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    How the O.J. Simpson Trial Changed What Comics Could Roast

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    Norm Macdonald and Jay Leno made the double homicides such a constant topic that refraining from jokes the way David Letterman did was noticeable.The weekend after a jury found O.J. Simpson not guilty of murder, the comedian Norm Macdonald opened Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live” at his desk next to a photo of the defendant. “Well, it is finally official,” he said. “Murder is legal in the state of California.”The 1995 trial of Simpson, who died Wednesday at 76, didn’t just dominate and revolutionize the media. It also became an unlikely staple of comedy. The details of the killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald L. Goldman were daily fodder for punchlines on talk shows, sitcoms and stand-up stages. And Macdonald cemented his status as one of the finest comedians of his generation thanks to a fixation on what turned into one of the largest comedy genres of the 1990s: the O.J. joke.In his 1996 breakthrough special, “Bring the Pain,” Chris Rock’s button-pushing analysis of the dynamics of the O.J. Simpson case helped change the course of his career. He argued that fame is what saved Simpson. “If O.J. drove a bus, he wouldn’t even be O.J.,” he said. “He’d be Orenthal, the bus-driving murderer.”The O.J. joke was so pervasive in the 1990s that not telling one could make you stand out. In the week after Simpson’s arrest, Howard Stern went on “Late Show With David Letterman” during the most heated era of the late-night wars and asked the host why he was avoiding the subject. “I’ll tell you my problem with the situation,” Letterman responded. “Double homicides don’t crack me up the way they used to.”Letterman eventually did tell some jokes about the trial, including a Top 10 list of things that will get you kicked off the jury (No. 1: “Keep frisking yourself.”). But his caution was in sharp contrast to Jay Leno, who went all in on O.J. jokes on the “Tonight Show.” A study that tracked his monologues revealed that Leno told more punchlines about Simpson than about any other celebrity, edging out Michael Jackson and Martha Stewart. In one running bit, he imagined the trial judge, Lance Ito, and the lead prosecutor, Marcia Clark, as members of a Broadway chorus line. In an even more perversely glib parody, Leno recast the murder trial as a sitcom using the theme song from “Gilligan’s Island” and portraying Simpson as the lovable title character. Was this sketch turning real-life tragedy into diverting entertainment or parodying it? Watching it now makes the difference seem pointless.Moments like Simpson trying on the gloves at trial became fodder for Jay Leno, Macdonald and other comics. Vince Bucci/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Norm Macdonald and Bo Burnham, No Audience Is No Problem

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      Filmed during lockdown, a new Netflix special from Norm Macdonald and outtakes from Bo Burnham’s “Inside” suggest that crowd laughter can be limiting.If a comic tells a joke in the forest, did it really kill?There’s a school of thought, one I have long been sympathetic to, that believes that stand-up without a live audience isn’t stand-up at all. Just listen to the debrief among famous comedians that, oddly, follows right after Norm Macdonald’s “Nothing Special,” his posthumous set recorded in his home during lockdown in 2020 and released this week on Netflix.Dave Chappelle compares comedy without an audience to a swim meet without water. David Letterman keeps returning to the point that without an audience, Macdonald didn’t have his “partner,” and something was missing. The closest to a dissent comes from Conan O’Brien, who makes the point that Macdonald always seemed like he could do comedy by himself, saying that when Macdonald appeared on his talk show, the host felt irrelevant.Macdonald is perhaps uniquely positioned to serve as an example of the shortcomings of the audience. His standards could be higher than the crowd’s. There are stories of him deciding to do jokes on “Saturday Night Live” that he knew were funny even if they died in rehearsal.This final special, a raw and moving production, is a gift to fans. It’s a pleasure to hear one last time his faux-folksy locutions (“It doesn’t make no sense”) and the way his jokes could twist (“I have opinions that everyone holds, like, I don’t know, yellow is the best color”) or move full steam ahead. After years of therapy, he says, he discovered why he has a fear of flying. “It’s the crashing and the dying,” he says, his wide eyes twinkling.Judged by aesthetic slickness and tight jokes, this hour isn’t nearly as successful as his last one, from 2017, “Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery.” But it’s mesmerizing in different ways. There’s something uncanny about letting the jokes stand on their own, the quiet awkwardness and messy intrusions (a dog barks, a cellphone goes off) offering a reminder that something bigger than showbiz is happening here, a glimpse of a man facing the end, giving his last jokes everything he’s got.Norm Macdonald made Netflix’s “Nothing Special” in his home during lockdown in 2020; he died last year.NetflixMacdonald, who died of cancer last year and is