Only Norm Macdonald Gave O.J. Simpson What He Deserved

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The news of O.J. Simpson’s death yesterday engendered a massive outpouring of love—for Norm Macdonald, whose O.J. jokes got shared like crazy. To the average fan, Norm was defined by his adversarial relationship with O.J. in the 1990s. And that’s not unfair. At least a few of those jokes were candidates for the best late-night joke ever told. They had this bluntness, this total lack of the wordplay and whimsy that defined so much comedy at the time. There was never any fat on those jokes, and Norm was unafraid to just make you sit there with them, even after the laughs had died—even when there were no laughs. Nobody else back then had Norm’s willingness to just sit there and say “What? I’m right. Come at me.” (Shades of Hannibal Buress talking about Cosby.)

Half the time Norm was barely even joking—he just reminded us, over and over, that O.J. was a vicious double murderer, and pointed out how much insane, contemptible bullshit happened at a trial that can be charitably described as a national disgrace. Everybody was talking about O.J. back then, but nobody else on TV was doing that, because of the spectacle and TV-ratings potential of all other kinds of coverage. Think of the carnival that springs up around the man trapped in the cave in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. Just unapologetic, transparent avarice. If every element of the justice system and media hadn’t failed us at the same time, O.J. wouldn’t still be in the national consciousness.

It’s called the trial of the century, but it also feels like the most L.A. trial of the century. It basically created car-chase coverage and everybody in the trial became kind of a celebrity, even the itinerant actor staying in OJ’s guest house. To be clear, nobody’s ever gonna know that many names from a trial again, so Norm’s constant jokes (all of which amounted to “He killed two people—what are you guys doing?”) always felt like media criticism. Not a stretch to assume about a guy whose brother is low-key one of the most respected journalists in Canada.

Overused phrase incoming, but it’s the best one here: the whole act was punk rock. Norm would still be famous, decades later, just for highlight reels of his O.J. Simpson material, which are constantly being re-edited and re-packaged on just about every corner of the internet. And it’s no easy thing to successfully craft so many jokes where the punchline is “He brutally murdered his wife and a waiter” and get them all on network TV. When people I knew in real life told O.J. jokes, they were all some variant on “the Juice is loose!”— and yeah, congrats on watching TV. We’re talking about homicide.

Maybe just as punk, Norm never joked about him much after the trial, except to pretend in his novel that he’d come to believe Simpson was innocent (“I was the greatest rusher to judgment”) and elsewhere, and respond to an audience request in a stand-up special: “As much as I was indignant about his acquittal, I’m equally indignant about his going to prison for stealing his fucking own shirt. I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think if you steal your own shirts, you should get 35 consecutive life sentences.”

Hardly seems fair to make a one-hit wonder out of a nightclub comic with thousands of hours under his belt, none of which were about O.J. Simpson. You get the sense he felt the same way. None of that material ever really grazed his act. To Norm, SNL was something that was dead and gone, and it was time to move forward.

And it makes sense: O.J. may have been the most boring thing about the O.J. trial. The miscarriage of justice and moral bankruptcy of the media was almost always more shocking than yet another charismatic rich sociopath getting away with murder, at least after the car chase. And when it was over, it made sense for Norm to drop the material.

And he was very clear from then on that while he enjoyed Weekend Update and the fame from hassling O.J., his whole deal was stand-up, and he worked at it constantly. Because that work lives and evolves, and Norm’s Weekend Update, no matter how good, is back there in the 90s, an artifact of a long-finished legal proceeding. Being forever linked to an emblematic ‘90s villain made a veteran, grizzled-ass stand-up seem a bit washed up. But his real work was in clubs, not on television.

I remember how I met Norm, a zillion years ago at one of those improv clubs at the mall that 30 years ago would have been smoky as hell. I introduced myself after the set and told him Don Ohlmeyer, who fired him from SNL—allegedly because he and O.J. were golf buddies—taught at my school. I said I had it on reliable authority that the dude was cokey and double-parked his convertible, then I offered to throw rocks at it.

I remember how he chuckled and said he was probably fired because his Update segments had too much dead air, and that I should not throw rocks at Don Ohlmeyer’s car. He’d clearly made peace with his SNL tenure ending the way it did, and I think there’s a lesson there. He was over it. In the ‘90s, O.J. was a murderer facing a trial that damned the justice system and pretty much the whole LAPD. Now he’s just a dead guy, and we should let him stay that way.

And everybody loves the “Murder is legal in the state of California” joke, but in Norm’s book he’s got a list of his favorite Update jokes, and O.J.’s only on there once. It’s this one:

“This week in the O.J. Simpson trial, Johnnie Cochran delivered a spellbinding final summation. In a brilliant move, Cochran put on the knit cap prosecutors say Simpson wore the night of the double murders—although O.J. may have hurt his case when he suddenly blurted out, ‘Hey, hey, careful with that. That’s my lucky stabbing hat!’”

Originally Appeared on GQ