Based on a True Story Read online

  “Well, things have changed since then, Adam Eget.”

  He looks at me steady. “Yes, things have changed. I’ve fallen in love and now I’m afraid of where we’re going and what we’re doing. Please, Norm, I’ve done everything you asked.”

  “I remember another time you were afraid for your life,” I say, “and you were right to be afraid, but you are alive today because I saved you. Don’t you remember the Night of the Gypsy? Perhaps it’s been too many years. Perhaps you’ve forgotten.”

  “I remember, Norm, but I can’t keep paying for that the rest of my life. What happens after all this is over?”

  “Well, Adam Eget, then we will be all square, you and I. You will be a free man.”

  Adam Eget smiles.

  “All you have to do until then is survive.” His smile vanishes, and the Challenger resumes its journey as we move fast toward the Salton Sea.

  28

  WEEKEND UPDATE

  “Hey, Norm, how’d you get Weekend Update?” I’m out of cigarettes so I pour a few grains of liquid morphine into a glass pipe. I use a torch lighter that sends an obelisk of hard blue fire to attack the glass and make the morphine sizzle and spit like bacon grease. My mind begins a crazy dance.

  “Well, let me think, Adam Eget. Let me think.”

  —

  There was only a week until my second season on SNL began. I was out of prison and had my immortal soul intact. Sarah had just announced she would be leaving the show. She said she could no longer live in New York, that she was being tormented day and night by some obsessive stalker. This caught me completely by surprise, as I had taken to hanging around Sarah’s apartment, hiding in the bushes day and night, watching her come and go, and I had never seen any signs of a stalker. But she was gone now, and I had to turn my attention to my future at SNL. The problem was, Lorne still had no idea what to do with me. The two of us had been partying pretty heavy for three days straight down at the Chelsea hotel, but we had been discussing a serious matter as well: What would my role on SNL be next season?

  “You can’t write,” said Lorne. “You can’t act or do characters. I simply don’t know how we can use you.” There was a lot of truth in what Lorne said, but it still hurt. I knew I could write, because I had been doing stand-up for years and had plenty of surefire bits that would make for dynamite sketches. And I knew I could appear in those sketches, because I’d performed those stand-up bits thousands of times, to wildly mixed reactions. I told Lorne as much.

  He looked at me long and his eyes were tranquil and pale. “Norm, the thing is, you’re not really suited for the show. You’re more suited to touring the country, playing smaller and smaller clubs until you finally fizzle into oblivion and are given an unattended pauper’s funeral,” he said. There was a lot of truth in what Lorne said, but it still hurt.

  Suddenly I saw a lightbulb go on over Lorne’s head and his eyes brightened and I could tell he had an idea. But no such luck. It was just that Goddamned bare lightbulb that hung from the ceiling and kept going off and on all day.

  Finally, as usual in creative matters, it was the drugs that thought up the idea. After Lorne had injected himself with a near-fatal dose of the opioid, his eyes rolled back in his head, then returned to where a fellow’s eyes usually rest. “Let me ask you a question, Norm, and I want you to be completely honest with me.”

  “Of course I’ll be honest, Lorne.” Fat chance.

  “If we let you sit down on a chair behind a desk and we stick giant cue cards two feet in front of your face, do you think you could read what is on those cue cards?”

  “Of course, Lorne,” I said, “and I won’t let you down. I just have one question: Do I get to have a gun?”

  I always asked this question every time someone had a plan for me, just in case they said yes. Like everyone else, Lorne said no.

  “Let’s celebrate by throwing the TV out the window,” I suggested, but now Lorne looked concerned.

  “I just remembered, Al Franken wants the Update spot, and he’s been lobbying pretty hard for it. The truth is, he’s much more qualified than you. He’s been on the show since its inception, and there’s nothing concerning politics or satire that Al is not on intimate terms with, whereas you’re an illiterate nightclub comic.” There was a lot of truth in what Lorne said, but it was really starting to get on my nerves.

  “Look, Lorne, what if I was to tell you that if Al Franken were to step aside and allow me to host Update, I could make him a United States senator?”

  “How could you possibly make that happen, Norm?”

  “I know people.”

  I was telling the truth, but only technically. I did know people—more than two dozen, in fact—but none who could help make a civilian into a senator. It was a huge bluff, but Lorne bought it.

  In an interesting sidebar, Al Franken, buoyed by the idea that the fix was in for him, ran for office in 2009 and became the junior senator representing Minnesota. He has not been heard from since.