quoted in a scroll at the start of the special saying he filmed it before a medical procedure because he “didn’t want to leave anything on the table in case things went south,” becomes unusually earnest about his mother, expressing what she means to him. In what seems like a tangent, he points out that she didn’t speak with irony and couldn’t tell a good story but she “knew how to love.” As he gazes off, his face inches away from the screen, you might wonder if this is heartfelt or part of a joke (hint: could be both) before the punchline lands. There’s a cleverness as well as a poignancy here that I don’t think could be replicated if an audience were there.Live entertainment is of course singular, and the lockdown only emphasized my appreciation for it. But despite what you might have heard, audiences are often wrong. (Think of the famous comic you hate the most and I promise you they have delighted the crowd.) The audience has an underexamined impact on the aesthetic of specials. Comics spend so much time thanking and praising the people in the seats that it’s worth at least considering an opposing view.Here goes: The audience in specials is fundamentally manipulative, a bullying intrusion on the relationship between artist and observer at home. It can operate like peer pressure. And just as it adds to the excitement of stand-up, the steady, familiar sound of laughter, the most beloved cliché in all of comedy, can also be limiting. When Macdonald talks about his fear of dying and finding a different God than he expected, no sound distracts from the poignancy, and you find yourself looking closer at his face, studying it for clues, hints that may or may not be there.The pandemic forced so many comics to learn about performing to screens. Most didn’t like it, but some had considerable success. And a comic working by himself, Bo Burnham, made “Inside,” the most acclaimed special last year and one of the finest works of art about that period.As it happens, Burnham, who has been relatively quiet for the past year, released over an hour of outtakes from “Inside” the same week that Macdonald’s special premiered.Burnham and Macdonald are from different generations and have clashing styles, one theatrical and flamboyantly satirical, the other deadpan and folksy. But they share a love of language and a bone-deep ironic sensibility. And in these specials, both haunted by death, they show that removing the audience can access emotions a traditional special cannot.Burnham tapped into the pandemic zeitgeist while mounting a musical comedy that portrayed his own unraveling mind. The lockdown became a metaphor for larger trends of the internet age, and “Inside” became a hit not only on Netflix but also on social media, among young audiences who will delight in and study this fertile new release, free on YouTube.Burnham includes many cut songs and satirical sketches as well as alternative versions of familiar bits. It doesn’t play like a director’s cut, but it’s also more than a series of odds and ends not ready for prime time. If anything, it’s instructive to see how some of the bits are funnier than what is in the original special.In one outtake, Burnham performs a parody of a Joe Rogan podcast.YoutubeAmong the darlings that Burnham killed was a scathing, spot on parody of a Joe Rogan podcast, with Burnham on split screen playing two different guys. It captures an essential incoherence of so many thin-skinned comics when they complain about offended audiences: The podcasters insist they are just telling inconsequential jokes a second before describing comics as philosophers.An even more hilarious spoof comes later when multiple versions of Burnham, one representing the writer of “Inside,” the other the director and on and on, appear in a grid onscreen to be interviewed by a glib internet journalist. When they’re asked why there isn’t more diversity, they all freeze and then one Burnham pipes up to flamboyantly offer gratitude for the question. Burnham is gifted at mocking the performative liberal sanctimony of the moment as well as corporate attempts to exploit it, such as his very realistic YouTube ads that pop up below. One reads, “It’s mental health awareness decade at Kohl’s,” followed by the promise: “All laceless shoes 60 percent off.”He has a song at the end of these outtakes that is a clever riff on the chicken crossing the road joke. It could have been a closer to the special, but he cut it. Instead, we see him panicking at the sight of an audience.Performing to no one doesn’t fit most comedy, but it has its advantages. Burnham and Macdonald created a more direct relationship with the viewer, one with more intimacy than can be generated by a close-up.Burnham wanted to capture the uneasy mood of the early pandemic as viscerally as possible. And he clearly succeeded. When my 13-year-old daughter saw “Inside,” her first reaction was: “Is he OK?”It’s not something you would ask about a comedian who just received a round of applause. More

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      The Artists We Lost in 2021, in Their Words

