Norm MacDonald's Moth Joke

A comedian’s comedian

Norm MacDonald is a comedian’s comedian, as they say. That is, Norm is a comedian admired among other comedians disproportionate to his popularity with the masses. Exhibit A: Among the star-studded line-up of guests that joined David Letterman during his final week, MacDonald was tasked to deliver the final stand-up comedy performance. To put that in perspective, the Foo Fighters delivered the final musical performance and Bob Dylan made a rare late night TV appearance. Jerry Seinfeld did stand up on his appearance but he wasn’t the stand up comedian Dave wanted for the capstone. Letterman on Norm:

“If we could have, we would have had Norm on every damn week. He is funny in a way that some people inhale and exhale. With others, you can tell the comedy, the humor is considered. With Norm, he exudes it. It’s sort of a furnace in him because he’s so effortless. The combination of the delivery and his appearance and his intelligence. There may be people as funny as Norm, but I don’t know anybody who is funnier.”

99% of the time, what makes a punchline funny is that it confounds the audience’s expectations in some jarring way. That’s how most jokes work, the setup creates an expectation and then the punchline spins off in an unexpected direction. Norm MacDonald had a number of throughlines in his approach to comedy. He relentlessly played with conventions, taking a premise and turning it into a story that had happened to him, but then doing that in ridiculously clumsy ways in order to let the audience know that — in fact, this did not happen at all — he can’t deliver the punchline if he doesn’t set up the premise, so we all have to get through the set up if the punchline is going to pay off, but bear with him, we all know this convention of ‘set-up/punchline’ is ridiculous but that’s just how it works, so why not make the set-up ridiculous and let the audience in on the joke. “So, I says … I says …” This is an approach he leveraged over and over to great effect in appearances with Conan O’Brien because Conan loved that ironic meta-commentary on how to tell a joke. A comedian’s comedian.

One way of confounding expectations … that MacDonald is a master at … is to deliver a punchline that disappoints expectations. This approach to constructing a joke in order to get laughs is not for the meek of heart. It is the highest level of difficulty to pull off with the lowest likely return on investment. Not everybody is going to get it and the people who don’t get it, REALLY aren’t going to get it.

Norm famously employed this as a stratagem for roasting the roast format. When he was approached by Comedy Central to roast Bob Saget, he asked the network what they wanted him to do. They told him they just wanted the most shocking jokes he could think of. Instead of coming with a fusillade of sexually explicit and boundary-pushing jokes he came and blundered his way through a series of awkward puns and dad jokes, stepping on punchlines by repeating them in even clunkier rephrasings. “Bob, you have a lot of well-wishers here tonight. And a lot of them … would like to throw you down one … a well. They want to murder you in a well. That seems a little harsh but, apparently, they want to murder you in a well … it says, here on this card. But Bob has a beautiful face. Like a flower. Yeah — CAULIFLOWER. No offense. But your face. Looks like. A cauliflower.”

It worked and built through the compounding interest of refusing to relent. Norm MacDonald telling an unexpectedly corny joke at a Comedy Central roast is kind of funny. And the crowd kind of laughs. But Norm MacDonald doing an entire set of NOTHING but corny dad jokes at a Comedy Central roast is hilarious and the laughter rises as the crowd figures out what’s going on.


He managed to kill.

His most effective use of misdirection towards disappointment was with the legendary Moth Joke on Conan O’Brien where he tortures Conan for four minutes with a meandering story appropriating tropes from Kafka and Russian literature of a tortured moth who has wandered into a podiatrist’s office and proceeds to tell his tale of woe. Watch it and when you come back we can discuss it.

Spoiler Alert

Norm starts out with a joke within the joke that disappoints and it’s about the joke. The show has sent him a car and he tells Conan that he frequently gets material from drivers. We expect something about the colorful and tragicomic lives of cab drivers. No. The drivers tell Norm jokes and then he uses them in his act. This is one of them. We were expecting material from a brilliant comedian and now we are (supposedly) getting a joke from some random Uber driver.

MacDonald gives us the initial setup. “A moth goes into a podiatrist’s office.” It’s a boilerplate set up to a bar joke, the kind of jokes people tell to kill time at bars. Or retell, having picked them up from somebody else, nobody ever knows where the joke originated. But Norm takes it and turns it into a tale of woe as told by the love child of Fydor Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka. When the podiatrist asks the moth “What seems to be the problem?” The moth replies, “Where to start?” He works all day for Gregor Ilyanivich. He can’t find meaning in his work but Gregor Ilyanivich seems to find joy in his power over Mr. Mothovich. He’s become alienated from his wife, whom he once loved but is now old and unrecognizable to him. His daughter Alexandria succumbed in the cold of the previous year. He realizes that he no longer loves his son, Gregaro Ivinolitovitch. His son mirroring back to him his own cowardice. He contemplates suicide. Conan explodes in impatience and then implores him to go on. The moth feels like a spider suspended over an eternal fire. A bog-standard bar joke has taken a turn into dark and surreal territory but when the podiatrist asks the moth why he has come to see him instead of a psychiatrist, we come full circle. “Because the light was on.” We should have known better. Norm got us expecting some surreal, existential revelation, and instead, we got the bar joke ending that plays on the one thing we all know about moths — they are drawn to light, offices have lights, the moth was drawn to the light. We should have known better. We were expecting a dramatic, philosophical punchline, and instead of delivering that Norm disappoints with a bar joke punchline but the way Norm delivers disappointment is funnier than any intellectual punchline he could have come up with.

Bar jokes are structured so that mere mortals can’t fuck them up (though they still manage to do so). “A Moth Walks Into a Podiastrist Office as Told by Nicholai Gogol” is beyond the abilities of mere mortals. That takes a special kind of skill set. Especially when you find out that he was improvising it in order to kill time.

He goes on ‘Conan’ expecting to do one segment and at the commercial break, Conan says, “We’ll be right back with more Norm MacDonald.” Norm tells Conan that he didn’t prepare for another segment. Conan says just to talk. He remembers the bar joke version of the Moth Joke that Colin Quinn had told him but it’s only twenty seconds. How long is the next segment? More than twenty seconds. And the rest is history.

One can’t help but be reminded of Larry Miller telling the Hippo Joke in the outtakes from The Aristrocats, showing how a bar joke can be elevated by a pro.

Rewatching I realize that he’s not really telling the joke. He’s briefly describing the joke and that properly told it would go far beyond 45 seconds. But even in this telling, it’s a bar joke but beyond the skill level of most people sitting next to you at the bar.

Below, Norm returns to Conan with the tale of the great, forgotten Canadian intellectual, Jacques DeGautier. Bound for greatness but feeding the dolphins at Seaworld. I’ve droned on enough, so I’ll just leave you with that.