Making us laugh at assistant crack whores all over again.

Professionals will describe Norm MacDonald as a “comedian’s comedian.” It’s a nice way of saying it, but that always carries an accusation that a guy’s talent is wasted on the public. Then again, Jeff Dunham’s puppet shows keep getting voted among Comedy Central’s top stand-up specials.

In MacDonald’s case, jokes hitting the wrong targets has proved unhealthy for his career — like when NBC exec Don Ohlmeyer famously sided with a certain alleged double-murderer over MacDonald. The relentless barrage of O.J. jokes got MacDonald booted from Weekend Update even though Chevy Chase himself reportedly said Norm was the only other guy to get it right. Not that these kinds of things seem to bother MacDonald. In fact, nothing seems to bother him. Bone-dry and amused seem to be more than just the cornerstones of his act — they’re his way of life.

He went on from Saturday Night Live (where he did what may be the greatest sketch in the show’s history) to do Dirty Work, A Minute With Stan Hooper and The Norm Show. His fans border on the obsessed, leaving a wealth of Norm-related media around the internet.

MacDonald is at the House of Blues inside Mandalay Bay at 8 p.m. We caught up to talk about the Juice, the roast and drop-in calls from his buddy Adam Sandler.

This is probably a pedestrian question, but with the O.J. trial going on, and the fact that you like to play a little poker, is this kind the perfect gig at the perfect time for you?

Yeah, I’ll probably be talking about O.J., and maybe I’ll be in the same room where it happened.

You’re going to go to Palace Station?

I always go to the O.J. room.

With an election coming up and the economy and all that, is this kind of right in your wheelhouse?

Not the fucking economy. That’s the worst thing ever. First of all I can’t really make a joke about something I don’t understand anything about. That’ll be pointless unless I started reading books about what the fuck the deficit is. Then I’m fucked. Mostly, I’ve never found the economy to be such great comedy fodder when you start talking about sub-prime mortgage rates, jokes just don’t spring forth quickly from that.

You don’t remember the Henny Youngman bit on that? Killed in the Catskills.

He did his big Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae bit. He was ahead of his time.

Do you still do a lot of current events stuff in your act?

I don’t know about current events. I’m not a political junkie. I just know what people know. I know the stupid parts. I couldn’t tell you who the fuck the Secretary of Agriculture is. I just know like retarded things that everybody else knows from YouTube and shit. Since everyone else is pretty well dumbed down to the point where they’re like me. It’s funny, that when I was a kid – I’m not even this fucking bad, I don’t give a fuck about like, I wouldn’t talk about Britney Spears because I don’t know a fucking thing about her. When I was a child, the girls would have these teen magazines. They’d gush over like 17-year-old teen sensations and stuff. Now it’s the same but people are like fucking 60. I have people in their 50s telling me about like Lindsay Lohan. I’m like ‘What the fuck?’ You’ve got to start your life at some point.

(MacDonald changes lines to take another call.)

I’m in a (Adam) Sandler movie tomorrow. I get to play a comedian. It all comes back full circle.

Is that the one, it’s like about all stand-ups? (Note: Judd Apatow’s Funny People is scheduled for a July 31, 2009 release.)

Yeah, Seth Rogen plays a young stand-up. His hero is Sandler, who’s like a journeyman standup. Tomorrow it’s me hanging out with Sandler, hanging out at his club it’s going to be me and him and Sarah Silverman and Dave Attell.

Oh, that’s cool. What do you think that’s going to be like, working with Sandler again?

It’ll be great because there’s no script. Judd said just improvise the whole thing, so it’ll be the easiest thing of all time.

It’s very easy when you get to improvise. If everybody’s just improvising, because what happens is people who actually don’t improvise wind up bringing in their own ammo. Then you just hang back, you actually improvise, and then you end up being the funniest guy. That’s how it always works.

Because when they try to improvise, they already have the line in their head, so they’re trying to crowbar it in. So you just let them hang themselves and then you point it out.

You think Attell and Sarah Silverman will be –

Sarah will have like three jokes ready on the go and I’ll diffuse every one of them. I’m like an expert at a bomb before it goes off.

On the Sagat roast, did they edit it, or was that really the reaction you were getting from the audience?.

What do you mean the reaction?

It didn’t look like everyone was getting it.

No, I’d say most of them didn’t like it, but it was a lot longer. I did a long time. I probably did like 45 jokes.

It looked like Jimmy Dore was the only who was into it.

