Name: Norm Macdonald Hates Political Comedy
Uploaded: 2021-02-24T12:30:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Norm Macdonald Hates Political Comedy' from I'm not Norm on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-02-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Norm Macdonald Hates Political Comedy' from I'm not Norm on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-02-24. Transcript available.

What about guys that do, like, political, like, that's not very good, is it?
Sometimes it is.
Political stuff?
I like all comedy.
Do you?
Norm, you know?
Huh?
You probably like it all, too.
I don't like political comedy that much.
You don't?
Like, I don't give a fuck if Reagan's old.
Are they still doing Reagan jokes?
Probably.
They probably are.
Yeah, you gotta have a, you know, you get, like, an old socialist audience of
old Jewish
guys with ponytails when you do material like that.
I really?
You understand after a while, and even with politicians, like, they're still
human beings.
Yeah, barely.
But yeah, they're the worst kind of fucking people in the world.
That's true.
All of them.
I'm glad to hear you say that, because everybody thinks you're all leftist and
everything.
Well, I mean, you know, I definitely land on the lefty side of things on, you
know, ideological
terms, but I found that from doing political talk radio, just, you know, being,
you know,
carrying water for any of them, you just gotta realize the quality of people
you're dealing
with.
You're dealing with fucking corporate whores who are operated by business
interests.
So, you know, really, it's going to come down to, you know, however you view
politics.
The question is, do you give a shit about poor people?
And, uh, and, and are we being taken advantage of?
Right now, if people want to frame that as, you know, Obama's a communist and
draining us
of our livelihood.
Well, that's your particular delusion and that's fine.
I mean, but, but it, I just got disillusioned with all of it because they're,
these are
not quality people.
I mean, I did a joke about, uh, Michelle Bachman on real time.
I saw that.
Yeah.
And I was getting flack from this, you know, you know, a very small portion of
the right,
you know, that they were like, he's got, he's a misogynist.
I'm like, she's a fucking pig.
She's a fucking politician.
How do you, can you name me two politicians that command any respect whatsoever?
Why do we respect these people?
These people are car salesmen.
They're idiots.
They're, they're, they're more disingenuous than anybody as performers.
And they basically figured out a way to bait and placate morons into, you know,
voting against
their, their self-interest.
That's an amazing skill, but is it respectable?
I don't know.
Do you respect a guy that sells you, you know, horse shit in the guise of a
health supplement?
I agree with you.
I mean, I think politicians are more, are, are, are terrible.
I, I, I mean, people, uh, attack evangelists and it, but at least evangelists
offer something.
Right.
Well, they, they, they, they after the immediate relief of someone's, uh, you
know, pain and
aggravation with another line of bullshit, but, but nonetheless, I mean, they're
pretty
evil too.
Well, I mean, you know, with politics, it's like, yeah, I, I, I don't like to
get into it
that much anymore.
Yeah, let's not get into this shit, man.
Okay, buddy.
Cause it's getting, I can see people not laughing now.
No, I mean, but you know, laughter, but you know, I, I know that you've gotten
into a
little bit of flack around it, but you're, you're, you're around politics.
Uh, what do you mean?
Well, just say, you know, you've said things that people have reacted to, but
you're, you're
not like a political comic.
I'm not political.
I, I, I've said, I've only said things on purpose to provoke people.
Right.
Once in a while.
Once in a while.
You like doing that though.
Once in a while.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, uh, I've never, uh, but I'm, uh, but I, but I've never, um, because I don't
know
enough and because I, and because I don't respect a political humor when it's
nothing but gossip.
Yeah.
And mostly comics and people like us, you know, people who are obviously first
amendment
warriors to a certain degree, we like living the way we want to live.
So it's really just going to come down to, to money.
It's like, you know, how do I keep my money?
I mean, that's the biggest political question that most righties ask themselves.
It's like, I'd like to keep as much as my money as possible.
And if that's a, if that's in a minority opinion, how do we get this majority
of poor people
to get me to keep my money and believe that they're doing the right thing?
Yeah.
It's a tough fucking thing because if every, apparently I read this, if all the
money in
the world was equally divided among everybody, everybody would be dead fucking
poor.
Yeah.
You know, there's like, there's these moments where like, I don't talk about as
much as
I used to, but then there's like, there's moments where you're like, there's a
moment
that I could, I was on a fucking radio show the other day and this was an
interesting thing
because it's, it's about professionalism.
You know, I don't, you know, I don't do political talk radio.
So, you know, I've got my political views and, uh, and, and they're fairly
general.
You know, I'm not trying to support, you know, any politician, but you know, I,
I have the
way I think about things, but there are politicians that represent the opposite
of the, what I
think.