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      This year, as pandemic deaths ebbed and flowed, a distinctive, eternal beat — that of artist’s deaths — played on as usual, bringing its own waves of collective grief. Some, such as Cicely Tyson and Stephen Sondheim, held the spotlight for generations. Others, like Michael K. Williams and Nai-Ni Chen, left us lamenting careers cut short. Here is a tribute to just a small number of them, in their own words.Cicely TysonAssociated Press“I’m not scared of death. I don’t know what it is. How could I be afraid of something I don’t know anything about?”— Cicely Tyson, actress, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)Melvin Van PeeblesMichael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“I want people to be empowered and also have a damn good time.”— Melvin Van Peebles, filmmaker, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“I want my steps to speak.”— Liam Scarlett, choreographer, born 1986 (Read the obituary.)“I remember my childhood often, I remember a lot of the past. But when it comes to music, I always look forward.”— Nelson Freire, pianist, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)Bob AvianKarsten Moran for The New York Times“When my parents went out, I would push back the furniture, clear an open space, turn on the record player and leap around the apartment.”— Bob Avian, choreographer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)“School was a crashing bore and a terrible chore, until one day when I was cast as the girl with the mandolin in ‘Sleeping Beauty.’”— Carla Fracci, dancer, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)“As I grew up in Kyoto, the wood of the Buddhist statues, trees, the grain of the wooden pillars, the patterns on the floor, the stones in the gardens, the bamboo, trees and plants in Kyoto are all a part of me — and as I read a script, I borrow from all these things.”— Emi Wada, costume designer, born 1937“I still feel sky-deprived when in the forested places. Many, many people born to the skies of the plains feel that way.”— Larry McMurtry, novelist, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Ed AsnerWally Fong/Associated Press“My father told me, ‘You didn’t make a success as a student, you’re not going to make a success as an actor.’ I said, ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’”— Ed Asner, actor, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Olympia DukakisAbramorama“I came to New York with $57 in my pocket.”— Olympia Dukakis, actress, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Charlie WattsEvening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“When I first went to New York with the Stones, the first thing I did was to go to Birdland. And that was it. I’d seen America. I mean, I didn’t want to see anywhere else.”— Charlie Watts, drummer, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)Jacques D’AmboiseJohn Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images“Spread me in Times Square or the Belasco Theater.”— Jacques D’Amboise, dancer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“If you have a leading character, they should be in a hurry. You can slow it down when you’re shooting, but it helps in the writing: Even if they’re not moving, they’re thinking about moving on, or getting away from the scene they’re in.”— Robert Downey Sr., filmmaker, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Joe AllenJim Cooper/Associated Press“I always said I lacked ambition — but that does not mean I was lazy.”— Joe Allen, theater district restaurateur, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t assume an audience’s interest. I assume the opposite.”— Charles Grodin, actor, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Jerry PinkneyJoyce Dopkeen/The New York Times“I solve problems — visual problems.”— Jerry Pinkney, children’s book illustrator, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Larry KingAlberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images‘‘If you’re combative, you never learn.”— Larry King, TV host, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)Anna HalprinSam Falk/The New York Times“I started to teach people how the body actually works. I looked at the skeleton. I did human dissection. I did all these things to understand the nature of movement, not just my movement.”— Anna Halprin, choreographer, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)“I’m not interested in the intentions of artists; I’m interested in consequences.”— Dave Hickey, art critic, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)Nai-Ni ChenStephanie Berger for The New York Times“My thirst for expressing myself, both East and West, could only happen through creating my own company.”— Nai-Ni Chen, choreographer and dancer, born 1959 (Read the obituary.)Virgil AblohDavid Kasnic for The New York Times“When I studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, it was the humanities classes that I had put to the side that ultimately started me on this path of thinking about creativity in a much more cultural context — not designing for design’s sake, but connecting design to the rhythm of what’s happening in the world.”— Virgil Abloh, designer, born 1980 (Read the obituary.)Yolanda LópezAlexa Treviño“Those of us who make images must always be very conscious about the power of images — about how they function — especially in a society where we are not taught our own history.”— Yolanda López, artist, born 1942 (Read the obituary.)“You’re more anarchic onstage than you are anywhere else.”