No One Tells the Norm Macdonald Story Better Than Norm Macdonald

The day Norm Macdonald died in 2021, there must have been a million people on Earth — at least — who went straight to YouTube and started queuing up old Norm bits. Plenty of us still do it every so often: we remember an old Norm Macdonald joke, look it up, and lose the next hour or two down a Norm Macdonald rabbit hole in a way that almost feels like quietly reminiscing with Norm himself.

That’s the experience Judd Apatow delivers in Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald. There are no talking heads. Apatow didn’t round up his friends and fellow comedians to share their favorite Norm stories. He compiled the best two hours of Norm Macdonald the Internet has to offer, cut it together in a way that feels both chronological and thematic, and let Norm Macdonald tell the story of Norm Macdonald’s life and comedy.

And it hits hard. Norm Macdonald was one of the funniest men who ever lived, and there are moments in Apatow’s film where you’ll erupt in laughter, whether at jokes that blindside you or ones that sneak up on you and don’t fully land until half a minute later. But Macdonald was also deeply philosophical, especially in the last decade of his life. He battled cancer for nine years and told no one outside his closest friends and family, but his reckoning with death was there in his comedy all along. We just didn’t know it at the time.

The “Weekend Update” jokes are great. The O.J. jokes are sublime. And there’s something wonderful about the fact that Don Ohlmeyer — an NBC executive for a couple of decades — is best remembered as the guy who fired Norm Macdonald. It was the subhead of his obituary. It’s the longest section on his Wikipedia page. Norm was so beloved that the man who fired him has been reduced to a supporting character in Norm’s story.

But for all the comedy Macdonald was known for — jokes that crossed the line but somehow still felt humane — it’s the man’s tender heart that resonates most in the documentary. He was a genuinely lovely man, and that, too, shines through in his comedy. So many of these jokes are still hilarious, but knowing what we know now, they also carry a certain wistfulness alongside the laughs.

The documentary runs over two hours, and honestly, I could’ve watched another two, easily. Apatow does Macdonald proud, not by reflecting on his legacy or trying to place him in the pantheon of great comics, but by stepping aside and letting Norm tell his own life story, one joke at a time. It’s truly remarkable.