So I'm on this talk show with a guy, it's a Fox affiliate, but you know, I'm
there to
plug my comedy and talk about my podcast and be funny with this dude.
Who's a talk show host.
He's a radio professional.
He runs an entertainment show for the most part, but he's been dying to talk to
Rand Paul about
the bridge situation because I'm in Louisville, Kentucky.
He's the fucking Senator.
They got bridges falling down and he's been trying to get this guy on the show
and the
guy just, he calls in when I'm there, you know?
So like now I've got like, if I was doing political talk radio, I mean, it
would have
been like, you know, what the fuck are you thinking?
You know, you and your libertarian bullshit and how are we going to pay for
this?
Like I would have jumped in and done that.
But there was this moment where it's like, I just done a segment with this
radio professional.
He was like, God, it's great to talk to a guy who knows how to be on radio.
We're having a good time.
Hold on.
The Senator's on the phone and I got to sit there and go, Oh, do I do this?
Yeah.
Would it be worth it to sabotage it for some lefty, uh, uh, you know, credit,
you know,
credibility.
Yeah.
And then I realized like, dude, you know, he's a radio guy.
You're a comedian.
You're having a good conversation.
He's trying to talk to this guy about a local problem.
Just shut the fuck up and, and, and let him do his job.
And then when you come back, you know, get back to what you were talking about.
Uh, and I chose to do that, but I, but I did walk out saying like you pussy,
you had such
an opportunity there.
You know, I was on politically incorrect a couple of times and, uh, fuck man.
You know, you have to have an opinion about every goddamn thing on that show.
So, or you can just do a little homework and write some jokes.
Yeah.
But there's something I remember at the break, like Scott Carter go, enough
with the jokes,
but, uh, I'll never forget it.
Like we were fucking, but I'm very unlearned.
And so before the show, uh, Scott came in, uh, it was the, uh, the producer.
Yeah.
He's been on the show.
Yeah.
So he said, what do you think about China and Taiwan?
And seriously, I, I don't only, I don't only know those words, you know?
So I was like, I don't know anything.
Like, can I have another subject?
So anyways, then we get out because he goes, because, because Bill believes
this.
I mean, anyways, when we get out, the fucking, we're introducing the guy beside
me, the smart
guy, right?
He wrote a book on China and Taiwan.
Right.
So fucking Bill Maher, he starts with me.
He goes like, what was the China and Taiwan?
And I, I go, I don't know if I can ask this guy, what do I, I'm a nightclub
comic.
What?
Like that's what made me laugh at that show.
Everyone's opinions equal.
Right.
You know, like a, a, a nightclub comic and an expert or,
or, and then another thing I find, I always found funny about that show is the
comedians
try to be very serious and then the serious guys are trying to get joked.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it's like.
Yeah.
It's not, it's not always our, our shining moment.
But I do, I do like Bill though.
No, Bill's great at what he does.
Yeah, yeah.
Like he's, he's a, he started out a straight up joke dude and he knows his shit,
you know,
and it's, it's pretty amazing.
You know what's funny about him?
I don't know if I should say this or not, but I mean, he's probably aware of it.
When he does his monologue, you notice when he does his monologue, he does
Johnny Carson.
No, yeah.
Oh no, definitely.
He definitely models himself.
I think, and I think he's, that's been his style for a long time.
He definitely takes the posture.
But I find it very funny because, you know, he's got the posture and the timing
and everything.
And he's like, and then she came in his face, you know, but it's crazy words
come out.
Hey, Carson would have loved to have done that.
Yeah, he unfathomably would have.
You met Donald Trump when he was on the Tonight Show with, on Jimmy Fallon's
show.
Now, tell us about that encounter you had with Donald Trump.
Well, I'd met Donald Trump many, many times in New York City just because when
I was doing
Saturday Night Live, he was a fixture in New York City and he'd come to a lot
of the
shows and he was just a local eccentric, you know, that people mostly loved in
New York
because he fixed the rink in Central Park when the city couldn't.
But, you know, when I was on Jimmy Fallon, that's when he was, that's when
Jimmy Fallon
tussled his hair and got in trouble for it and I was the other guest.
So I was just out in the hallway and I said, Donald, can I have a picture?
You can call him Donald then.
I guess you can still call him Donald.
We don't have to call him president apparently.
But I said, can I get a picture with you?
And he said, yeah, absolutely, sure, Norm.
And then he walked down the hall and got in the elevator with his Secret
Service guys.
So, but he was just doing it as a joke.