— Helen McCrory, actress, born 1968 (Read the obituary.)Michael K. WilliamsDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times“The characters that mean the most to me are the ones that damn near kill me. It’s a sacrifice I’ve chosen to make.”— Michael K. Williams, actor, born 1966 (Read the obituary.)bell hooksKarjean Levine/Getty Images“We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humor.”— bell hooks, writer and scholar, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)Norm MacdonaldMargaret Norton/NBC, via Getty Images“Making people laugh is a gift. Preaching to them is not a gift. There are people who can do that better. Preachers.”— Norm Macdonald, comedian, born 1959 (Read the obituary.)“The thing that everybody thinks is going to work will not. The thing that nobody thinks will work will.”— Elizabeth McCann, theater producer, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)“The success of my books is not in the characters or the words or the colors, but in the simple, simple feelings.”— Eric Carle, author and artist, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“I think children want to read about normal, everyday kids.”— Beverly Cleary, author, born 1916 (Read the obituary.)Young DolphPaul R. Giunta/Invision, via Associated Press“My whole thing is about giving these folks the real.”— Young Dolph, rapper, born 1985 (Read the obituary.)“I try to use words that fit a pattern, that are musical and expressive, but do not sound mechanical. Above all it should have a speech rhythm that is like the rhythms that the audience would speak.”— Carlisle Floyd, composer, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)“Birds were the first composers. They like to sing in spring. Purely serving of the beauty — that’s what we try to do.”— Louis Andriessen, composer, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Cloris LeachmanAssociated Press“I don’t have a lot of trappings, I think, in my personality. I’m just a simple person, with a silly bone.”— Cloris Leachman, actress, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)“I’m a witness of my time, you know, of a history.”— Hung Liu, artist, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)“Technology is changing the way people work. With electronic mail, the internet, teleconferencing, people are starting to ask, ‘What is a headquarters or office environment?’”— Art Gensler, architect, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Christopher PlummerTom Jamieson for The New York Times“I’ve made over 100 motion pictures, and some of them were even good. It’s nice to be reborn every few decades.”— Christopher Plummer, actor, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“After you see your work, you always want to go right back and do it all over again.”— Lisa Banes, actress, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“I think of the art as dead when it leaves my studio. I don’t even own it anymore. Installing in a museum or a show that’s coming up, I’m not allowed to touch my own work ever. It just seems strange to me. If somebody puts me in front of my drawings, I’d put more text in it. It’s never finished, but none of my work is ever finished.”— Kaari Upson, artist, born 1970 (Read the obituary.)SophieFrazer Harrison/Getty Images For Coachella“I don’t have the need to bring any more clutter into the physical world. And I like the fact that musical data is weightless and spaceless in that way.”— Sophie, pop producer and performer, born 1986 (Read the obituary.)Etel AdnanFabrice Gibert, via Galerie Lelong & Co.“My paintings are not usually titled. Art should make people dream, and when you have a title, you condition the vision.”— Etel Adnan, author and artist, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)Michael NesmithMichael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“We’re a couple of old men, but we sound the same when we play this music — and it nourishes us the way it nourishes you.”— Michael Nesmith, musician, born 1942 (Read the obituary.)“We always put music first and marriage second. One night after dinner, for instance, I was going to do the dishes and Jerry said, ‘Forget the dishes. Let’s practice. I’ll do the dishes later.’”— Dottie Dodgion, drummer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Jessica WalterDove and Express, via Hulton Archive/Getty Images“Even my ‘leading ladies’— you know, in air quotes — were characters. They were not Miss Vanilla Ice Cream. They weren’t holding the horse while John Wayne galloped into the sunset.”— Jessica Walter, actress, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)“The last note, the high last note — it must say something.”— Edita Gruberova, soprano, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)DMXChad Batka for The New York Times“I’m going to look back on my life, just before I go, and thank god for every moment.”— DMX, rapper, born 1970 (Read the obituary.)Stephen SondheimFred R. Conrad/The New York Times“Life is unpredictable. It is. There is no form. And making forms gives you solidity. I think that’s why people paint paintings and take photographs and write music and tell stories that have beginning, middles and ends — even when the middle is at the beginning and the beginning is at the end.”— Stephen Sondheim, composer and lyricist, born 1930 (Read the obituary.) More

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      Here’s Why Norm Macdonald Was Comedy Royalty. It’s Not ‘S.N.L.’