It was only for me, but that’s what it’s all about with me.

It seemed like it almost picked up a little life in the couple of weeks since then. Have you got that sense at all that people are coming around to it?

I don’t know. People come up to me and say things. That comes up a lot. The roast comes up all the time. I don’t know if that’s important or not.

Are you taking your act into more of – for lack of a better term – an anti-comedy kind of thing?

No. It depends on – I wouldn’t do anything that would purposely bomb. I would only do things that an audience would laugh at a situation that – I’m aiming for me, really. Like if I’m watching the David Letterman show or something or Conan, and there’s a guest on, then this is what I wish would happen. Something fucking crazy. Some crazy shit that I didn’t expect. I wouldn’t want to see the stuff I expected to see. I just think that if something happens that’s different than they expect, then that’s comedy. That’s the only way you could get someone to laugh.

I didn’t know much about the roast but I knew they were shocking. Like, Gilbert’s very good at being dirty. Like, he’s hysterically funny. Gilbert Gottfried. I can’t be that funny being dirty. So I decided to make a lateral move and make it actually shocking in an actual shocking way, in the other meaning of the word. Like he’s shocking in what he’s doing rather than he’s saying something shocking. I just wanted to make Sagat laugh mostly, by telling a bunch of retarded jokes.

Also, like I would never do that to people I don’t know at all, or Cloris Leachman who I watched when I was a child. I would never go “Hey you old whore, why don’t you go fuck Lou Grant or something.” I’m not going to say that to this 82-year-old woman. They were saying crazier shit than that. Why would I want to say that?

Do you laugh at that kind of stuff? Like (Greg) Giraldo or Jim Norton?

It depends on the joke. Like, Jeff Ross has like great jokes. It doesn’t matter how dirty. My act’s really dirty. In a way it’s dirty because I just talk about whatever I want to talk about. So sometimes if I want to talk about dirty stuff, I’ll talk about dirty stuff. I guess you could say I was dirty. But as long as it’s funny, it doesn’t matter. What does it matter?

I remember when I was starting out, (Sam) Kinison told me, “Why are you talking about like dogs and shit? Does that really interest you? I talk about women because that’s what interests me because I can do stand-up on anything I want to do. I never understood why a guy would do it about socks or something when you can choose from anything.” I always thought about that afterwards, that it’s probably true.

People talk about your style, you hear the word minimalism thrown out a lot.

Minimalist? Well the people I pattern myself after in comedy are sort of minimalist. Two people I studied the most are Gertrude Stein and also Hemingway. So I use a lot of ellipses and I use a lot of repetition. Especially like Virginia Woolf did. Sometimes I do a lot of repetition and stuff.

And like a 20-minute set on absinthe.

Yes. I can do that if I want to.

To me, a lot of the play comes in when you’re making it very awkward for the audience.

I like seeing an awkward audience. I’ll tell you what I don’t like. I don’t like people applauding at me if I say a joke. Because what they’re doing is they’re taking control. They’re saying, OK, we agree with that. Whatever the fuck you’re saying. You’re like “Pat Buchanan is a Nazi!” And they’re like “Yeah!” So they clap. While they’re clapping, they’re not laughing, you know? You’re not doing your job at all. They’re not laughing, because clapping is voluntary, and laughing has to be involuntary. You can do voluntary laughter but then you just suck. You want to make it – depends on how you want to see an audience.

If you’re just sitting at the back of a club – I know it’s interesting from the back of the club watching and seeing. I’ve been in crowds and I know what’s interesting. What’s interesting by far is a guy having trouble up there. A guy in complete control, destroying? You feel sort of safe, but you’re not really laughing like really hard. When the crowd starts – the crowd can turn into a mob and security people show up, it’s pretty funny considering the starting place, as a guy just trying to make a bunch of people laugh.

Have you ever had that kind of show?

Oh yeah, of course, millions of times.

That’s devolved into chaos like that?

Oh yeah, absolutely. Those are the funniest ones. I know if I was in the audience, those would be the ones I would remember. I wouldn’t remember the guy that killed. I would remember the guy we all hated and wasn’t funny at all. They’ll be talking about that shit forever. But I would never purposely bomb. It’s just once I start bombing, I have no interest in stopping it.

You did a couple of fill-in spots for Dennis Miller on O’Reilly’s show.

I did one, yeah. Worst thing I’ve ever done in my life.

He looks like he’d be tough to work with.

