'The Norm: The Norm MacDonald Story' review: Judd Apatow's latest comedy doc sends viewers down a rabbit hole of laughs

The Netflix film ditches traditional talkies for a more archival approach to the comedy legend of "Saturday Night Live" and "Dirty Work."

As much as I adore Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared and The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up , it's becoming increasingly clear that Judd Apatow's greatest legacy may be the documentary project he began relatively late in his career.

In the past decade, Apatow has directed or co-directed multi-part documentaries about Garry Shanling, George Carlin and Mel Brooks, as well as feature-length documentaries about Maria Bamford and Norm MacDonald, with Brooks, Bamford and MacDonald projects all airing this year alone. In a documentary landscape heavily saturated with stories of certain types of comics for a generation (or two), Apatow's films are constructed as the most thoughtful and thoughtful pieces of a puzzle that ultimately come together as an essential record of a genre and its key artisans.

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A popular approach that suits its subject well.

Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald, which hit Netflix a week before Apatow and Neil Berkeley's Flagged by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story (and a week after Berkeley's co-directed documentary about Marine Mole), found Apatow officially continuing the experiment.

If Mel Brooks: 99-year-old man! Guided by the remarkable gift of Brooks' continued presence in our cultural life and Gary Shanling's Zen memoir, The Norm: The Norm Story, guided by Shanling's unpublished diary, MacDonald challenges the notion of documentary as a path to intimacy. This is the first of Apatow's docs, which feels more like an opportunity to point and laugh at favorite one-liners and late-night shows than to learn something deeper and more personal about its subject matter, which here is simultaneously a limitation and a goal.

Macdonald, who died in 2021, is revered in comedy circles. He was a respected stand-up, an all-time great podcast and talk show guest, and depending on your age, the platonic ideal of a Weekend Update host on Saturday Night Live. The latter was a three-and-a-half-year stint that turned him into a righteous deity and eventual martyr of corporate meddling, who suddenly fell for refusing to back down from the O.J.-related staples. Simpson and murder

MacDonald was also deliberately unknown for much of his career. He often veered from retelling to retelling as he revealed details of his autobiography. When he wrote his memoirs, he clearly argued that they should be treated as fiction. It wasn't until the last few years of his life, when he became popular on Twitter and Instagram, that he gave the impression that he was letting audiences into the "real" norm. But when it was revealed posthumously that she had battled cancer for eight years, it was a detail she never mentioned in all those posts and circles.

He was unknown, but Apatow treats that as a way to get to know him. The conceit of Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald is that it's a documentary version of a YouTube rabbit hole that builds a portrait of Macdonald mostly through montage clips, which will be all too familiar to anyone who has gone down the rabbit hole of Norm Macdonald clips alone.

So that means a lot of MacDonald's stand-up footage, his regular appearances with David Letterman and Conan O'Brien, his performances on Saturday Night Live, and his later career, which includes a brief stint as a movie star and a stint as an acclaimed streaming talk show host. Instead of bringing in MacDonald's contemporaries for keynote sessions, Apatow turns to clips from countless podcasts and video shows in which MacDonald's contemporaries reflected on and celebrated him.

Sometimes Apatow and editor Jake Hostetter use these "commentary" clips to show the love and admiration that MacDonald's other comics had for him, and sometimes to show that even those closest to MacDonald don't necessarily know his real age, his real educational history, and his real love interests.

There's a suggestion that something more candid than McDonald's last few years on social media has revealed, but many clips of McDonald's end of life come from unexplained and unquoted sources, making them both more and less reliable as a result.

Not every comic would benefit from this treatment. I'd venture to say that most comics wouldn't, and frankly, I'm not sure that a more traditional approach would have given Apatow more insight. Part of why we make documentaries at all, rather than just letting people tell their life stories exclusively in five-minute late-night interviews, is the opportunity for depth and reflection that a filmmaker can evoke. lost here

But if the ironic removal of his comic voice was part of what allowed MacDonald to tell so many uncomfortable truths, Apatow is justified in creating an omission of his own. Returning to the idea that these documentaries are pieces of a much larger project, it's fitting that MacDonald's film comes out a week before a documentary about Bamford, whose unique gift has always been the use of the absurd, even surrealism, as a way to dissolve all boundaries between an artist and his truth.

Bamford digs deep, paralyzed by hope. By design, Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald hovers like a butterfly around porch light. It does not cover or include all of O.J. joke or any conversation with O'Brien or Letterman, but if you've been patiently waiting for more than an hour for Courtney Thorne-Smith's indelible appearance, it will eventually appear, as always for a good laugh. All of this combined with visualizations of various search engine queries, etc. gives the impression that you could have made this documentary in your head, but Apatow has saved you several steps. Of course, you can watch the entire conversation with Thorne-Smith if you search for yourself and select your favorite clips, but it could take hours. So it is a service that Apatow and Hoster have kept this movie to 127 minutes.

Some of the limitations of the documentary show, without explanation, the limitations of a generation of stand-up comedians. For most of its run, Norm has no women or people of color at all, a suggestion of limitations to MacDonald's appeal and voice that I don't think is necessarily accurate.

Then in the finale, near and posthumous, we briefly see Laurie Jo Hoekstra, her longtime producing partner (and the producer of this documentary), and Molly Shannon, who was once MacDonald's only SNL co-star, who we see as her only SNL co-star soon after she was fired as well as on the show. Viewers, however, wish there was a way to merge these voices earlier, because it's not like the world doubts David Letterman and Conan O'Brien about Norm MacDonald.

In fact, I wish someone would make a documentary about the insularity of stand-up comedy, the voices that reach the point where they deserve to be documented, and the ones that are considered too special. I respect this current crop of comics-centric documentaries, but it's hard not to realize that the same people are making and appearing in all of them. It's self-fulfilling for those people to represent and represent the industry as a whole.

It's probably not the kind of documentary Apatow should be making—though maybe he could make it about a woman or a person of color. Meanwhile, I'll just wait patiently to see who Apatow narrates next. Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald is not his best film, but Apatow is very good at what he does.