Judd Apatow knew Norm Macdonald personally, dating back to their early days as stand-ups.
But he didn’t actually know him.
“I don’t know if you could ever truly know him,” Apatow told LateNighter in an interview this week.
He said this even after many months of making a feature-length documentary about the late, increasingly legendary stand-up, sketch performer, incomparable late-night guest, and—let’s call it what it was—martyred “Weekend Update” anchor on Saturday Night Live.
Discovering the real Norm wasn’t Apatow’s chief goal in directing Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald, which premieres Friday on Netflix.
Mostly, Apatow wanted to celebrate Macdonald’s entirely singular writing and performing style. After films about Garry Shandling, Mel Brooks, George Carlin, Maria Bamford, Bob Newhart, and Don Rickles, Apatow has become one of filmmaking’s most respected chroniclers of comedians and the art of comedy. Macdonald’s work has only grown in stature since his too-young death in 2021. (He was 61.)
“The whole ideology was: let’s just show what Norm put out into the world.”
Apatow called Macdonald a “real unicorn of a guy,” which led to an unusual approach in trying to tell his “tale.” Apatow did not conduct a single new interview for the film, though many of Macdonald’s contemporaries appear in archival on-camera interviews talking effusively about his talent.
Instead, Apatow sought to reveal Macdonald, as much as he could, in the man’s own words culled from interviews, podcasts, and stand-up gigs over a long career that began in Canada.
That makes Macdonald the real narrator of the film—“the unreliable narrator,” Apatow clarified.
“He’s a mysterious figure because he was very private, and in a very Bob Dylan-esque way, he didn’t tell the truth when asked personal questions.”
Norm said he was poor; he wasn’t. He suggested farm labor dominated his childhood, but both he and his brother were outstanding students. Norm graduated high school at 14. His brother Neil went on to become a prominent CBC News correspondent.
Referring to his famous stint at “Update,” Apatow said, “So Norm’s doing fake news while his brother is Dan Rather in Canada.”
Norm wrote a biographical “novel” called Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir. “There’s some facts in the novel but most of it is made up,” Apatow said. “But is there any meaning in what he made up? That’s the fun game of it all.”
In one clip, a befuddled Larry King asks whether the book is autobiography, fiction, or something else. Norm answers: “It’s not facts but it’s true.”
Macdonald specialized in jokes that took unexpected turns, often to dark places.
More than anything else in his career, Macdonald earned his most indelible reputation—in every definition of that word—for his unfettered, unrelenting, unbelievably funny excoriations of O.J. Simpson during his murder trial in 1994–95. An assemblage of Norm’s “Weekend Update” jokes about O.J.’s “guilt” fills an 11-minute clip on YouTube.
Apatow uses one classic gag from the week after the verdict: “Well, it’s official: murder is legal in California.” But he can’t resist Norm going for the ultimate TD in a clip from a gig hosting the ESPY Awards, when Norm congratulated Charles Woodson for being the first defensive player to win the Heisman Trophy: “That’s something they can never take away from you—unless you kill your wife and a waiter.”
The SNL jokes are deeply entrenched in the Macdonald saga for being hilarious—and for getting him fired from “Weekend Update.” Don Ohlmeyer, Simpson’s bosom friend and NBC’s entertainment chief, always defended O.J. and was angered enough by Norm’s assault that he first tried to get Macdonald to tone it down and ultimately ordered him off “Weekend Update.” (Later he even barred NBC from accepting ads for Macdonald’s movie Dirty Work.)
In the film, Macdonald describes the firing and seems to lament the fact that if you leave SNL and don’t become a big star, you’re considered a failure.
“Do we think he really cared that he was telling everyone that O.J. did it? Or was it just funny America was on the fence about this thing that was truly obvious?” Apatow said. “Was it so important to hit it harder and harder, when you’re being told the head of the network is friends with O.J.? Is Norm sticking up for the freedom of expression? Or is he just enjoying the rebelliousness of it?”
If it was the latter, the joy didn’t seem to last. Apatow said Norm thought he may have lost opportunities because another network executive might wonder: If I hired Norm and something went wrong, would this guy make fun of me?
The SNL affair is one of several sections—or “pods,” as Apatow calls them—that the documentary uses to tell Macdonald’s story.
Apatow assembled the archival material into what he called “a collage of thoughtful interviews, raucous wild interviews, his novel, his sketches. It’s somewhat chronological but we divided it into pods. So we were making a mini-doc about getting fired from SNL, a pod about his gambling, one about his interest in Russian literature.” (Maybe some of the dark stuff came from there?)
Of course, some of the best Macdonald clips are from other corners of late-night. David Letterman just flat-out calls Macdonald the best ever in the stand-up arena. Conan O’Brien says he never laughed harder than he did when Norm was on his show and he likely never will again.
“David Letterman and Norm are one of the great comic pairs ever on a talk show. Norm and Conan created some of the best moments in talk-show history,” Apatow said.
In the end, Apatow felt he did know Norm Macdonald a bit better. “I really enjoyed spending a few years digging through all of it. It made me admire him more.”
That sentiment is widespread and growing. Apatow said, “He’s probably the most viral comedian out there now.”
“It’s both sad because you would want Norm to feel it and to be able to take advantage of it; and also he’ll be remembered as one of the greats because it holds up. And when you watch it, you think, oh it’s all pretty timeless.”
Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald premieres Friday, October 16, on Netflix.
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