Norm Macdonald

The delivery was the joke. Macdonald built a style out of deadpan, understatement and deliberately old-fashioned phrasing, telling stories at the wrong speed and landing on punchlines that were often worse than the setup on purpose. David Letterman, whose programs he was a frequent guest on, described him as the best stand-up comedian.

He anchored Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live in the mid-1990s, and the catalog only preserves that era in clip compilations, which is a shame, because the Update desk is where the persona was finished. The movie career that followed never really matched it. Dirty Work in 1998 is the closest thing to a Macdonald vehicle, a cheap, genuinely strange comedy that plays much better now than it did then, and The Norm Show gave him a sitcom from 1999. Mostly he turned up in other comedians' films, a bartender here, a mob member there, and did excellent work in animation, where a voice built out of timing rather than volume goes a long way: Lucky in Doctor Dolittle, Yaphit on The Orville, Norm the Genie on The Fairly OddParents, Mogens in Klaus.

The late stretch was the interesting one. He wrote a book in 2016 that is a comic novel wearing a memoir's jacket, and he ran his own interview show, on the podcast and then on Netflix, where the point was usually to make the guest uncomfortable in the friendliest possible way. He died in 2021, and a solo special was released the year after.