Based on a True Story Read online

  The stories in this memoir begin with the author’s recollection of events, which is—by his own admission—spotty. Beyond that, several names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2016 by Norm Macdonald

  Foreword copyright © 2016 by Louis C.K.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me” by Billy Joe Shaver, copyright © 1972 by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  All photographs are reproduced courtesy of the author.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Macdonald, Norm.

  Title: Based on a true story / by Norm Macdonald.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Spiegel & Grau, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016014108| ISBN 9780812993622 (hardback) | ISBN 9780812993639 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Macdonald, Norm. | Comedians—Canada—Biography. | Actors—Canada—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

  Classification: LCC PN2308.M23 A3 2016 | DDC 792.7/6028092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016014108

  ebook ISBN 9780812993639

  randomhousebooks.com

  spiegelandgrau.com

  Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook

  Cover art: Mark Stutzman

  Cover design: Greg Mollica

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: The Job Interview

  Chapter 2: A Debt Unpaid

  Chapter 3: My First Five Years

  Chapter 4: Six Years Old to Eight Years Old

  Chapter 5: Eight Years Old to Thirteen Years Old

  Chapter 6: Thirteen Years Old

  Chapter 7: Driving to Las Vegas

  Chapter 8: Starting Out

  Chapter 9: My Greatest Gig

  Chapter 10: Star Search

  Chapter 11: The Plan

  Chapter 12: Me, Gabe Veltri, and a Squid

  Chapter 13: The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson

  Chapter 14: Live from New York

  Chapter 15: A Little Fame

  Chapter 16: Winning Big

  Chapter 17: First Week at Work

  Chapter 18: The Trial

  Chapter 19: Doing Time

  Chapter 20: The Devil, You Say

  Chapter 21: The Lost Days

  Chapter 22: Meeting God

  Chapter 23: Make a Wish

  Chapter 24: Heading North

  Chapter 25: A Wish Fulfilled

  Chapter 26: Tiny White Coffin

  Chapter 27: Leaving Las Vegas

  Chapter 28: Weekend Update

  Chapter 29: The Update Team

  Chapter 30: Top 25 Weekend Update Jokes of All Time

  Chapter 31: The Fat Man with the Artificial Hair

  Chapter 32: Word for Word

  Chapter 33: Way Outta Line: The Making of Dirty Work

  Chapter 34: Mr. Warmth

  Chapter 35: The Shoot

  Chapter 36: Torn Apart

  Chapter 37: The Bright White Light

  Chapter 38: Fired from Update

  Chapter 39: A Debt Incurred

  Chapter 40: Flipping Coins

  Chapter 41: After the Fall

  Chapter 42: A Fancy Name for a Filthy Thing

  Chapter 43: Escape!

  Chapter 44: The Final Chapter

  Chapter 45: Me, Myself, and I

  The Last Part of the Whole Book

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Three fingers whiskey pleasures the drinkers,

  Moving does more than that drinking for me.

  Willy, he tells me that doers and thinkers

  Say moving’s the closest thing to being free.

  —BILLY JOE SHAVER,

  “Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me”

  To live outside the law you must be honest.

  —BOB DYLAN,

  “Absolutely Sweet Marie”

  I know of only two very real evils in life: remorse and illness.

  —LEO TOLSTOY,

  War and Peace

  FOREWORD

  LOUIS C.K.

  I first saw Norm Macdonald onstage in 1988. I was twenty-one years old and he came to headline a club in Boston where I had been doing stand-up for three years. Me and my friends had heard about him, so I went to check him out.

  Within two minutes I was astonished by how goddamn funny he was. Just blown away. I laughed harder that night than I had in my life. I remember my comedian friends and I just sat and talked about him for hours after the show. I went back to see him five times during the week he was at that club. He instantly became my favorite comedian, and in the thirty years since, he has never stumbled far from that rank. Every time I see or hear Norm, he’s doing something new and better than the last time—he gives me a new favorite comedy bit.

  The thing that drives me nuts about Norm is the powerful simplicity of his style. A lot of comics (myself included) swagger around the stage and fly into contrived bits of anger that give them an air of dynamic importance. Norm has a beguiling humility that sneaks up and grabs you by the throat. There is something about how simply Norm says things onstage. Just lays words end to end with such elegance. And then you just explode with laughter and you just can’t stop. He’s just standing there talking and you’re howling and trying to breathe, your head in your lap. The power in that is amazing.

  Norm is brilliant and thoughtful, and there is sensitivity and creative insight in his observations and stories. But really he’s just talking. Just a guy talking and somehow shredding everything he talks about.

  He mildly dives into dark and light subjects alike and fabricates them with his hand in his pocket and his wry look. And he leaves you limp. How does he do it? I don’t know. I have been a student of comedy my whole life and I honestly don’t know how he does any of it. He has a fastball and a slider and about fifty arm angles.