A lot of times, the problem with candidates that, or political candidates that
do comedy is obviously,
comedy doesn't translate well to the page sometimes.
You know, sarcasm is lost, obviously, and things like that.
So, so if someone says something that's meant self-disparagingly or satirically
and you want
to take it out of context, you can.
That happened a lot of times with Trump on the campaign trail.
But, you know, he's being caricatured on Saturday Night Live, like quite mercilessly
by Alec Baldwin.
And, like, is it funny to you?
Is that funny?
No.
The only reason I don't find it funny, when I was there, Daryl Hammond did
Donald Trump.
And that shows how far back Trump goes, because that was 20 years ago.
Daryl did him then, it was a softer Trump, you know, I think it was a Trump
that was a lot closer to his real self.
But if you do, the problem with, if you do an impression of someone, you have
to like that person, you know,
because you're playing the person and people like themselves.
So, you can't play someone and have contempt for them at the same time.
You know, it doesn't work as an impression, so I don't like, I don't like his
impression.
And I have no political affiliation, I just mean from a comedy, from a comedy
level.
Let me ask you this.
So, your Bob Dole imitation was pretty famous back in the day.
So, would you do Donald Trump today?
Would you do a Donald Trump imitation?
I try to not do comedy about Donald Trump, because I think I had one joke about
Donald Trump that I ever did,
where I said that people, that Americans hated Hillary Clinton so much,
that they voted for someone they hated more than Hillary Clinton, to rub it in.
And that's the only time I ever made a joke about Trump.
But I try to stay away from it, because it's just, you know, it's low-hanging
fruit,
and also, you know, Trump oftentimes is doing self-parody,
and nothing looks dumber than if you parody self-parody.
You know, you really get caught not understanding.
So, comedy in the time of Trump, is it more difficult than it was when you were
on Saturday Night Live?
It's more difficult in the time of Trump for good comedians, and it's way
easier for bad comedians, you know.
You don't have a worldview by just saying you don't like Trump, you know what I
mean?
That doesn't count.
Like, you can't just say, I hate Trump, and that makes you a good person.
And the Democrats just can't say, I hate Trump, and that means they have a
position.
You know, that's no position.
So, for idiots, it's an easier time, because you go, well, that guy's the idiot,
not me.
But if you try to do smart comedy, it's better to stay away from Trump, you
know.
But if you try to do smart comedy, you don't have to do smart comedy, you don't
have to do smart comedy, you don't have to do smart comedy, you don't have to
do smart comedy, you don't have to do smart comedy, you don't have to do smart
comedy, you don't have to do smart comedy, you don't have to do smart comedy,
you don't have to do smart comedy, you don't have to try to do smart comedy,
you don't have to do smart comedy, you don't have to do smart comedy.
The big thing was, he forced them to do this, the big problem that Clinton has
is this thing where he's going to pardon the McDougals.
He may or may not pardon them, yeah, people don't know, the Whitewater people,
we call them.
Right, Hillary, if she, you know, if she is, because she's also a co-conspirator.
Yeah, if she gets sent away.
If she gets sent away, will he pardon her?
And Clinton said, you do the crime, you do the time, he said.
That was so sweet, you know, you moved into three-point range and up and at the
last second, fouled, all right.
I don't know about politics.

Norm Macdonald Hates Political Comedy

What about guys that do, like, political, like, that's not very good, is it?
Sometimes it is.
Political stuff?
I like all comedy.
Do you?
Norm, you know?
Huh?
You probably like it all, too.
I don't like political comedy that much.
You don't?
Like, I don't give a fuck if Reagan's old.
Are they still doing Reagan jokes?
Probably.
They probably are.
Yeah, you gotta have a, you know, you get, like, an old socialist audience of
old Jewish
guys with ponytails when you do material like that.
I really?
You understand after a while, and even with politicians, like, they're still
human beings.
Yeah, barely.
But yeah, they're the worst kind of fucking people in the world.
That's true.
All of them.
I'm glad to hear you say that, because everybody thinks you're all leftist and
everything.
Well, I mean, you know, I definitely land on the lefty side of things on, you
know, ideological
terms, but I found that from doing political talk radio, just, you know, being,
you know,
carrying water for any of them, you just gotta realize the quality of people
you're dealing
with.
You're dealing with fucking corporate whores who are operated by business
interests.
So, you know, really, it's going to come down to, you know, however you view
politics.
The question is, do you give a shit about poor people?
And, uh, and, and are we being taken advantage of?
Right now, if people want to frame that as, you know, Obama's a communist and
draining us
of our livelihood.
Well, that's your particular delusion and that's fine.