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      He may have been best known for his work on “Saturday Night Live,” but he should be really remembered for decades of club sets and you-can’t-miss-this clips.My favorite Norm Macdonald joke — and trust me, there’s serious competition — is one he told as anchor of Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live” in the late 1990s. Papers in front of him, he reported with a cheer: “Yippie! Jerry Rubin died this week.” Looking down, he apologized for his mistake and tried again: “That should read: ‘Yippie Jerry Rubin died this week.’”Silly, dark, ruthlessly concise, this gem is a model of craft, and like many of Macdonald’s bits, it proves how the smallest change in tone, language or, in this case, exclamation mark can radically shift meaning, providing the kind of jolt of surprise that produces belly laughs.Macdonald, who died Tuesday of cancer, maintained a studied modesty about his work. He said that his act had no substance, that it was all “gossip and trickery.” And he claimed without self-pity that he would be remembered only for his few years at “Saturday Night Live,” not his decades of stand-up, which he referred to as “a shabby business, made up of shabby fellows like me who cross the country, stay at shabby hotels, and tell jokes they no longer find funny.”He described his life as a sprint to outrun the wolves of irrelevancy. “They caught and devoured me years ago,” he wrote in his 2016 quasi-memoir, “Based on a True Story.”Whether he believed this about himself doesn’t matter (Macdonald was a very skillful liar) and there is some merit to his points about stand-up and his credits, but the ornate way he beats himself up hints at a deeper truth: Macdonald was not only one of the funniest comics of his generation, but also a sneaky aesthete who elevated stand-up, helping shift its cultural prestige over the past few decades into an art deserving respect.His legacy is not clear from his level of stardom or even his list of television shows and specials, although he has some signal accomplishments, including an early stint as a writer on “Roseanne” and one of the best Netflix specials of the past decade, “Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery.” Macdonald’s greatness is not on his IMDb page so much as in the number of you-have-to-see-this moments, the kind that friends tell you about at parties and then send you the clip the next day.Many of these came from talk shows, where he was a hall-of-fame guest. He told one of the most justly revered jokes in late-night history on Conan O’Brien’s “Tonight” show, a preposterous masterpiece of literary suspense-building about a moth in a podiatrist’s office. Another moment on the couch from the same show went viral decades later: He interrupted an interview with the actress Courtney Thorne-Smith to savagely insult Carrot Top, the star of the movie she was promoting, a brutally hilarious act of sabotage.Macdonald had other talents. When it comes to parodies of roasts, he stood alone, turning intentionally awful jokes at the roast of Bob Saget into disorienting performance art that remains one of the funniest bits of anti-comedy you will ever see. And on “Saturday Night Live,” he may have been at his best on the Weekend Update desk (ultimately getting fired after his jokes about O.J. Simpson), but he also delivered several singular impressions, including a version of David Letterman that was both accurate and far too bizarre to be realistic.Letterman proved to be a key figure in Macdonald’s career, a champion of the stand-up’s work (the talk-show host said no one was funnier) who booked the comic on his show’s final week. Macdonald, breaking from his trademark acerbic style, ended on a surprisingly moving tribute, displaying an emotional side that usually only lurked under the surface of his comedy.In a column from 2017, I argued that what distinguished Macdonald’s comedy was his sensitivity to language, his peculiarly poetic brand of plain talk. He made stylish turns of phrase and folksy flourishes seem conversational and offhand. A lover of Bob Dylan, Macdonald was also a sponge for influences, borrowing and repurposing figures of speech or unusual words to create funny-sounding sentences.But describing him as merely a master of joke writing misses his quickness, wryly deadpan delivery and, most of all, a unique level of commitment. He did not bail out of jokes and never pandered. You see this in his Bob Saget roast: the conviction to push through despite the confusion of the response. He pleased the crowd without being a crowd-pleaser. And no one had a nimbler and more assured sarcastic voice, which he used to find humor in ambiguity. There was a wonderfully