‘Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald’ Review: Judd Apatow’s Juicy and Haunting Portrait of a Comedy Star as Troubled as He Was Hilarious - Variety
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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.)
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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.
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