I just finished watching the excellent Netflix documentary about Norm Macdonald, and I came away feeling two things very strongly. First, what an extraordinary, singular talent we lost when Norm died in 2021. And second, how remarkable it is that a documentary so lovingly devoted to a comedian who refused to play by anyone else's rules could leave out the most legendary joke he ever wrote.
But let's start with the good, because there's an awful lot of it.
Judd Apatow's documentary is a wonderful tribute to a man who occupied a truly unique place in American comedy. It's funny, surprisingly moving, occasionally heartbreaking, and filled with reminders of just how brilliantly unconventional Norm Macdonald really was.
It also captures something that has become increasingly apparent since his death: Norm might have been the ultimate comedian's comedian of the last half century. He never enjoyed the kind of conventional Hollywood success that someone of his extraordinary talent might have expected. His movies weren't blockbusters. His sitcoms came and went. He never landed the long-running late-night talk show that would have seemed a natural fit for someone so effortlessly funny. And yet, among the people who actually understood comedy, Norm was practically royalty.
David Letterman adored him. Conan O'Brien clearly revered him. Some of the most accomplished comedians in the business considered Norm not merely funny, but a genius. And watching the documentary, it's easy to understand why.
Norm didn't simply tell jokes. He seemed to exist in a different comedic universe from everybody else. He could take a joke that was already bombing and somehow make it funnier by refusing to abandon it. He could stretch a punchline so far beyond the point of reasonable anticipation that the audience would begin laughing at the sheer audacity of what he was doing. He could make a room profoundly uncomfortable, then turn that discomfort into the joke itself. And perhaps most importantly, Norm seemed utterly uninterested in what the people in charge thought of him.
One of my favorite sequences in the documentary involves Norm's infamous appearance on The View, when he repeatedly brought up allegations about Bill Clinton having people murdered, much to the increasingly obvious discomfort of Barbara Walters and her fellow hosts. Watching the women desperately try to steer the conversation away from the subject while Norm kept returning to it is absolutely hilarious.
To be clear, Norm wasn't presenting evidence that the Clintons had murdered anyone. He was doing something much more interesting comedically. He was taking a provocative political conspiracy theory and treating it with the kind of cheerful, matter-of-fact sincerity that made the people around him squirm. The more uncomfortable they became, the more committed he seemed to the bit. It was vintage Norm. He understood perfectly well that he was violating the unwritten rules of polite television conversation, and he couldn't have cared less.
That same stubborn independence arguably cost him the most prestigious job of his career. Norm's firing from Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update remains one of the great controversies in television comedy.
Week after week, Norm relentlessly mocked O.J. Simpson, refusing to let up even as the jokes became increasingly uncomfortable for some powerful people at NBC. Network executive Don Ohlmeyer was famously a friend of Simpson's, and Norm's dismissal has long been associated with that relationship, although Ohlmeyer maintained that the decision was based on Norm's performance.
Whatever the precise motivation, the larger point is unmistakable. Norm wasn't going to stop telling O.J. jokes because somebody upstairs didn't like them. He wasn't going to soften the punchlines or read the room and adjust his material to protect his career. If anything, the resistance seemed to make him more determined.
And that, to me, is one of the defining characteristics of Norm Macdonald. He was a man who seemed almost constitutionally incapable of compromising his comedic instincts to satisfy the expectations of the entertainment industry. It also helps explain why his career never quite followed the trajectory everyone expected.
Hollywood rewards talent, certainly, but it also rewards predictability, cooperation, and the willingness to make compromises. Norm was spectacularly talented and spectacularly uninterested in playing that game.
Which brings me to something that has always fascinated me about Norm, and something I wish the documentary had explored more deeply.
I'm a conservative. I've been one for most of my adult life. And while I know perfectly well that Norm repeatedly resisted political labels, I've always felt a particular kinship with him. I suspect a great many conservatives who loved Norm would say the same thing.
I don't mean that Norm was secretly a Republican operative masquerading as a comedian. I don't mean that every joke he told was some coded conservative message. And I certainly don't mean that he would have appreciated being claimed by one political movement or another. Quite the opposite, in fact. I suspect Norm would have found the entire exercise of assigning him a political identity absolutely ridiculous.
But there was something about his worldview, his temperament, his moral instincts, and his utter contempt for fashionable self-righteousness that resonated deeply with conservatives. Norm had an extraordinary gift for exposing the absurdity of people who were convinced of their own moral superiority.
He had little patience for performative virtue, ideological conformity, or the idea that the correct political opinions somehow made someone a better human being. He also possessed a deeply traditional understanding of human nature. He seemed fascinated by the timeless weaknesses of mankind: vanity, hypocrisy, foolishness, fear, sin, and our endless capacity for self-deception. That's not necessarily a Republican worldview, but it certainly has a great deal in common with philosophical conservatism.
