Things We Learned About Norm Macdonald After He Died

The following references sexual assault allegations. 

When Norm Macdonald died on September 14, 2021, it came as a total shock to the general public, prompting the media and entertainment personalities to bestow an extensive series of accolades of his impact on popular culture. "Tolstoy in sweatpants," declared the Washington Post. "In every important way, in the world of stand-up, Norm was the best," tweeted comedian and former talk show host David Letterman. Despite being hailed as a comedic genius, Macdonald failed several times during his career. His stint as the "Weekend Update" anchor on "Saturday Night Live" ended badly, his short list of movies that included "Dirty Work" and "Screwed" bombed at the box office, TV programs like "The Norm Show" and "A Minute with Stan Hooper" were ratings disasters, and his Netflix talk show was axed after only one season.

That didn't stop scores of colleagues from agreeing with the assertion that the jocular prowess of Macdonald was unmatched. Still, Macdonald served as an interesting study in contrasts, such as displaying a knack for delivering a family-friendly standup act one moment, before going totally NSFW the next. With a deadpan cadence characteristic of an oblivious truck driver, Macdonald could win over an audience or stink out a joint and still be ambivalent about the results. Save for an incredibly small circle of friends, few of his peers knew Norm Macdonald when he was still a living legend. What surfaced after his death, however, only added to that legacy.

Norm Macdonald's death at 61 rattled the comedy world, not only because colleagues lost a friend and memorable funnyman, but also because many of them were not aware he was even sick. Only family and close friends knew he'd been diagnosed with leukemia in 2013, with him spending the last two years of his life in seclusion. "He didn't want it to affect the way he was perceived," said his brother Neil to CBC. "He wanted to carry on. He took great pains to conceal it from everybody but family."

Talk show host Conan O'Brien was sympathetic over Macdonald's decision to keep his illness under wraps, but felt disappointed that he never got to bestow any parting words to the comedian. "He didn't want to answer questions about maybe, you know, his appearance or anything," said Conan on the Netflix special "Remembering Norm Macdonald" that accompanied the late comedian's "Nothing Special" swan song performance. "But I remembered when he went, everybody in the community was — we all thought we were the only one that didn't know, and we were so upset that we didn't get a chance to tell him what he meant to us." Comedian Bill Maher praised Macdonald over the secrecy. "The fact that I didn't know about this, nobody knew about this — good one, Norm," he said on "Jimmy Kimmel Live". "He kept it to himself ... because he's in show business. He's here to make you happy." 

Norm Macdonald spent the summer of 2021 preparing an hour of material for a live show once the pandemic lockdown ended, including recording a dry run of his set from his living room. Sadly, he never hit the stage for real with that fresh arsenal of comedy, as Macdonald died a few months later. Instead, fans were treated to that original recording, apparently completed in only one take, in a special called "Norm Macdonald: Nothing Special" that was released on Netflix in May 2022. "Norm worked so hard on a new hour of material and wanted it to be seen," said Lori Jo Hoekstra, Macdonald's manager and professional partner in a prepared statement, per Rolling Stone. "We want to make sure his fans see this very funny hour. He left this gift for all of us."

Netflix wanted to keep the special hush-hush until they got closer to the release date, but comedian David Spade spilled the beans on the project when he and a few of McDonald's close colleagues saw an exclusive screening after the star's funeral. "He just said, 'You know, I keep trying to do my set,' but he was getting weaker, which we didn't know," Spade said on the podcast "Fly On the Wall." "They keep shutting down theaters, and they wouldn't let him go, and then he goes, 'I'm going to run it once, just kind of say it out loud.' And then he never got to shoot it." 

Norm Macdonald spent much of his adult life in the U.S., so he never made a big deal about his Canadian roots, although other comedians tended to point out his more northern nuances. "He talks like a 1930s Canadian dockworker," said Dave Chappelle on "Remembering Norm." "Norm was so Canadian, like he was so deeply, deeply, polite," comedian Andy Richter recalled on the "Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend" podcast. What most of his colleagues and fans didn't know was that besides being Canadian, Norm Macdonald was bilingual in that he spoke English and French, his native country's two official languages. 