I mean, but, but it, I just got disillusioned with all of it because they're,
these are
not quality people.
I mean, I did a joke about, uh, Michelle Bachman on real time.
I saw that.
Yeah.
And I was getting flack from this, you know, you know, a very small portion of
the right,
you know, that they were like, he's got, he's a misogynist.
I'm like, she's a fucking pig.
She's a fucking politician.
How do you, can you name me two politicians that command any respect whatsoever?
Why do we respect these people?
These people are car salesmen.
They're idiots.
They're, they're, they're more disingenuous than anybody as performers.
And they basically figured out a way to bait and placate morons into, you know,
voting against
their, their self-interest.
That's an amazing skill, but is it respectable?
I don't know.
Do you respect a guy that sells you, you know, horse shit in the guise of a
health supplement?
I agree with you.
I mean, I think politicians are more, are, are, are terrible.
I, I, I mean, people, uh, attack evangelists and it, but at least evangelists
offer something.
Right.
Well, they, they, they, they after the immediate relief of someone's, uh, you
know, pain and
aggravation with another line of bullshit, but, but nonetheless, I mean, they're
pretty
evil too.
Well, I mean, you know, with politics, it's like, yeah, I, I, I don't like to
get into it
that much anymore.
Yeah, let's not get into this shit, man.
Okay, buddy.
Cause it's getting, I can see people not laughing now.
No, I mean, but you know, laughter, but you know, I, I know that you've gotten
into a
little bit of flack around it, but you're, you're, you're around politics.
Uh, what do you mean?
Well, just say, you know, you've said things that people have reacted to, but
you're, you're
not like a political comic.
I'm not political.
I, I, I've said, I've only said things on purpose to provoke people.
Right.
Once in a while.
Once in a while.
You like doing that though.
Once in a while.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, uh, I've never, uh, but I'm, uh, but I, but I've never, um, because I don't
know
enough and because I, and because I don't respect a political humor when it's
nothing but gossip.
Yeah.
And mostly comics and people like us, you know, people who are obviously first
amendment
warriors to a certain degree, we like living the way we want to live.
So it's really just going to come down to, to money.
It's like, you know, how do I keep my money?
I mean, that's the biggest political question that most righties ask themselves.
It's like, I'd like to keep as much as my money as possible.
And if that's a, if that's in a minority opinion, how do we get this majority
of poor people
to get me to keep my money and believe that they're doing the right thing?
Yeah.
It's a tough fucking thing because if every, apparently I read this, if all the
money in
the world was equally divided among everybody, everybody would be dead fucking
poor.
Yeah.
You know, there's like, there's these moments where like, I don't talk about as
much as
I used to, but then there's like, there's moments where you're like, there's a
moment
that I could, I was on a fucking radio show the other day and this was an
interesting thing
because it's, it's about professionalism.
You know, I don't, you know, I don't do political talk radio.
So, you know, I've got my political views and, uh, and, and they're fairly
general.
You know, I'm not trying to support, you know, any politician, but you know, I,
I have the
way I think about things, but there are politicians that represent the opposite
of the, what I
think.
So I'm on this talk show with a guy, it's a Fox affiliate, but you know, I'm
there to
plug my comedy and talk about my podcast and be funny with this dude.
Who's a talk show host.
He's a radio professional.
He runs an entertainment show for the most part, but he's been dying to talk to
Rand Paul about
the bridge situation because I'm in Louisville, Kentucky.
He's the fucking Senator.
They got bridges falling down and he's been trying to get this guy on the show
and the
guy just, he calls in when I'm there, you know?
So like now I've got like, if I was doing political talk radio, I mean, it
would have
been like, you know, what the fuck are you thinking?
You know, you and your libertarian bullshit and how are we going to pay for
this?
Like I would have jumped in and done that.
But there was this moment where it's like, I just done a segment with this
radio professional.
He was like, God, it's great to talk to a guy who knows how to be on radio.
We're having a good time.
Hold on.
The Senator's on the phone and I got to sit there and go, Oh, do I do this?
Yeah.
Would it be worth it to sabotage it for some lefty, uh, uh, you know, credit,
you know,
credibility.
Yeah.
And then I realized like, dude, you know, he's a radio guy.
You're a comedian.
You're having a good conversation.
He's trying to talk to this guy about a local problem.
Just shut the fuck up and, and, and let him do his job.
And then when you come back, you know, get back to what you were talking about.
Uh, and I chose to do that, but I, but I did walk out saying like you pussy,
you had such
an opportunity there.
You know, I was on politically incorrect a couple of times and, uh, fuck man.
You know, you have to have an opinion about every goddamn thing on that show.