  A lot of comics over the years have been compared to Mark Twain, but I think Norm is the only one who actually matches the guy in terms of his voice and ability.

  I listened to Norm on the radio once with my fourteen-year-old daughter, and he was doing a bit about how he would go about stalking, abducting, murdering, and burying a woman. Just politely explaining what would be his logistical plan. My daughter and I were dying laughing. Just cackling and howling. How do you get a forty-eight-year-old man and a fourteen-year-old girl to laugh like that together? And he could have told that same bit to a bunch of ladies at a church and they would have laughed just as hard.

  I really could go on and on about Norm. He’s a brilliant comedian. One of the greatest of all time. I put him in my top five.

  The last thing is that there is not one single other comedian like him. He falls into no genre or category. Just comedian.

  I seriously fucking love Norm Macdonald. Please buy his book. He probably needs the cash. He’s really bad with money.

  INTRODUCTION

  FOUND ALIVE IN A HOTEL ROOM IN ED
MONTON

  “You’re dead.”

  “The hell I am!” They’ll see.

  I’ve heard this kind of talk before. How I’m finished, through, obsolete, passé, yesterday’s news, a has-been, a fossil.

  “I’ll have you know I’m just as relevant today as I was twenty-five years ago.”

  “No, no,” my agent laughs through the phone, like it’s the greatest joke in the world. “Check your Wikipedia page. You’re dead all right.”

  I look around the room and see the small bottles that are scattered everywhere, those small bottles that make me feel so big. They’re empty now, of course, just like me. My suitcase is in the corner—same one I’ve had my whole career—and it’s all beat to hell, stitching coming outta the sides, but it still does its job. Sorta.

  Stand-up comedy is a shabby business, made up of shabby fellows like me who cross the country, stay at shabby hotels, and tell jokes they no longer find funny. You show up in a strange town, and next thing, you’re gone. Then another town, and another, and another. Then a thousand more. Then another. You’re moving, always moving, like a criminal drifter, getting what you can from a place and then getting out. You’re never in one place long enough to experience anything but the shabbiest of love.

  I turn to look at the girl next to me in bed. I must have met her last night at the comedy club, where they had a great tall picture of me leaning against the door to remind the people what a bigshot I once was. Her hair is bright yellow, her lips are bright red, and she’ll wake up soon and I’ll pretend that I remember her. I make my way quietly through the dim room to the wide-open minibar. It’s empty but for one tiny bottle way at the back. I always leave one. I drink her dry, the way a man puts gas in his car when the tank’s near empty. Just to keep going a little longer down the endless road.

  Damn near fifty.

  Over at the table I hit a couple of buttons on my computer and discover what my agent found so funny. Some joker has changed my Wikipedia page, all right, and he’s left me for dead. “Norm Macdonald (October 17, 1963–May 12, 2013) was a comedian and actor who was known from…” I read on and on till the final sentence. The death sentence. “Mr. Macdonald was found dead in an Edmonton hotel room from an overdose of morphine.”

  Well, that’s a sight to see, all right, with all the authority of the Internet behind it! I’m standing stock-still in the very same Edmonton hotel room where I’d died the night before. And then I start to laugh and I laugh to beat all get-out, just like my agent did, just because I’m alive and I can. Then a thought comes to me in a sudden, a thought that stops all my laughing, makes me real cold, and has me craving a couple of grains of morphine, or at least some whiskey. And the thought is this: The preposterous lie on the screen before me isn’t that far off. After all, the only thing this joker really did was change tenses, turned “does” to “did” and “is” to “was.” He got the date of my passing wrong, for sure, but nothing else. To misquote Twain, it turns out the rumor of my death is only slightly exaggerated.

  So now I start to read this thing on the computer again, only this time I read it the way I imagine a stranger will in a few years or a few decades. When it’s true. In the future, when I was Norm Macdonald. So this is my life, then, these words on this screen? Well, it doesn’t add up to much, just a series of facts, and I suppose that’s what a man’s life is, after all, but it’s more than that too. I mean, it has to be, doesn’t it? And so I decide I will write an account of my life my own self. My side of the story.

  Damn near fifty.

  The girl on the bed is beginning to stir now and I feel sorry for her, the same way I feel sorry for myself every time I have to wake up. I struggle to remember her name, but it’s no good. And as I look at her and wonder who we were last night, I come up with a title for my book. I’ll call it Based on a True Story, because it comes to me that there’s no way of telling a true story. I mean a really true one, because of memory. It’s just no good.