He revealed that side in a 2018 Rolling Stone interview that wasn't published until after he died. When asked about how well he could speak la langue d'amour, Macdonald replied, "Pretty well... Much better than Americans and better than most Canadians, but I couldn't keep up with a French Canadian. When I was young, my father hated the French. I grew up on an army base that was all English, so I was a minority within a minority. My father was paralyzed with fear that I would one, become a figure skater, and two, marry a French girl." Macdonald grew up outside Quebec City, where Francophones greatly outnumbered their English-speaking counterparts, and where his only language options in high school were French and Latin. "You don't bump into a lot of Ancient Romans in Quebec," he said in an interview on Calgary's CJAY-92.

Comedian Dave Chappelle has admitted he didn't know Norm Macdonald all that well, and their professional paths rarely crossed. But it wasn't until after Macdonald died that Chappelle revealed the nature of their relationship when the two worked together, sharing the marquee on the 2000 comedy "Screwed." Just before shooting was slated to start, Chappelle's father had died, and in trying to deal with his grief, the comedian attempted to quit the movie. In retrospect, he was glad he couldn't get out of his contract. "Working with him was the greatest thing that ever happened to me, like he was the right guy at the right time," he said on the Netflix "Remembering Norm Macdonald" special about the roughly 10-week stint he had with Macdonald on the set. The late comedian apparently made Chappelle laugh like no other comedian he had ever hung out with. "We were just hanging out and all of a sudden it would be this punchline out of nowhere,” he added. "I couldn't wait to get to work and hang around this guy." 

It was during a screening of Chappelle's "Untitled" documentary at Toronto's Scotiabank Arena when the comedian heaped additional praise on Macdonald, referring to him as a real gift from Canada to comedy. Per Smack Media, he also credited Macdonald for championing free speech, calling him "more gangster than the most gangsta rapper of all time."

Norm Macdonald was a funny guy, but some of his remarks about women weren't exactly amusing. "I didn't hang around the ladies on the show for God's sake ... and their alleged comedy, although I liked Tina Fey," he said to Howard Stern in 2009 about the female players on "Saturday Night Live." And detractors pilloried Macdonald in 2018 after he told The Hollywood Reporter, "I'm happy the #MeToo movement has slowed down a little bit." Per TheWrap, he then went on "The Howard Stern Show" and insisted he supported the #MeToo movement while also stepping in it even further by making an offensive remark about people with Down syndrome. 

But after Macdonald died, several women denounced the comedian for alleged inappropriate behavior. Comedian Kerri Lendo tweeted about an encounter with him. "Since I'm not a male comedian I don't have a fun picture or memory with him, just another story about being sexually harassed," she wrote. "Must be cool to be a male who does comedy." Fellow standup comic Jenny Yang alleged on Twitter that there were a number of stories of female comics who had been sexually assaulted by him, prompting other women to respond about their negative experiences with Macdonald. The Daily Beast uncovered other accounts, including a Milwaukee woman named Molly, who claimed that his hand slid down under the back of her pants as they were taking a selfie together. Molly captioned the Facebook entry with "Molestation taking place at this moment."

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

Technically, Norm Macdonald wasn't fired from "Saturday Night Live." NBC President Don Ohlmeyer yanked the comedian from his "Weekend Update" anchor spot late in 1997 and relegated him to sketch status, which was enough for Macdonald to leave "SNL" weeks later. NBC declared low ratings warranted the dismissal, although it was no secret that the executive was angry with his friend O.J. Simpson frequently getting skewered on the "SNL" segment. Macdonald wasn't impressed with Ohlmeyer, telling the New York Daily News, "He thinks of himself as a straight shooter, even though he's a liar and a thug."

Former "SNL" head writer Jim Downie, Macdonald's "Update" writing partner, guested on the podcast "Fly On the Wall" shortly after his colleague's death, sharing a story revealed by the late comedian three years after the axing. "He said, 'You know, they told me like, they were only firing you, that I was welcome to stay.' And I said 'I won't do it without Downey,' and so they said 'Okay, motherf**ker, be our guest,'" said Downie. "That's how Norm came to be fired. He went out of solidarity with me." Downie seemed to enjoy the rebel status that came with being fired, telling Vulture in 2014, "We weren't going to do easy, political jokes that played for clapter and let the audience know we were all on the same side. We were going to be mean and, to an extent, anarchists."

When NBC President Don Ohlmeyer kicked Norm Macdonald out of the "Weekend Update" chair on "Saturday Night Live" in 1997 in response to the comedian's constant barbs against the executive's friend O.J. Simpson, the feud was only getting started. Macdonald's account of the dismissal on "The Late Show with David Letterman" prompted the host to declare, "Now, I know Don Ohlmeyer and between you and me, he's an idiot." Ohlmeyer was also vindictive, purging anything to do with Macdonald's presence on NBC, including banning ads of the star's "Dirty Work" movie, and ordering the network's talk shows to stop booking the comedian.

