'The Norm: The Norm MacDonald Story' review: Judd Apatow's fresh and exciting portrait of a comedy star who was as funny as he was.

At times he had a streak of Andy Kaufman's antisocial hostility, as if comedy were a way of testing both himself and the audience, seeing what they would accept, and whether he would.

The documentary pays homage to MacDonald's barbed comic glee, even as it reveals his difficult personality and penchant for mischief.

Stand-up comedians have always revered what they like to call "the comic"—the fellow comedian who works with such purity and excellence, initially immersed in the somber metaphysics of comedy, that the comics end up worshiping him more than the general public. (He's the stand-up comedy equivalent of a great cult indie rock band.) Gilbert Gottfried was a stand-up comic. So are Larry David and Doug Stanhope and Maria Bamford. And so was Norm MacDonald, except that watching Judd Apatow's fresh and exciting documentary The Norm: The MacDonald Norm Story, you realize there's something special about him. He was a comic…that everyone else loved. Related Stories 'Obsession' Is the Golden Globes the New Home for Category Cheating? 'Love of Your Life' director Rachel Morrison on Margaret Qualley's 'Wild Range', coping with Covid-19 and subverting romantic drama expectations: 'Finding yourself is enough'

As the film shows, MacDonald's reputation as a comic was impenetrable. We see his first network television appearance on May 9, 1990 on "Late Night with David Letterman," where he talked about the devil ordering someone to kill his family and dismember them and put the pieces in a boat bag. (Then the killer realizes that the demon friend he had was playing a joke. He already knows how to draw the audience into his mind. Popular in Variety

On "Saturday Night Live," where MacDonald spent four seasons as one of the weekend's great hosts, beginning in 1993, time and time again, with obsessive fixations that we can't contain, the subject of O.J. Simpson and the fact that Simpson had killed his wife. Why was this funny? Because every time McDonald joked about it, his claim that O.J. was guilty. It was a way to return to its shocking unreality. Every O.J. The joke had the effect of a confusing slap. He wouldn't give up, which got him fired from "Saturday Night Live" (Don Ullmeyer, the president of NBC's West Coast division responsible for the McDonald shooting, was O.J. Simpson's best friend). Now this is a joke of a comic.

On "SNL," and in legendary echoes of late-night talk-show appearances, and in his stand-up shows, Norm MacDonald had a strange quality -- a slightly off-kilter swagger where he'd talk about a subject and a joke he knew would be sarcastic, and that might help him "break the line." He had to say the obscene word to erase the forbidden. Telling that joke would be a catharsis. It would be a comedy not to say this would be a failure.

At times he had a streak of Andy Kaufman's anti-social hostility, as if the comedy belonged to him. A way of testing himself and the audience, seeing what they would accept and see if they would accept him. The strange thing that emerges in "The Norm: The Story of MacDonald's Norm" is that MacDonald was a compulsive liar, both in stand-up and in his life, two levels of existence sometimes entwined around a single deception. That's why he always looked a bit like a space cadet. You can never really tell if he means what he says. We learn that he never went to high school...and also that he did (and graduated at 14)...that he never went to college...but that was it. On the eve of the pandemic, he described himself to audiences as "68 years young" (he was 60 at the time). He also describes himself to Larry King as "deeply closed," and when King asks if that means he's coming out as gay, he says no, he's straight... and then shows how secretive he is by claiming to be straight. You can hear Andy Kaufman raving in his Absurd Paradise.

The thing about Norm Macdonald, though, is that he did it all with a smiling charm and supreme satisfaction that made him irresistible to a wide range of fans. He wasn't a spiky punk - more like an aggressive teddy bear. In his early days, including the "SNL" years that made him famous, he was downright handsome, with a thin face, bright, sunken eyes, a mop of curly hair and a killer grin that made him look like Paul Newman's slightly goofy cousin. Fifteen years before Norm MacDonald, Choi Chase was "Saturday Night Live's" first featured superstar, and his Weekend Update story He became a household name on screen, and he did it not because he was a great actor, but because he had great cleavage along with his tall looks. His handsomeness was part of the joke, and so was the cushion.

But McDonald did not use his appearance in this way. They just sort of existed along the thin edge of his comedy. And so when he got booted from "SNL," he acted like he was thrown off a cliff. He was still in that culture, but he was moving around, and this, as the documentary shows, had to do with his strange and slippery personality: his compulsive honesty (which meant he didn't quite know how to package himself), his compulsive clothes (which meant he was really afraid to show who he really was). in himself as a star), mixed with an element of self-sabotage (his way of validating all those worries about himself).

After all, "The Norm: The Soft Story of MacDonald" was, and still is, rooted in the popular comedian Norm MacDonald. In the opening montage, several people, like Howard Stern, point to a rabbit hole you can enter just by going to YouTube and watching clips of McDonald's on late-night talk shows. He had countless appearances that were gems, as he always spent his conversation with a spark of menace. He couldn't just be a straight shooter, he had to make his balls feel real. At times, he was as philosophical as Lenny Bruce - but Bruce only spoke of religion to mock it, while Macdonald at one point reveals that he is a Christian who is a true believer. (This is a guy who introduces his assistant as someone who pulls punks out from under a bridge for $15.) It's all part of his mystique.

The film is interspersed with clips from Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Conan O'Brien and Dave Chappelle, and Apatow, with editor Jake Hostetter, assembles the clips in a fascinating way so that we feel the subterranean sprawl of McDonald's career. He can be a great impressionist (his Bob Dole on "SNL" may have helped swing the 1996 presidential election; Quentin Tarantino inspired him). He continued to perform stand-up, but he didn't need to be a great stand-up comedian. Just talking to Jane Fonda on his video podcast, "Norm MacDonald Live," he was maddeningly funny. We see his appearance change quite a bit over the years as he becomes a bloated version of himself, something that happened in part because he secretly battled leukemia for the last nine years of his life. (He died in 2021.) Yet audiences stayed with him—at least more than the entertainment industry.

MacDonald wasn't the first "wrong" comedian to run afoul of the comedy police, but he seemed to be the first of his day and age (ours, that is). He should have had his own late-night talk show, but when he found out he was up for one — and lost out to the boring yuppie Craig Kilbourne — it was a sign that his comedy was falling apart. At the same time, he cultivated falsehood in such a way that he could be thoughtless. When he went on "The View" and said that Bill Clinton was guilty of "murder," he claimed he was only doing one thing, but since that "bit" was fed into a right-wing conspiracy theory, it seemed like an episode of Tarsh's mess. And when he defended Roseanne Barr after her racist tweet in 2018, he did so faithfully (one of his first gigs as a writer for Roseanne) but tone-deaf, as if what he tweeted was a lighthearted joke. (It wasn't; it was disastrous.) It all led to the perfect storm that was The Decline of Norm MacDonald.

We pretend comedy is just fun, a means to an end - our goal is to make you laugh. But the few chosen as "comic comics" occupy that rarefied stratosphere, knowing that comedy is more than just laughs, and more laughs than we give it credit for. You laugh for many reasons, but one of those reasons can be when an idea goes off in your head like a little bomb. That's why comedy can tickle your soul, bring you back to life, cleanse you. And that was comedian Norm MacDonald. He had a devilish glow, but the laughter he provoked sat by his side from the angels