Yeah, well, I don’t have any fucking opinions. So what happened was, Dennis wanted me to host his show, just because I was funny when I was talking to him. But I’m just like a retard. I don’t know anything. He goes here, host one of my shows. So now I’m interviewing a guy from like pledgeco.com or some fucking thing, about the Electoral College. I don’t even know what I’m saying. Most of the words I’m saying, I don’t know what they mean. Then they’re like O’Reilly wants you to fill in for Miller, since I’d been on Dennis Miller’s show. None of it made any sense. It’s the Peter Principle.

Now I’m on O’Reilly and I go I don’t know what the fuck to say. I guess you’re just supposed to say what he thinks. I just tried to say whatever I thought he’d like to hear, which is basically what I did.

You’ve done a ton of the talk show circuit, who do you like working with the most?

David Letterman. There’s a lot of reasons. First of all, he’s way funnier than you are, so you have to be at the top of your game. Then he’ll challenge you sometimes. He’s really good, but he protects you. He knows how long a story should go. I’ve noticed I have stories where I’ll talk and he’ll just stop me. Other guys that I’ve done it with will just let the story keep going and then just go into nothingness, whimper away. I don’t know he knows when it’s over. I guess he’s like Johnny Carson. You feel safe in his hands if he tells you it’s time to move on.

But I’ve heard that motherfucker, like I’ve had jokes that I’ve worked on for two years to get perfect in my act, and I just say it on panel and he like says something right after that’s the perfect tag for the joke. I’m like, ‘Holy fucking shit. You just thought that up. I was pretending to think mine up.’

There’s a clip that’s going around of you on Conan in ’97, with a chick from Melrose Place where you just shredded her. What’s that like knowing that stuff that was kind of off-hand up to a decade ago can just pick right back up and make the rounds again?

You mean with YouTube and all of that shit? The next thing we’re going to see is the president’s cock being sucked on camera. Clearly that’s the next thing that’s going to be on the internet. Because the president will fuck anyone, right? The lady will just take a video camera picture of it with her phone. Some crazy shit will come out like that. I don’t know what it leads to. I know Anderson Cooper wears his underwear into the shower in the CNN athletic department.

Do you think it makes your job any more or less difficult as a comic to have so much of your material available?

No, no it doesn’t. I don’t care. I don’t like anything old that I do anyway. I mean, I don’t not like it, but I don’t care about it too much. They wanted me to do an hour HBO special. It’s alright, but I don’t really need to do it. If they want to put it on, I don’t care.

Is there anything that gets to you? For years, your public persona has been calm, deadpan, always kind of in control. Is there anything where you’ll just snap a little bit?

No, not really. The only thing I really think is there’s two types of people. There are people who are healthy, who aren’t going to die in the immediate future. And there’s people that are sick and they’re going to die in a couple of months and they know it. I’m so fucking happy I’m in that first group. Literally, I’m fucking elated most of the time that I’m not fatally ill, since I know one day a guy will tell me that. It might be a long fucking time, but it’s still going to happen. That’s literally why I’m usually so happy. Things don’t bother me because I feel so lucky to exist.

There’s this article that was out about you in Bluff magazine that was kind of like, in Vegas the night after a show, and you took 40 grand over two three days and just went through it. I’ve read you don’t gamble like that anymore.

I don’t gamble at all, no.

Do you still play poker at all?

A little bit but, no, no, not enough to count as anything.

So you’re not going to be the tables at all this weekend?

No. The worst thing about gambling – I guess this is probably any addiction, but the only one I really had, because I don’t drink or do drugs or anything like that. The only bad thing I think about the addiction that I’ve realized with gambling, is not the money at the end of it or even your health, it’s the time. The time that you spend thinking about insanely trivial things, like who’s going to win a fucking football game. You don’t get that time back at the end of your life. They don’t go, ‘Hey, remember that fucking time you spent two years worrying about football? You get it back to do something fun with or whatever.’ That’s when it came to me. I was just getting so saturated. I don’t want to do this every day. I know guys who go to the track every fucking day for their whole life and watch horses run. I just finally got saturated by it.

You’re going to be in another movie coming up, Hollywood and Wine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s with the Farley brothers. Kevin and Johnny Farley, they’re Chris Farley’s two brothers are directing and starring in this independent movie. I said I’d do it. Me and Spade did some little thing.

And I’m going to be in a movie about comedians, man. That’s the coolest one.

By Jason Scavone

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