So, or you can just do a little homework and write some jokes.
Yeah.
But there's something I remember at the break, like Scott Carter go, enough
with the jokes,
but, uh, I'll never forget it.
Like we were fucking, but I'm very unlearned.
And so before the show, uh, Scott came in, uh, it was the, uh, the producer.
Yeah.
He's been on the show.
Yeah.
So he said, what do you think about China and Taiwan?
And seriously, I, I don't only, I don't only know those words, you know?
So I was like, I don't know anything.
Like, can I have another subject?
So anyways, then we get out because he goes, because, because Bill believes
this.
I mean, anyways, when we get out, the fucking, we're introducing the guy beside
me, the smart
guy, right?
He wrote a book on China and Taiwan.
Right.
So fucking Bill Maher, he starts with me.
He goes like, what was the China and Taiwan?
And I, I go, I don't know if I can ask this guy, what do I, I'm a nightclub
comic.
What?
Like that's what made me laugh at that show.
Everyone's opinions equal.
Right.
You know, like a, a, a nightclub comic and an expert or,
or, and then another thing I find, I always found funny about that show is the
comedians
try to be very serious and then the serious guys are trying to get joked.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it's like.
Yeah.
It's not, it's not always our, our shining moment.
But I do, I do like Bill though.
No, Bill's great at what he does.
Yeah, yeah.
Like he's, he's a, he started out a straight up joke dude and he knows his shit,
you know,
and it's, it's pretty amazing.
You know what's funny about him?
I don't know if I should say this or not, but I mean, he's probably aware of it.
When he does his monologue, you notice when he does his monologue, he does
Johnny Carson.
No, yeah.
Oh no, definitely.
He definitely models himself.
I think, and I think he's, that's been his style for a long time.
He definitely takes the posture.
But I find it very funny because, you know, he's got the posture and the timing
and everything.
And he's like, and then she came in his face, you know, but it's crazy words
come out.
Hey, Carson would have loved to have done that.
Yeah, he unfathomably would have.
You met Donald Trump when he was on the Tonight Show with, on Jimmy Fallon's
show.
Now, tell us about that encounter you had with Donald Trump.
Well, I'd met Donald Trump many, many times in New York City just because when
I was doing
Saturday Night Live, he was a fixture in New York City and he'd come to a lot
of the
shows and he was just a local eccentric, you know, that people mostly loved in
New York
because he fixed the rink in Central Park when the city couldn't.
But, you know, when I was on Jimmy Fallon, that's when he was, that's when
Jimmy Fallon
tussled his hair and got in trouble for it and I was the other guest.
So I was just out in the hallway and I said, Donald, can I have a picture?
You can call him Donald then.
I guess you can still call him Donald.
We don't have to call him president apparently.
But I said, can I get a picture with you?
And he said, yeah, absolutely, sure, Norm.
And then he walked down the hall and got in the elevator with his Secret
Service guys.
So, but he was just doing it as a joke.
A lot of times, the problem with candidates that, or political candidates that
do comedy is obviously,
comedy doesn't translate well to the page sometimes.
You know, sarcasm is lost, obviously, and things like that.
So, so if someone says something that's meant self-disparagingly or satirically
and you want
to take it out of context, you can.
That happened a lot of times with Trump on the campaign trail.
But, you know, he's being caricatured on Saturday Night Live, like quite mercilessly
by Alec Baldwin.
And, like, is it funny to you?
Is that funny?
No.
The only reason I don't find it funny, when I was there, Daryl Hammond did
Donald Trump.
And that shows how far back Trump goes, because that was 20 years ago.
Daryl did him then, it was a softer Trump, you know, I think it was a Trump
that was a lot closer to his real self.
But if you do, the problem with, if you do an impression of someone, you have
to like that person, you know,
because you're playing the person and people like themselves.
So, you can't play someone and have contempt for them at the same time.
You know, it doesn't work as an impression, so I don't like, I don't like his
impression.
And I have no political affiliation, I just mean from a comedy, from a comedy
level.
Let me ask you this.
So, your Bob Dole imitation was pretty famous back in the day.
So, would you do Donald Trump today?
Would you do a Donald Trump imitation?
I try to not do comedy about Donald Trump, because I think I had one joke about
Donald Trump that I ever did,
where I said that people, that Americans hated Hillary Clinton so much,
that they voted for someone they hated more than Hillary Clinton, to rub it in.
And that's the only time I ever made a joke about Trump.
But I try to stay away from it, because it's just, you know, it's low-hanging
fruit,
and also, you know, Trump oftentimes is doing self-parody,
and nothing looks dumber than if you parody self-parody.
You