Norm Macdonald

Norm Macdonald (born October 17, 1959, Quebec city, Quebec, Canada—died September 14, 2021, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) was a Canadian stand-up comedian and actor known for his acerbic wit and deadpan delivery. He was best known as a writer and cast member for the sketch comedy television series Saturday Night Live (SNL; 1993–97) and for anchoring the show’s Weekend Update news segment sketch.

Early life

Macdonald was the second son of Percy Macdonald, who worked as a school vice principal, and Ferne (née Mains) Macdonald, who worked as a teacher. As a youth Norm Macdonald loved writing stories and jokes, but his social life was hampered by what he described as a crippling shyness. He studied philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, but he dropped out before graduating and took a series of odd jobs. In 1985 he was working as an insurance underwriter when he decided to try his hand at stand-up comedy at Yuk Yuk’s comedy club in Ottawa. His elder brother, Neil, recalled seeing Macdonald hyperventilating in the bathroom before pulling himself together and delivering a great performance.

Career

At the beginning of his career Macdonald toured as a stand-up comedian in Canada and the United States, including stints working as an opener for comedian Sam Kinison. By age 30 he was performing on popular television shows, such as Late Night with David Letterman. He landed a job writing for the late-night talk show The Dennis Miller Show in 1992 and worked as a writer for the situation comedy series Roseanne from 1992–93, where he caught the attention of television producer Lorne Michaels, the cocreator of SNL, who hired him as a writer in 1993.

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He quickly became a fan favourite on SNL for his celebrity impressions of Burt Reynolds, Larry King, Quentin Tarantino, and Bob Dole. In 1994 he became the anchor for the Weekend Update news segment sketch. After a jury acquitted former gridiron football star O.J. Simpson of murder in 1995, Macdonald cracked, “Well, it is finally official: Murder is legal in the state of California.” Those types of jokes irritated Don Ohlmeyer, president of NBC Entertainment’s West Coast Division, who was a friend of Simpson’s.

Macdonald was fired from the show, with his last appearance being in March 1998, but he claimed that his Simpson jokes were not the reason, as had been reported, telling The New York Times Magazine in 2018, “We were doing experimental stuff, non sequiturs. Ohlmeyer would watch [Jay] Leno kill every night for 15 minutes. Every joke, huge laughs, and then I’d do 10 minutes a week and sometimes not get laughs.”

He had sporadic career success after leaving SNL, including playing an ex-hockey player in the situation comedy series Norm from 1999 to 2001 and hosting the short-lived Sports Show with Norm Macdonald in 2011. Although he primarily considered himself to be a comedian rather than a television or film actor, he wrote and starred in the dark comedy film Dirty Work in 1998 and also performed in the comedy Billy Madison (1995), the biopic The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), and the family films Dr. Doolittle (1998) and Dr. Doolittle 2 (2001). His stand-up comedy was featured in the television specials Norm Macdonald: Me Doing Standup (2011), Norm Macdonald: Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery (2017), and the posthumously released Norm Macdonald: Nothing Special (2022).

Personal life and leukemia diagnosis

In 1988 he married Connie Vaillancourt; the couple had one son, Dylan, and divorced in 1999. In his somewhat fictionalized book, Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir (2016), Macdonald wrote, “Stand-up comedy is a shabby business, made up of shabby fellows like me who cross the country, stay at shabby hotels, and tell jokes they no longer find funny.”

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Macdonald died of leukemia in 2021 at age 61. He had been suffering from the disease for nearly a decade but kept it private. He did, however, reference mortality on a number of occasions over the years. He took issue with describing people as having “lost a battle” against cancer. “I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure that if you die, then the cancer also dies at the same time,” he once said on the cable television network Comedy Central. “That to me is not a loss. That’s a draw.”

In an appreciation, The New York Times called him “not only one of the funniest comics of his generation, but also a sneaky aesthete who elevated stand-up, helping shift its cultural prestige over the past few decades into an art deserving respect.” In 2018 he told New York Magazine that he thought about his deathbed often, quipping, “I think I should never have purchased a deathbed in the first place.”