And then there's his faith.
Norm's relationship with Christianity was complicated, deeply personal, and sometimes contradictory. He could speak about religious belief with startling sincerity, then make statements that seemed to cast doubt on precisely what he believed.
The documentary acknowledges some of those contradictions, and I appreciate that. But what seems unmistakable is that Norm took the great questions of religion seriously. He wasn't merely a comedian who occasionally mentioned God. He wrestled with questions about Christ, salvation, sin, forgiveness, mortality, and what might await us after death. He seemed genuinely interested in whether Christianity was true, not simply whether it was culturally fashionable to believe in it.
In an entertainment industry where religion is frequently treated as something to be mocked, dismissed, or regarded with suspicion, Norm's willingness to engage with Christianity seriously was refreshing. I wouldn't presume to know exactly what Norm believed in the privacy of his own heart. But I do believe his religious seriousness was an essential part of who he was, and it deserves to be remembered.
His admiration for George W. Bush, and his willingness to associate comfortably with people whose politics were decidedly unfashionable in Hollywood, also contributed to the sense that Norm didn't share all the cultural assumptions of his entertainment-industry peers.
And then there was Twitter.
For those of us who followed him while he was alive, Norm's Twitter and then X account was an absolute treasure. He could be hilarious, bewildering, profound, deliberately obtuse, and completely unpredictable. Sometimes he would embark on elaborate comedic digressions. Sometimes he would make an observation so simple and devastating that it seemed impossible nobody had thought of it before. And occasionally, he would write something that transcended comedy and became part of the cultural vocabulary.
I give props to the documentary for carving out a rather large chunk to appreciate Norm's genius in the realm of 140 letters that was Twitter and became X.
But there is one omission from Apatow's documentary that genuinely bothered me.
On December 16, 2016, Norm posted what I consider one of the greatest political jokes ever written on social media.
The joke was devastating in its simplicity. Norm imagined an almost incomprehensible terrorist atrocity, then delivered a punchline suggesting that the truly frightening consequence would be the possibility of Islamophobia. It was a perfect example of his comedic genius. No elaborate setup. No lengthy explanation. Just a breathtaking reversal of moral priorities, delivered with the deadpan sincerity that made Norm so extraordinary.
And for conservatives, that joke became something much bigger than a funny tweet. It became shorthand for an entire phenomenon.
To this day, when an Islamist terrorist commits an atrocity and the ensuing coverage in outlets such as The New York Times or The Washington Post prominently emphasizes fears of anti-Muslim backlash, conservatives will often invoke Norm's joke.
We have a saying for it: "They're doing the Norm tweet." That's it. That's all we have to say. Everybody in the conversation knows exactly what we're talking about.
Its brilliance lies in satirizing a grotesque inversion of priorities, in which concern about the potential reaction to terrorism appears to overshadow concern for the actual victims.
And the joke has proved remarkably durable. Nearly a decade after Norm wrote it, and years after his death, it remains instantly recognizable throughout large parts of the conservative internet. It circulates through podcasts, social media, political commentary, Substack newsletters, and countless online discussions. From shows such as Ruthless to the broader audience surrounding Ben Shapiro and other conservative commentators, Norm's observation has become part of a shared cultural language.
Think about how remarkable that is. A comedian writes a single tweet, and years later an entire political audience can recognize a perceived pattern of media behavior simply by invoking his name. That's not merely a successful joke. That's a cultural achievement.
It is quite literally known far and wide as - "Macdonald's Law"
And yet, in a documentary celebrating Norm's extraordinary comedic legacy, this particular achievement receives no attention whatsoever. Not a mention. I find that highly disappointing.
Now, I understand that Judd Apatow is politically liberal. He's certainly entitled to his beliefs, just as I'm entitled to mine. And I have no evidence that he deliberately excluded the tweet because he disagreed with its political implications.
But I can't help wondering whether the documentary might have benefited from acknowledging this enormously influential part of Norm's legacy, even if it made some viewers uncomfortable.
After all, isn't that precisely what Norm spent his career doing? Making people uncomfortable? Refusing to say what everyone expected him to say? Finding the humor in subjects that polite society would prefer to avoid? It seems almost ironic that a documentary celebrating those qualities would omit a joke that exemplifies them so perfectly.
And this is where I find myself feeling strangely protective of Norm. I know he wasn't mine. He wasn't ours. He didn't belong to conservatives any more than he belonged to liberals, Christians, atheists, Republicans, Democrats, or any other group that might wish to claim him. Norm belonged to Norm. And I'm fairly certain he would have responded to any attempt to categorize his political philosophy with a joke so inappropriate that the entire conversation would immediately collapse.
