Name: Behind the Scene: Norm Macdonald's Moth Joke
Uploaded: 2021-12-12T20:51:17.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Behind the Scene: Norm Macdonald's Moth Joke' from I'm not Norm on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-12-12. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Behind the Scene: Norm Macdonald's Moth Joke' from I'm not Norm on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-12-12. Transcript available.

I watched because I went down that rabbit hole after I watched the clip
and I watched him tell the moth joke.
Right.
And, you know, it's interesting.
It reminded me, my dad told jokes that way.
He was just so inherently funny that a two-minute joke takes 10 minutes.
The punchline is the least of it.
You're going on the journey.
And that's the same thing with Norm.
It's like, I don't care how long this takes.
No.
Because it's just fun watching him tell a story.
I hadn't seen the moth joke since it aired, and I had no memory of it.
And he's so delightful doing it.
You just totally go for that.
Yeah.
And you almost forget that it was a joke, even, to begin with.
It's like, oh, I don't even remember what the premise was anymore.
Yeah.
He's such, like, a disruptor.
Like, the night of the moth joke show, I remember I was walking off.
Like, act one, we do all the comedy stuff.
And then I have to go off stage, and we go edit, you know, pull it up or
tighten it or whatever.
I go back to the edit room.
And I left the studio, and I'm walking in a hallway, and Norm's being brought
the other direction to be the guest.
And I know him only to say hello, like, in a very superficial showbiz way, not
at all.
And I had my arm in a sling because I broke my arm.
And he's like, hey!
And it was like an excuse for him to just stop and start talking to me.
And he just started going, yeah, you know, my uncle broke his arm, and oh, boy,
let me...
And he started going into this long story, and I'm like, why is he doing this?
And then I realized, like, the stage manager and the segment producer, all
these people were around him, and they were trying to hustle him out.
So, you know, the commercial break was ending, and I swear, I was thinking,
like, he's just doing this to bust their balls.
Because he just went on a monologue for, like, two minutes, and they're kind of,
like, looking at their watches and freaking out.
And I was like, I think he just loves...
Oh, he's disrupting.
Pushing people's buttons, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
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, um, 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.
And, 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, uh, it was, uh, both an experiment, and, uh, I had, it was an
experiment born of necessity, because, uh, Conan told me I had to do a second
spot, which he'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, uh, Colin Quinn had told me, this
street joke.
A moth goes into a podiatrist's office, and, uh, 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, uh...
It was just a two-line joke.
It was just a, you know, one-liner times two.
So, um, then I thought, well, how can I do a...
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, um, very, um, little boy's joke, um,
uh, just a set of horrifying facts laid end to end, then it could, uh, make the
sweetness, uh, way, way funnier at the end, because they'd have...
they'd have completely forgotten where, where I was.
And so I ended up working, uh, by fluke, like, uh, often things will when you're
experimenting.
I need your love
You free my mind
I need your love
Yeah, you free my mind
This is dark.
Sometimes I feel like a spider, even though I'm a moth.
Just barely hanging onto my web with an everlasting fire underneath me.
I'm not feeling good.
And so the moth, the, 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, "Cause the light was on."
I mean, yeah, and then, um, what happens in, with the computer is that people
put things on the computer and they live forever.