Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald review: Judd Apatow doc nails the comedian's wisdom - Roger Ebert

Open this photo in gallery:The late Norm Macdonald in Judd Apatow's Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald. The documentary is a collage of Macdonald clips assembled by Apatow into a kind of extended YouTube playlist, Nestruck writes. NETFLIX/NetflixHoward Stern’s method of cheering himself up is highly relatable: The veteran shock jock fires up the ol’ internet and watches clips of Norm Macdonald’s best moments as a late-night guest on David Letterman or Conan O’Brien. “When I’m feeling down, what I do is, I go on YouTube and I watch you on various talk shows,” Stern once told the Canadian stand-up who was famously fired from Saturday Night Live in 1998. Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald, Judd Apatow’s new Netflix documentary, is inspired by this common way of consuming Macdonald’s uncommon comedic oeuvre – and animated by the conviction he was the best guest ever. It’s a collage of Macdonald clips assembled by Apatow into a kind of extended YouTube playlist. That clip of Stern interviewing Macdonald, who died in 2021 at age 61, about his talk-show interviews is the meta-introduction.

Stand-up comedians have always had a reverence for what they like to call a “comic’s comic” — a fellow comedian who works with such distilled purity and edge, diving head-first into the gnarly metaphysics of comedy, that the comics end up worshipping him more than the public does. (He’s the stand-up-comedy equivalent of an ultimate cool indie-rock cult band.) Gilbert Gottfried was a comic’s comic. So are Larry David and Doug Stanhope and Maria Bamford. And Norm Macdonald was one too, except that as you watch Judd Apatow’s juicy and haunting documentary “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald,” you realize that there was a special thing about him. He was a comic’s comic…who everyone else loved too. As the movie demonstrates, Macdonald’s credentials as a comic’s comic were unassailable. We see his very first network television appearance on May 9, 1990, on “Late Night with David Letterman,” where he did a bit about the devil commanding someone to kill his family and chop them into bits and stuff the pieces into a duffel bag. (Then the killer learns that the devil is a friend who was kidding.)

NEW YORK (AP): Wynonna Judd’s first album in 10 years, The Hard Truth, could come with a warning – but the title works just as well. Across 10 tracks, the country music icon bares all: There are songs about her late mother and principal musical collaborator Naomi Judd, who died by suicide in 2022 at age 76. There are songs about her estranged daughter Grace Kelley, whose 4-year-old daughter, Kaliyah, Judd is raising. There are songs for Judd’s biological father, whom she never got to meet and first learnt about in a therapy session when she was 30 years old and pregnant with her son Elijah. And there are songs about hope, triumph, resiliency and success – an encapsulation of an artiste who has lived a lot of lives, now completely willing to lay it all out there. “I’m not a victim. I don’t think of myself as somebody who is defined by all of this,” Judd told The Associated Press. “It happened to me, but it doesn’t mean that I’m constantly in despair. I feel like I’ve been reborn. This album has given me a voice, literally and figuratively.