odd moment on David Spade’s talk show a few years ago when Macdonald told Jay Leno he was maybe the best talk-show host ever, and no one, including Leno, seemed to be able to tell if he was being sincere.There’s a lot of fun to be had in this liminal space between earnestness and just kidding. One of Macdonald’s most impressive feats is writing an entire memoir that remains there. It’s one of the greatest comedian memoirs but also a pointedly frustrating mix of fact and fiction, cliché and originality. It’s very funny, sometimes tedious, occasionally wise. The title, “Based on a True Story,” isn’t just a gag. It’s rooted in his faith that, as he puts it, “there is no way of telling a true story. I mean a really true one, because of memory. It’s just no good.”Just because you can’t tell a really true one doesn’t mean that art can’t get closer to the truth. In an interview with New York magazine, Macdonald balked at the trend toward confessional art, saying he thought art was supposed to be about concealment. That was revealing.The fact that he struggled with cancer for a decade was something he certainly didn’t advertise in his work. His death came as a shock to many. But clues were everywhere. Death has been among his favorite subjects in recent years. In a great viral moment, he delivered one of the earliest and best comedy club sets about the coronavirus. It was at the Improv in Los Angeles in March 2020 right before venues were shutting down. “It’s funny that we all now know how we’re going to die,” he said. “It’s just a matter of what order.”At the start of his memoir, he tells a story about reading on his Wikipedia page that he had died. Then he imagines if it were true, laughing until a thought stops him cold. “The preposterous lie on the screen before me isn’t that far off,” he wrote. This seemed like jokey melodrama when I first read it, but now it hits differently.Macdonald once talked about an uncle dying of cancer, skewering how we now describe people suffering from that disease as “waging a battle” because that means the last thing you do before you die is lose. “I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure that if you die, then the cancer also dies at the same time,” Macdonald said on Comedy Central. “That to me is not a loss. That’s a draw.” More

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      Norm Macdonald, ‘Saturday Night Live’ Comedian, Dies at 61

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      Acerbic and sometimes controversial, he became familiar to millions as the show’s “Weekend Update” anchor from 1994 to 1998.Norm Macdonald, the acerbic, sometimes controversial comedian familiar to millions as the “Weekend Update” anchor on “Saturday Night Live” from 1994 to 1998, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 61.His manager, Marc Gurvitz, confirmed the death. Lori Jo Hoekstra, his longtime producing partner, told the entertainment news outlet Deadline that the cause was cancer, something he had been dealing with for some time but had kept largely private.Mr. Macdonald had a deadpan style honed on the stand-up circuit, first in his native Canada and then in the United States. By 1990 he was doing his routine on “Late Night With David Letterman” and other shows. Then, in 1993, came his big break: an interview with Lorne Michaels, a fellow Canadian, for a job on “Saturday Night Live.”“I knew that even though we hailed from the same nation, we were worlds apart,” Mr. Macdonald wrote in “Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir” (2016), a fictional work with occasional hints of biography mixed in. “He was a cosmopolite from Toronto, worldly, the kinda guy who’d be comfortable around the Queen of England herself. Me, I was a hick, born to the barren, rocky soil of the Ottawa Valley, where the richest man in town was the barber.”In any case, he got the job, and by the next year he was in the anchor chair for the “Weekend Update” segment. In sketches, he impersonated Burt Reynolds and Bob Dole and played other characters.Mr. Michaels, in a telephone interview on Tuesday, said that Jim Downey, the show’s head writer at the time, had first brought Mr. Macdonald to his attention.“Jim just liked the intelligence behind the jokes,” he recalled.And Mr. Michaels saw it, too.“There’s something in his comedy — there’s just a toughness to it,” he said. “Also, he’s incredibly patient. He can wait” — that is, wait for a punchline.That, Mr. Michaels said, made Mr. Macdonald different stylistically from other “Weekend Update” anchors.