A Comedian’s Masquerade: How Norm Macdonald Became a Man of the People

With the blaring fluorescent light above me, I squinted as my sleep-deprived ninth-grade self drowsily searched through the YouTube feed, straining my eyes that tried to grab onto anything that would provide even the slightest hint of entertainment.

My happiness came in the form of a video titled “Norm Macdonald Hates Oscar Pistorius”, in which one of my first experiences with the comedy icon was this:

“I feel that one of the basic requirements of being a sprinter, is having legs.”

It seemed as if each and every line Macdonald came up with in that snippet of an interview was met with incredulous roars from the crowd. Conan O’Brien, the host of the show, felt he had no choice but to agree — “No one’s going with you on this” he exclaimed.

I knew I was in favor of Macdonald’s comedy, but there was just something about it that I just couldn’t put my finger on. Why is Norm Macdonald so funny?

For years I have been studying Macdonald’s comedic technique (what my parents and teachers would probably refer to as procrastination) and have found that it is groundbreaking in it’s approach.

Norm is a Late-Night Revolutionary

There was something about Macdonald that was so charming: the fact that he would tell a joke and take you along for the ride. But how did he do this?

Macdonald’s comedic timing is unparalleled. Despite the tight constraints talk shows have on certain segments, Macdonald seems to find his way around these, telling the jokes in the way he wants to tell them.

Perhaps Macdonald’s best use of timing is in his telling of proclaimed “Moth Joke” on Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show. Find it here.

The setup to the joke is nothing short of bizarre, and strangely adherent to something of a Norse family epic. He begins the joke with: “a moth goes into a podiatrist's office”. Macdonald goes on for the rest of the joke to personify the moths with Slavic sounding last names in a story that the audience was dragged along upon the basis that the punchline would be worth the wait. “You should be seeing a psychiatrist, why on earth did you come here?”, Macdonald says. At this point, the audience had been paying attention for 2 minutes and fifty seconds before the precisely 2 second punchline:

“‘cause the light was on.”

Humble Norm

Before Macdonald even begins the joke, he tells Conan that this was a joke he acquired from his cab driver, in a move that he said was the same way he gets all of his other material.

The vocal performance by itself is shaky. During the joke, Macdonald will smile at the stunning harshness of the Moth Family epic as it contrasts to the lighthearted chuckles of the time before the story. Macdonald does this about five times in pauses that last an average of about 3.5 seconds.

And of course, anyone who knows anything about ‘Dad jokes’ could recognize that often sigh-inducing punchline in the last quotation.

But despite the change of tone from lighthearted jokes to the stunningly serious Moth Family epic, the key to the joke is Macdonald’s verbal performance.

The Genius Within

But don’t be mistaken in that here, Macdonald is putting on an act.

By ending the entire joke in an anticlimactic two seconds, his audience may have felt cheated out of some far more riveting, underlying truth about the life of the moth. But by destroying this hope, Macdonald actually exposes the human ability to become invested in the details. When really, Macdonald is arguing that these details are insignificant, and that the main reason for telling the story was to display the effects of passage of time.

Macdonald and Churchill

Believe it or not, Norm Macdonald and Winston Churchill have more in common than you would think. Both are devoted to the satisfaction of the audience, and their catering to them. Of course in his famous June 4th, 1940 speech, Churchill makes sure to mask or at least understate the harsh losses that the British had faced after the evacuation of Dunkirk, and instead chooses to highlight the small victories that were achieved on the beach.

Macdonald is actually similar in this way in that he makes his speech accessible to the general public. He separates himself from the pedestal so many of the celebrities in the public eye had sat atop. Instead, Macdonald, (hence his relative lack of stardom) levels with the audience.

In the end, if you wanted to replicate this joke, you probably could — especially the awkward ninth graders in all of us.