‘Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald’ Netflix Review: Judd Apatow Turns a Comedian’s Comedian Into a Joyous, Binge-Worthy Internet Rabbit Hole

In recent years, Judd Apatow has somewhat stepped away from fictional comedy —the last one to be released, The Bubble, was a full-on failure— and devoted himself instead to documentaries about comedians, a subject that fascinates him and one he has clearly made a study of. He has already made films about Mel Brooks, Garry Shandling, George Carlin and one about Maria Bamford that Netflix will release on October 23. All of them manage to be both exhaustive and insightful, trying to go beyond what everyone already knows about these figures to offer a complete biographical portrait while also maintaining a clear point of view. These aren’t just Wikipedia entries and biographical facts thrown together with a Greatest Hits package and a series of interviews. They are attempts to find the person behind all of that.

With Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald, Apatow faced a particularly difficult task. The Canadian comedian, who became widely known during his years on Saturday Night Live but is also regarded as one of the greatest stand-up comedians of all time, never made his personal life part of his act. He wasn’t autobiographical or confessional or anything of the sort. Very little was known about his life because he was always giving out false information, treating his own biography as just another source of material and nothing more. Faced with that challenge —and apparently determined to respect Macdonald’s choices— Apatow focuses almost entirely on his work and his relationships with other comedians, all of them admirers of his. What little we learn about his personal life comes from Macdonald’s own voice, reading the audiobook version of his autobiography. And that’s pretty much it. In fact, Macdonald himself considered the book a work of fiction. «It’s not autobiographical, but it’s true,» he tells a skeptical Larry King in one of the many interviews he gave over the years.

Macdonald was a cult comedian. Or, to put it another way, a comedian’s comedian. Among his peers, virtually everything he did inspired extraordinary admiration. He also had plenty of fans and a perfectly healthy mainstream audience, but he was never one of those superstars who could fill stadiums or headline movies, as so many other SNL alumni did. Apatow doesn’t rely here on the usual talking-head interviews in which colleagues explain the importance of Macdonald’s work. Instead, the film’s chosen format incorporates much of that material through what look like constant Google searches, as if the documentary itself were being sponsored by the search engine.

Norm unfolds as though it were trying to replicate the experience of a curious fan who goes online looking for Norm Macdonald and starts wandering through YouTube, unable to stop laughing for hours, days, perhaps weeks. There is so much great material available online, Apatow seems to be saying, that the best thing his documentary can do is curate it: weave it together, connect the dots, build bridges between seemingly unrelated pieces of material and give them some kind of shape. Not through a straightforward biography — the film jumps back and forth through time — but by organizing everything around themes or key moments in Macdonald’s life and career.

Macdonald’s comedy could be direct, dry and cutting, delivered with his distinctive accent and breakneck diction, which meant that plenty of his jokes could sail right past a large part of the audience. He could come across as brusque or even aggressive, but that was part of his persona as a stand-up comedian, the format in which he felt most comfortable and the one he believed defined him. His influence was enormous, but relatively few contemporary comedians work in quite that tradition, as a more personal and autobiographical style seems to have prevailed. Norm learned to tell jokes the old-fashioned way from his father and never lost sight of that role: the comedian telling funny stories that don’t necessarily have anything to do with his own life. At the same time, he was a comedian who demanded a lot from his audience. He was never looking for the easy laugh, but for the laugh that came from fully understanding the meaning of a joke, no matter how brutal it might initially appear.

The documentary moves through the iconic moments of his career: his years anchoring SNL‘s Weekend Update, the fake-news segment where he could be particularly blunt and where he got himself into trouble with his constant jokes about O.J. Simpson during his murder trial; his complicated experiences making movies; his controversial statements; the years he spent making talk-show hosts laugh whenever they invited him on —David Letterman and Conan O’Brien could barely contain themselves whenever he appeared on their shows; his unsuccessful TV programs; some of his most memorable bits and routines; his podcasts and comedy specials. Apatow gets straight to the point and, much like Norm himself, turns the film into a steady barrage of jokes, ironies, bits and hilarious observations.

Toward the end, much as Norm himself did, the film becomes somewhat more reflective as it moves into illness, religion and death —Macdonald talked extensively about death in general but never publicly discussed his own health problems— and even allows for a couple of unexpectedly moving moments in front of an audience. But the joke is never far away, honoring a particular understanding of comedy that is neither pandering nor condescending, but always expects the audience to meet the material halfway. Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald is a fitting tribute to one of the greatest comedians of all time, a man who constantly pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in comedy but always loosened the tension with a genuine smile. Deep down, and perhaps more discreetly than most comedians, maybe he just wanted to be loved.