September 11
Turner Hall Ball..
Norm MacDonald Talks Stand-Up, Teases FX “Reality” Show
Whether he’s irking his “Saturday Night Live” bosses with his frequent, deadpanned assertions of O.J. Simpson’s guilt, antagonizing the lovable Conan O’Brien and his guests, or horrifying the women of “The View” with his assertion that Bill Clinton “killed a guy,” Norm MacDonald’s comedy stems from his masochistic ability to be the most hated guy in the room. More recently, MacDonald provided the most memorable moments of Comedy Central’s roast of Bob Saget, attempting a high-concept stand-up routine “with no jokes and no delivery, only context” that elicited mostly silence and polite laughter from his fellow comedians before finding second life on YouTube, as many of his television appearances have. In advance of his 7 p.m. performance at the Potawatomi Bingo Casino Tuesday, MacDonald spoke to the Shepherd Express about why comedy is better when nobody laughs, his lost ABC sitcom “Norm,” and the upcoming FX show where he kills a guy.
Do you have a high tolerance for failure? So many of the bits that you’ve done on TV meet with silence.
I don’t mind it at all. I don’t do comedy for audiences; I just do it for myself. I wouldn’t even know how to please somebody, I only know how to please myself. I mean, I certainly don’t want audiences to not like me, that’s not my goal. I always just think, if it makes me laugh, then it will make everybody laugh. Often I’m wrong. [Laughs] I mean, I’ve tried before, when I was working on “Saturday Night Live.” People were writing these really hackneyed sketches and getting these big laughs. So I thought I would try it, but mine didn’t get any laughs. So I think you really have to like the stuff; you can’t just aim it at the audience and say, “this is something I think they’ll get.”
So for a while you actually tried pandering?
When I first started, absolutely. When I first began in comedy, I would get people to clap, rather than actually laugh. You just say something that has no comedy in it at all but people agree with it. Like, if the point of your joke is, like, “Buchanan is a Nazi”-I could say that, and I guarantee that I could get people to clap, simply by saying that. But it’s not even true!
So I was getting people to clap, but I reached a point where I never wanted to get people to clap, because it was, like you said, pandering. But there’s a difference between a clap and a laugh. A laugh is involuntary, but the crowd is in complete control when they’re clapping, they’re saying, “we agree with what you’re saying-proceed!” But when they’re laughing, they’re genuinely surprised. And when they’re not laughing, they’re really surprised. And sometimes I think, in my little head, that that’s the best comedy of all.
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