But that doesn't change the fact that conservatives recognized something in Norm that we increasingly feel is missing from mainstream Hollywood. We recognized his skepticism toward fashionable moral certainty. We recognized his willingness to ridicule political correctness. We recognized his respect for religious belief. We recognized his refusal to conform to the ideological expectations of the people around him. And we loved him for it.
That doesn't mean we agreed with everything he said. It doesn't mean his comedy was exclusively conservative. It certainly doesn't mean he wouldn't have delighted in making conservatives uncomfortable whenever the opportunity presented itself. But it does mean that a meaningful part of his cultural legacy exists within conservative America, and I don't think that should be ignored simply because it complicates the preferred image of a beloved entertainer.
There's another aspect of Norm's story that makes all of this especially poignant: his death.
I still remember how shocking it was when the news broke in September 2021 that Norm Macdonald had died of cancer. For nine years, he had been fighting the disease privately. Virtually nobody outside his closest circle knew.
It was like having a bucket of ice water dumped on your head. Suddenly, things that had seemed merely curious about Norm's appearance and behavior took on an entirely different significance.
I remember him joking about his increasingly full face, attributing it to eating too much. After his death, I couldn't help wondering whether the changes had actually been related to medications such as prednisone, which can cause facial swelling. I don't know precisely what treatments Norm received, and I wouldn't pretend otherwise. But I remember looking back at those appearances with an entirely different understanding.
And then we learned something that made me admire him even more. Norm had dealt with cancer for nine years. Nine years! And yet he deliberately kept his illness private because he didn't want people to perceive him differently. He didn't want sympathy to influence the way audiences reacted to his comedy.
He wanted people to laugh because he was funny, not because they felt sorry for him. If that isn't the most Norm Macdonald thing imaginable, I don't know what is. Even while confronting his own mortality, he remained determined to preserve the integrity of the relationship between comedian and audience.
Knowing what we now know about his illness makes his interest in faith, death, and eternity all the more moving. Here was a man who could tell the most outrageous, ridiculous jokes imaginable, yet who also seemed profoundly concerned with the deepest questions of human existence. He could make you laugh until you cried, then say something about God or mortality that stopped you in your tracks. That combination was extraordinary, and perhaps that's why his death felt so personal to so many people who never met him.
Norm wasn't simply another celebrity we enjoyed watching. He was someone whose very existence seemed reassuring. As long as Norm Macdonald was out there somewhere, you knew there was at least one comedian who would never surrender his independence, never become predictable, and never allow the prevailing cultural winds to dictate what he found funny. And then, suddenly, he was gone.
Which brings me back to the documentary.
Despite my disappointment about the omission of that legendary tweet, I genuinely loved it. Apatow deserves considerable credit for capturing the extraordinary affection Norm inspired among his fellow comedians, and for showing how a man whose career sometimes appeared disappointing by conventional Hollywood standards had actually achieved something far more meaningful. He earned the respect of the people who understood his craft better than anyone. He became a comedian's comedian. And perhaps most remarkably, he created a body of work that people continue to discover, revisit, quote, and celebrate long after his death.
There are comedians who achieve enormous commercial success and then gradually disappear from the cultural conversation. Norm seems to be doing precisely the opposite. His legend continues to grow.
And while I wish the documentary had devoted more attention to his religious convictions, his unconventional political instincts, and the extraordinary influence of his social-media commentary among conservatives, I don't want those criticisms to overshadow what is otherwise a wonderful tribute.
Ultimately, I don't need Norm Macdonald to have been a conservative. I don't need him to have voted the way I vote, believed everything I believe, or shared my opinions about the direction of American politics. I simply want the entirety of the man remembered.
The comedian who relentlessly mocked O.J. Simpson. The mischievous guest who made Barbara Walters squirm. The deeply thoughtful man who wrestled with questions of faith and mortality. The fearless comic who would rather lose an audience than compromise a joke. And yes, the man who wrote one of the most enduring pieces of political satire in the history of Twitter, a joke that conservatives still invoke whenever they believe the media has lost sight of what matters most.
All of those things were Norm. And all of them deserve to be remembered.
I suspect Norm would find it absolutely hilarious that people are still arguing about whether he was conservative or liberal. He would probably listen politely, offer some completely nonsensical observation, and then launch into a seven-minute joke about a moth visiting a psychiatrist. And somehow, by the time he finished, we'd all be laughing so hard that we'd forgotten what we were arguing about in the first place.
God, I miss that guy.
