Name: Norm's Worst Job
Uploaded: 2023-07-18T20:07:34.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Norm's Worst Job' from I'm not Norm on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-07-18. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Norm's Worst Job' from I'm not Norm on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-07-18. Transcript available.

I never knew there was such a thing as a person that could work in comedy.
Like, I thought, you know, I had seen The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
We got it rarely in Canada, but we got it.
And I thought there was like five comedians, you know, and they all had nice
sweaters.
It's a nice sweater.
Thanks, dude.
And that's what I thought.
And I didn't know that there was this subculture of comedians that traveled all
around
telling their, you know, rather unseemly jokes to, you know, drunk patrons
and tried to hit on waitresses and asked if all the food was free.
So then when I found that out, I said, that's great,
because before that I only had jobs, I only had manual labor jobs.
Like what?
What's a real job you did that you would call manual labor?
Well, the cooler ones were like, I was a chokerman for a logging company.
A what?
It's a person that puts the, it doesn't matter.
Okay.
It's a thing where a goddamn tree can fall on you.
Okay, all right, fine.
Every week, okay, hey, where was, where's Pete?
A tree fell on him.
And we all made a lot of money.
We made $17 an hour.
And I remember at one point I was talking to the dishwasher
that everybody made fun of, old Sam.
And I said, Sam, what do you make?
He's like, $17 an hour.
I'm like, what?
So everybody made $17 an hour.
So then I was like, I want to be the dishwasher.
It turned out there's a huge waiting list
that included almost everyone in the logging cans.
They wanted to be a dishwasher.
Yeah.
Because when you were washing dishes,
the likelihood of a tree falling on you
was highly diminished.
Hey, I'm Norm Macdonald.
When I was a young man of 14,
I attended a Jesuit school in Montreal.
And it was, it was very tough.
It was for the best and the brightest.
And come summertime, my dad decided it was time
that a boy would become a man.
And that I take on the work and the liberties
that go along with it of having a job.
And so he was, he'd done very well in real estate.
And I moved into the nascent field of hedge fund management.
So he said, son, how would you like to be
a hedge fund manager for the summer?
And I, you know, I didn't really want,
I wanted to play with my friends and so forth.
But I said, you know, sure, why not?
So I became a hedge fund manager.
It was a, the summer for me and school was three months.
And in that three months, I made $280,000 for the firm.
What do you think they paid me?
$190,000.
I did all the work and made, you know,
barely 60% of the money.
But it taught me a valuable lesson
that the people who control the money
are the ones that make the money.
Not the people that are down
in the trenches of Lipscomb, McDonald,
and Levine.
That truly make the money.
It taught me a very valuable life lesson.
Thank you.
It's just too hard to move when you're standing right there.
It's just too hard to walk away and leave you like that.
Can we give it one more night?
Just one more night.
I was a door-to-door salesman.
Did you?
Really?
What'd you sell?
Doors.
It never worked out.
What other jobs have you had besides actor and comedian?
I was a town drunk, village idiot.
No, but be serious for a second.
Did you ever wait table or drive a cab or something like that?
I did a lot of manual labor.
Did all manual labor.
Really?
Yeah.
Like brick work?
Brick work I did, yeah.
You're making all this up as we go, aren't you?
No.
That whole thing that we showed about the Scrabble game,
you made that whole thing up, didn't you?
No, no, no.
That was true.
Truth is stranger than fiction.
I keep trying to tell you that.
Heavy lifting?
I did a lot of heavy lifting.
I moved furniture.
That's a hard job.
Yes, it is.
Moving furniture.
Because the stairs are never right for the contours of the giant couch
that you have to lift up.
But people that I worked with, man, they loved lifting furniture.
Yep.
One time, one time, this is an interesting story, Tom.
It's probably too long, but I was working with an old guy, you know.
Old guy.
His name was Gus.
And we had to move this thing up a ladder, see, to a balcony
because we couldn't get it up the twisting spiral staircase.
Okay, okay.
So we had to go outside and put a ladder up.
So old Gus, he's on the balcony, you understand?
Yep.
With a rope holding this giant refrigerator.
And abs of steel.
And abs of steel.
I'm on the bottom climbing up the ladder, pushing the, uh, the, uh...
Refrigerator.
Refrigerator.
I slip off the ladder and fall down,
and old Gus has the entire weight of the refrigerator.
And all his muscles are shooting out, and he wouldn't let go, you know.
Abs of steel.
Abs of steel.
That wasn't a good story.
No, it's a great story.
It's fabulous.