Norm's past gambling addiction had been initiated by a six-figure win at a craps table in Atlantic City. He has said that he lost all of his money gambling three times, and the largest amount he lost at once was $400,000. In the 2007 World Series o...
Cameo as Michael Richards
In 1999, he made a cameo appearance in the Andy Kaufman biographical drama Man on the Moon, directed by Milos Forman. When Michael Richards refused to portray himself in the scene reenacting the famous Fridays incident in which Kaufman threw water in...
Removal from Weekend Update
In 1998, Norm was removed as "Weekend Update" anchor by Don Ohlmeyer, president of NBC's West Coast division. He initially believed that it was because he was making too many jokes about OJ Simpson, whom Ohlmeyer was a friend of. Many years later, ...
The most common question I see here on Twitter is if I have any advice on being a comedian. I have never given any but I will. It is said that you must write what you have experienced, that great comedy comes from truth, or from tragedy. All of this is nonsense. I am crushed by the time, gone and irrevocable, that these 300 pages have cost me. But here are a couple of stand-up tips. I am not sure if this can be done by the novice, but if I could go back and do stand-up differently, I would. The big problem, oddly enough, when a comedian performs, are the laughs. Stand-up comedy, as it is customarily produced, is a craft and not an art. Here is the reason. The stand-up comedian must create a ...
I hated everything in school. I think it kills people for books. My kid was having trouble with this book, and oh my God, it was a great book. So I said, "Why don't you try to read it once just for pleasure because you're reading it knowing that you'll be asked questions. You can't enjoy anything then." It's like if you went to a movie and they said, "Oh, there's going to be a giant quiz the next day," it'd be very hard to enjoy that movie because you'll be trying to figure out what questions they'll be asking. Of course the books weren't written for that purpose. They weren't written to be taught in school or analyzed in a literary way or anything like that. School killed me for books. I re...
Most books back then were awful and most books now are awful. The classics stayed on. Reading modern books is like you went panning for gold and had to go through a bunch of rocks to find one single lump of coal. Or, the way I do it, you just go into the store and they give you big bars of gold from the old days and you read those.
The Nixon Tapes: 1973 Ed. by Douglas Brinkley & Luke Nichter
Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
The Nixon Tapes: 1973 Ed. by Douglas Brinkley & Luke Nichter
I watched the Watergate hearings while I was a boy in Canada. They said Nixon was the ultimate politician, but no: He was stiff, he’d sweat, he was human, a tragic figure who got caught up in his own insecurities. My favorite part [in these tapes] is the banality: Nixon talks about his mother-in-law making this pie he f—–g hates, and all these guys going, “Yessir!”
Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
I love oral histories. Mitchell was a New Yorker writer who’d go around a city and write about interesting people he’d met, from the mayor to the lowest bum. He was probably the first to do New Journalism, [before] Gay Talese. Hi...
When I started there were 5 funny comics out of 100 then there was 5 out of 500 now there's 50k & only 5 are funny. It's going to be worse as audience doesn't know the diff as long as the structure is there which you can learn easily & trick the audience. You can't create art.
On the other hand, if you have someone like Bill Hicks who's just this fraud that screams at the top of his lungs and tells you that multi-national oil companies are not a good thing, then that will attract a wide, wide audience of half-smart college kids.
He kind of fascinates me. He’s seen everything, so he’ll out of the blue be like, [impersonating Larry King] "Your son died when he was six. Paul Newman told me you never got over it." He can be just so passionless. This insane corpse talking to people. Also, he looks like a million-year-old. He’s 72 or something. [He's 76. —ed.] And also he prides himself on knowing nothing about the guests, which is kind of cool because sometimes he’ll ask very innocent questions that are interesting, but more often than not, it'll be like how he had [Jerry] Seinfeld on and he asked, "How did it feel when you were canceled?"
Well, I don’t go on shows to promote anything, for one thing. When I was young, I’d watch guys on The Tonight Show, Buddy Hackett, guys like that, where all they’d be is funny. Later, I remember, on Late Night with Letterman, I remember he’d have Jay Leno and Richard Lewis as first guests and the entire point was to entertain and be funny, and I think talk shows have kind of lost that. It’s mostly about super famous people telling long, dull stories about their swimming pools or something.
I guess there came a time, and I missed it, when revealing everything started to be considered art. I’d always learned that concealing everything was art. And I still believe that, because comedy is a vulgar art; it’s an art that’s just beginning to take form because it’s so young. But I can look at other art forms and see how postmodernism has destroyed them, and now threatens to destroy stand-up. It’s the height of narcissism to write meta-comedy, because people aren’t interested in comedy. They’re interested in going home after shoveling shit all day and then seeing some fool perform. That’s not to say that comedy can’t make a greater point, because it can. But it can’t make a greater poi...
A lot of it is bragging. It used to drive me crazy when I knew that a stand-up’s agenda was about showing how smart they were. The last character you want to be is a guy who’s smarter than the audience. But there’s some hole inside that these stand-ups have to fill. It has nothing to do with making people laugh.
Stand-up is a form and to subvert something, you have to do it perfectly first. I remember somebody showed me a talk show with “subversion” in it — the guy chainsawed his desk. It was so stupid. Why did you build a desk in the first place if you were only going to chainsaw it? Don’t have a fucking desk! You just want little drops of subversion. Letterman in the ‘80s would be 90 percent a great talk show and then 10 percent subversion. If you get to 30 percent subversion, you’re in Andy Kaufman land. If you get to 70 percent, you’re a guy on the streets screaming at people. What are you trying to subvert anyway? Entertaining people? It’s absurd.
I was told later that Stephen was uncomfortable but I didn't mean to. The conversation just flowed to British children's entertainers being largely pedophiles and I don't know why Stephen Merchant was tiptoeing around it.
Well, it depends on your view I suppose but it's been my experience is that life's purpose is to suffer. To abide the inevitable pain and to bear it in a noble way.
The two greatest living writers are Cormac McCarthy and Alice Munro, so I would suggest a collection of Alice Munro short stories and McCarthey's masterpiece "The Road." My personal favorites are "War and Peace" and "The Death of Ivan Ilych" both by Tolstoy.
Norm Macdonald