  It’s like when a guy is telling a story and he’s way off and you know he is because the whole story is about you. But he’s changing it all around, leaving out important parts and making up others from whole cloth, doing whatever he has to do to turn the dead stuff of life into something worth telling. And you’d correct him, but the thing is, you’re not sure you remember it a hundred percent accurately yourself. It turns out your memory isn’t the precise court stenographer you think it is, getting every word down just so. It’s more like the sketch artist way at the back of the courtroom who is doing his level best to capture images that no longer are.

  So it won’t be a true story. It’ll be based on a true story, like every story I’ve ever told. But I promise you this: It’ll be the truth, every word of it, to the best of my memory. And I won’t just scratch the surface either, no sirree, Bob. I’ll claw and tear into this showbiz career of mine and I’ll let the filth fly, like a mad dog digging up bones he buried deep and long ago. And I’ll name names. And I’ll drop bombshells. I bet they’ll pay good money for that kinda thing. For the straight dope on the Hollywood crowd, and the SNLers too. And I need money. I need money to live.

  Damn near fifty.

  I open the curtains and it’s raining outside. I catch an image of myself in the window, and the rain blurs my thin reflection as if I’m barely there at all. And I see there’s a bruise under my left eye and some dried blood. I look down at my hand, and the heel of my thumb is swollen purple and hurts like a bastard and that makes me happy. It means the girl on the bed was fought for and not bought.

  She’s full awake now, and she’s holding her head and squinting and I watch her as she sees me. I can tell she doesn’t remember anything either. Well, that’s okay. I’ll hear all about it later from the guy who runs the comedy club and I’ll sit and listen, transfixed, to the forgotten details of last night and shake my head, bewildered, feeling like a trespasser in my own life.

  I look at the girl squarely. “I’ll get us a bottle.”

  She has a pretty smile.

  1

  THE JOB INTERVIEW

  “Lorne will see you now.”

  He was always Lorne, never Mr. Michaels. He was smart that way. I took a seat across the desk from him, and there was a container of pencils that had been sharpened that very day and a bowl of fresh popcorn and plenty of Coca-Cola.

  “Swell office you got here, Lorne.”

  “Thank you, Norm. I understand you’re from Canada?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and I knew that even though we hailed from the same nation, we were worlds apart. He was a cosmopolite from Toronto, worldly, the kinda guy who’d be comfortable around the Queen of England herself. Me, I was a hick, born to the barren, rocky soil of the Ottawa Valley, where the richest man in town was the barber. Lorne was a bigshot and I was a smallfry, and that’s why I was planning on doing very little talking in this job interview.

  First let me say that Lorne is often portrayed as an intimidating man, and he is. In some ways he can’t help it. He is quietly confident, smart, funny, and he always carries a dagger. These four qualities combine to make for an intimidating man.

  He had beautiful assistants that the writers had derisively nicknamed “the Lornettes.” These girls secretly loved Lorne and also openly loved him. In another room, the writers sat around and did impressions of Lorne that didn’t sound anything like him. This is the way it is with all bigshots and all smallfrys everywhere, and it’s been like that since the get-go. The boss is always a big joke, just dumb and lucky, and nobody’s afraid of him at all and everybody has a good laugh at him. Until he walks into the room, that is. It’s a different story then.

  Lorne began the interview by telling stories, and I just listened and nodded and laughed when I was supposed to, the same way I did in every job interview I’d ever had. But this guy was different. First thing I noticed was that he was funny, really genuinely funny, and that is very rare for a bigshot. Especially a bigshot in comedy.

  He had all
these firsthand stories he was telling me about back in the day when he worked on shows in Toronto and then in Hollywood. And he smiled when he told the stories, the kind of smile a man gets when memory transports him to another place and another time. He had worked on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and a few Lily Tomlin specials. And there were famous celebrities in his stories, and all the stories were funny. And pretty soon my pretend laugh was turning into an honest-to-God real laugh, and I was choking on popcorn and coughing Coca-Cola.

  We were having a grand old time until suddenly Lorne got down to business. “So, Norm, let me tell you how the audition process works. We go down to the studio and you show us two characters.”

  I hadn’t expected this. I’d been told this meeting was a mere formality, that as long as I didn’t insult Lorne outright, the job was mine.

  I’d been misinformed.

  “Well, you see, Lorne, the thing is this. I’m a nightclub comic. Jokes, crowd work, that kinda thing. But I’m a hard worker and I catch on really fast. Besides, I understand I’ve been vouched for.” And I had been too. By Jim Downey, the head writer and second-in-command. By David Spade, the comic actor. Why, even by Adam Sandler himself!

  “Yes, I’ve heard good things. But the thing is, you’re a stand-up comedian. We are a variety show and I have to be sure you will be able to provide versatility. I don’t want to waste your time or mine.” I wasn’t sure he cared about wasting my time, since I’d been left in his waiting room for four hours, waiting and waiting. And waiting.