“I think it took some getting used to for the audience,” Mr. Michaels said. “It wasn’t instantly a hit. But he just grew on them.”In early 1998, however, Mr. Macdonald was booted from the anchor chair, reportedly at the behest of Don Ohlmeyer, president of NBC Entertainment, West Coast, who was said to have been annoyed by Mr. Macdonald’s relentless mocking of his friend O.J. Simpson.Mr. Macdonald as the anchor of “Weekend Update” in 1995. He got the anchor job 1994, a year after joining “Saturday Night Live,” and lost it in 1998.Al Levine/NBCUniversal via Getty ImagesMr. Macdonald stayed on for a few more episodes but didn’t return for the 1998-99 season. His post-“S.N.L.” television ventures were a mixed bag. “Norm” (originally called “The Norm Show”), a comedy about a former hockey player, ran from 1999 to 2001 on ABC. “Sports Show With Norm Macdonald,” on Comedy Central, lasted only a few months, in 2011. “The dedicated fan will identify two patterns in his television work,” Dan Brooks wrote in a 2018 article about him in The New York Times Magazine. “It is invariably funny, and it is invariably canceled.”But Mr. Macdonald said he didn’t think of himself first as a TV performer, and he continued to work as a comedian throughout his career.“In my mind, I’m just a stand-up,” he told Mr. Brooks. “But other people don’t think that. They go, oh, the guy from ‘S.N.L.’ is doing stand-up now.”Though known for “Weekend Update,” Mr. Macdonald did not do much topical material in his own routines. He liked jokes that would still be funny years in the future. Among his most famous is one he told on “The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien” in 2009, about a moth that goes to a podiatrist. After a setup that rambled on for minutes, in which the moth pours out various emotional troubles, the podiatrist asks the insect why it came to a podiatrist rather than a psychiatrist. Mr. Macdonald’s punchline: “And then the moth said, ‘Because the light was on.’”Mr. Macdonald’s sense of humor sometimes got him in hot water. In 2018, for instance, he drew criticism for remarks that seemed to defend the comedian Louis C.K., who had been accused of sexual misconduct, and Roseanne Barr, who was under fire for a racist Twitter post. (Louis C.K. had written the foreword to Mr. Macdonald’s 2016 book, and Ms. Barr had hired him as a writer on her 1990s sitcom, “Roseanne.”) In apologizing for those comments, Mr. Macdonald made a remark that mocked people with Down syndrome.Missteps aside, Mr. Macdonald was always good for an unpredictable few minutes, or more, on a late-night talk show.“I’ve been interviewing Norm for 18 years, and he has consistently broken every talk-show rule,” Mr. O’Brien told The Times in 2011. “He tells anecdotes that are blatantly false. His stories have always been repurposed farmer’s daughter routines that he swears happened to him.”Mr. O’Brien added, “When Norm steps out from behind the curtain, I honestly don’t know what is going to happen, and that electrical charge comes through the television.”Mr. Macdonald in a scene from his sitcom “The Norm Show” (later called simply “Norm) in 1999. With him were Laurie Metcalf and Max Wright.Robert Votes/ABCNorman Gene Macdonald was born on Oct. 17, 1959, in Quebec City, according to IMDB.In 1998, his brother Neil told The Record of Ontario that Norm had had a flirtation with the newspaper business as a young man but that he had deliberately botched an interview for a job as a copyboy because he wasn’t that serious about the profession.“He once said he was interested in discovering the truth, but he hoped it would be within walking distance,” Neil Macdonald told the newspaper.He also recalled finding his brother hyperventilating in the washroom at Yuk Yuk’s, an Ottawa comedy club, before going onstage for his first stand-up gig. But he got it together and, as comedians say, killed.By 1984, Mr. Macdonald was skilled enough to spend four months opening for the comedian Sam Kinison. He eventually made his way to Los Angeles, and in 1992 he was hired as a writer on “The Dennis Miller Show” and then “Roseanne.”“I never wanted fame at all, I just wanted to do stand-up,” he told The Ottawa Citizen in 2010. “I found when I came to Los Angeles to do more stand-up comedy that people wanted me to do other things, which I really didn’t want to.”“Stand-up,” he added, “is an odd kind of job where, if you’re good at it, they figure you’ll be good at other stuff in show business, which is usually not the case.”Mr. Macdonald wrote the 1998 film “Dirty Work,” in which he starred with Don Rickles, Chevy Chase and others. Among his other credits were the “Dr. Doolittle” movies, in which he provided the voice of a dog named Lucky.His survivors include his mother, a son and two brothers, his manager said. “He was an original,” Mr. Michaels said, “and he didn’t compromise in a business that’s based on compromise — show business.”Dave Itzkoff More