That included "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," whose host credits Ohlmeyer for green-lighting his career on live TV after leaving his last major gig writing for "The Simpsons." On the "Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend" podcast that aired after Macdonald's death, O'Brien remembered being conflicted by his loyalty to Ohlmeyer and the ratings that would spike whenever the comedian appeared on his show. In his response, O'Brien recalled that he wrote: "I got this directive. You've hired me to do the best show I can do, and this is my best guest. So I need to do my job, which is the best show I can do." Ohlmeyer expressed his disappointment in O'Brien in his response, but the "Late Night" host stuck to his guns. "I always greedily wanted more Norm," he said.

Arguably, the funniest joke Norm Macdonald ever told on network TV was a little ditty relayed to him by "Saturday Night Live" cohort Colin Quinn, which chronicled a moth's visit to a podiatrist. But Macdonald's version of the joke, which he told on "The Tonight Show" in 2009, was so unorthodox, it gobsmacked host Conan O'Brien. "He completely, like Picasso, blew up the form; he goes and he tells this joke forever and then finally gets to this punchline," O'Brien recalled on "Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend" shortly after Macdonald died. "He has broken every rule in the book." 

The joke also saved "The Tonight Show's' hide that night. After O'Brien called for a break when he finished interviewing Macdonald, panic-stricken producer Frank Smiley approached the host to inform him that the program still had an eight-minute segment remaining with no material to fill it. O'Brien asked Macdonald if he had anything else. Some ponderous moments later, Macdonald came up with how he could extend Quinn's moth joke. When the lights came on, Macdonald padded the joke with some Anton Chekhov-inspired family tragedy before delivering the relatively trite punchline, resulting in the biggest laugh of the night. 

When the world learned of Macdonald's death, Macdonald's moth joke went viral on social media. In particular, "Late Night" host Seth Meyers, after declaring Macdonald as the "gold standard," encouraged everyone to check out the moth joke.

Considering Norm Macdonald's reputation as one of the best standup comics of his time, it stands to reason that he also had a few eccentricities that people didn't know about until after he passed on. One of them was discovered by accident by comic actor and budding "Saturday Night Live" alum Adam Sandler, who at one time lived in the same building as Macdonald. Hanging out with the "Dirty Work" star one day, Sandler decided to grab a drink from the refrigerator and staring back at him was something he least expected. "I open up his fridge, and I swear to God, $25,000 worth of chips, of Atlantic City chips were in his fridge," said Sandler on "Remembering Norm Macdonald." When asked about his arcane chip storage, Macdonald declared, "I brought it here, so I could talk to [producer] Bernie Brillstein to see how I don't have to pay taxes on it." After finding out he couldn't dodge the IRS, Macdonald lost it all in a subsequent Atlantic City junket.

It's well-known that Macdonald had a gambling addiction, and he bet heavily primarily on sports, losing his life savings on a couple of occasions. "I think it was with gambling, I bet everything I had," he once told Larry King, adding that the most he had ever lost was betting $400,000 on Super Bowl XXIII in 1989.

While Norm Macdonald kept his illness a secret, he also left a few hints behind about the terminal nature of his affliction. One profound comment in a 2018 Rolling Stone interview that was published posthumously addressed fate in general. "I started wondering if I could talk about very big issues in a very off-handed, trivial way," said Macdonald. "So, it's not that death gnaws at me, it's just that I'm not in as much denial as other people. There are things people just don't want to hear or talk about, and one is death." When the topic of mortality cropped up on the comic's Netflix series "Norm Macdonald Has A Show" in 2018, he declared that he didn't want any fun stuff at his funeral. "Most of these funerals, they're crying and sad and everything like that, That's what I'd like," he said to guest David Letterman. "I've heard of other ones, 'Let's have a party!' Whoa! There will be a lot of party days later, but right now, I'm dead."

At one standup gig, Macdonald poked fun at living with a terminal illness, and came up with this witticism: "If you die, the cancer also dies at exactly the same time, so that to me is not a loss, that's a draw." In the case of Macdonald, someone notorious for taking several risks throughout his career, it seems kismet to suggest he broke even in the end.