, you say things like, well, you know, like you're not going to
be as funny as this, you're not going to be as good as that.
Like the greatest comic in the world is not necessarily going to be that.
Like, I know it's a big question, but like in your craft, like what's your
ideal comic?
Who's your ideal comic?
Rodney Dangerfield would probably be my ideal comic, or Richard Pryor might be
my ideal comic, depending on the type of comic that they are.
Why?
But, well, because they're the best at, it's very hard to be, it's very hard to
be considered naturally funny, which is just a nonsensical phrase.
But it's, you know, it's used as a sort of a put down in some ways that the
person could read a phone book or something.
Of course, no one could read a phone book and be funny.
But it's just that they're so good, they don't look good.
So, on the other hand, if you have someone like Bill Hicks, who's just this
fraud that screams at the top of his lungs and tells you that, you know, multinational
oil companies are not a good thing, then that will attract a wide, wide
audience of, you know, half-smart college or college kids or whatever, you know.
So, to truly conceal everything like somebody like Bob Hope would do, then he
becomes vilified, you know, somebody like Bob Hope, because it looks like he's
doing nothing, which is, of course, the magic of it, you know.
And who's he talking to?
You said that, I know I was probably supposed to give you space there, but, you
know, you mentioned an audience of half-smart college kids.
And, Norm, earlier in the interview, you talked about how you don't really do
comedy for anyone but yourself.
You don't worry too much about the reaction from the audience.
However, you talk about Bob Hope and Rodney Dangerfield, and the reaction
mattered a lot to them.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know how much it meant to them.
Well, they did it for them.
They seem to legitimately be concerned with entertaining the audience.
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
But, no, when I do a gig for – sometimes people confuse what I do for no
money and what I do for money.
Like, if I –
What's this one?
Well, like, I'm not being insanely funny now because it's not the purpose of
what I'm doing, you know.
But if I do stand-up at a comedy club, I will throw away jokes that don't work.
I would not keep doing the joke only because I liked it.
I just mean the creation of the joke is aimed at me.
I don't know how it's possible to – you know.
I mean, I know how it's possible, but it's a bad idea to go, well, what does
the audience think?
And then I'll start there, you know.
So I'll start with Trump's an idiot.
And then you just end – you end with Trump's an idiot, too.
That becomes the entire point of what you say.
And so it's just empty, and they knew that before they showed up.
You know.
So it's not like I would ever, in front of an audience, deliberately do a joke
that I know would not get a reaction.
Now, I've done stuff on television before where I've experimented with joke
structures.
And I did that on Weekend Update, and I did that other places on television.
But that was for my own consideration because oftentimes, you know, I would be
getting, like, $500 for the appearance, you know, let's say on a talk show or
something.
So I go, well, let me try something here because I know I'll be just as good as
the girl talking about her third swimming pool.
Yeah, or the Melrose Place.
The moth joke is a good example of that, Norm, because if, like, you go into
– you tell a really beautiful version of the moth joke.
And if you're listening to this – by the way, this is Norm MacDonald talking
about his new book, Based on a True Story and Memoir.
My name is Tom Power.
You're listening to Q.
I should have said this about 10 minutes ago, and I didn't, and my producer is
now waving his arms in the air thanking me for doing that.
So you do tell the moth joke in the book.
You told it on The Tonight Show with Conan back when he was doing The Tonight
Show.
It was – it's a long kind of joke.
And just a few months ago, maybe about a year ago, it kind of got revived
online, and people were putting it up online, calling it the best telling of a
joke ever on television.
But, Norm, that seemed to me like you were trying – you were experimenting
there.
You were trying to experiment with – you knew the punchline, and you knew the
beginning of it, and you knew it was a pretty straightforward street joke.
But you wanted to experiment with how to get from one point to another.
Yeah, it was both an experiment and – it was an experiment born of necessity
because Conan told me I had to do a second spot, which you'll sometimes do.
But I said, I don't have anything else to say.
I have nothing left to tell you.
And so then I thought of this joke that Colin Quinn had told me, this street
joke.
A moth goes into a podiatrist's office, and the podiatrist's office says, what's
the problem?
And the moth says, what's the problem?
Where do I begin, man?
He goes, I go to work for –
It was just a two-line joke.
It was just a, you know, one-liner times two.
So then I thought, well, how can I do – I started thinking during the
commercial, is it possible to do a one-liner for an entire six-minute segment?
So I thought if I can put in between this very little boy's joke, just a set of
horrifying facts laid end to end, then it could make the sweetness way, way funnier
at the end because they'd have completely forgotten where I was.
And so it ended up working by fluke, like often things will when you're
experimenting.
He says, Doc, sometimes I feel like a spider, even though I'm a moth, just
barely hanging on to my web with an everlasting fire underneath me.
I'm not feeling good.
And so the moth – the doctor says, moth, man, you're troubled.
But you should be seeing a psychiatrist.
Why on earth did you come here?
And then the moth said, because the light was on.
I mean, yeah, and then what ha