  “Hey, Lorne, I was thinking the best writer at SNL, Jim Downey, could be head writer of Update,” I said as I tossed a double shot of morphine at his feet. “What do you say?”

  Jim Downey was the best writer at SNL. He’d been there since the beginning and only left for a short spell to work on Late Night with David Letterman. He had helped usher into being two of the best and most original comedy shows of his generation. Not bad for a guy with a grade-one education. I knew that Downey’s platinum writing credentials combined with my ability to read words off giant cue cards that the producers would place two feet in front of my face would be a potent mix.

  “Well, the thing is, Norm, you are absolutely correct,” said Lorne. “Jim is nonpareil.”

  Then he just looked at me. A long time passed—maybe forty-five minutes—until I finally said, “All right, all right. What’s that word mean?”

  “It means he is without parallel. He is the best writer we have. We use him to write all the political sketches.”

  “I have a better idea,” I said. “He’ll work for me. That way the jokes will all be surefire and I’ll just have to read them.”

  “Sorry, Norm, Jim will write the political sketches. He’s much too valuable to only be working on Update. When it comes to this show, Norm, you’ll find I don’t compromise. SNL always comes first.”

  “I’ll give you three times as much morphine.”

  Lorne picked up his phone and dialed. “Jim, you’re on Update from now on.”

  Thank God for Lorne Michaels and his hopeless addiction to liquid morphine.

  29

  THE UPDATE TEAM

  The next person I got on the Weekend Update team was Lori Jo Hoekstra, whose talent was being wasted as a writers’ assistant. She was always the funniest girl in the room and could keep up with the big boys, even Sandler, who loved her. Her taste in comedy was nonpareil, and I convinced her to be the producer of the segment.

  I loved Ian Maxtone-Graham and wanted him exclusively on Update, but he was too important to the show and would have to split his time between my work and the sketches. He served as a consultant along with Steve Lookner, who always submitted highly eccentric jokes.

  From the outset, Lorne let me know that I could make Update into anything I wanted it to be but that I would always have to deliver the jokes completely unarmed.

  Lori Jo, Downey, and I discussed it. Before me, the Weekend Update staff had always been made up of just the host and one writer. But that was because the host would write jokes every week. I had a completely different style. I would write roughly one to two jokes every two years and spend most of my time practicing reading giant cue cards two feet in front of my face.

  Lori Jo then suggested we hire outside writers so that Weekend Update would have a completely different flavor from the rest of SNL. She suggested Ross Abrash, a veteran comedy scribe who was the best in the business and the man who taught me what the word “scribe” means, and Frank Sebastiano, a UPS driver
just like that fat guy on TV with the bitchy wife. Frank had been sending in two hundred jokes a week on brown paper bags, just trying to land a job. The jokes were so good that we hired him. The team was in place.

  I’ll never forget our first meeting. Jim Downey explained that Sandler had successfully remade SNL with his rockstar persona. He thought we should follow Sandler’s lead and develop Weekend Update with a punk sensibility and cited the Clash as our muse. Everyone in the room agreed with Jim. Everyone but me.

  “Listen here, Jim, one of the most important qualities for a performer to have is the ability to know his own limitations. I’ve never been a good singer. I’m the guy in front of the camera, and I’m gonna have to nix that one.”

  Jim explained that he meant the show should echo the ethos of punk rock, where everything but the essence of the music was stripped away. It really had nothing to do with singing. But I put my foot down and addressed the whole room. “I got two words for all of you, and if you want to keep your jobs you’ll listen. NO SINGING!”

  Jim just sighed, but I knew I’d been heard. Never once in my three years as Update anchor was a singing joke submitted.

  Lori Jo agreed with Jim that the jokes should be stripped of any cleverness, play on words, or innuendo. Jokes should never elicit applause, Lori Jo insisted. A joke should catch people by surprise; it should never pander. Applause is voluntary, but laughter is involuntary. Lori Jo was sure smart and the whole room agreed, and I pretended to. But my mind was far away, on a meeting I had set up for later that afternoon with Wally Feresten, the cue-card guy. No offense to our team, but I knew that Wally and I were the key players.

  Ian Maxtone-Graham spoke next. He said he loved the jokes that Frank Sebastiano was submitting, where the punchlines were preposterously blunt. I also loved those punchlines and said as much. The directness really made me laugh.

  Ross Abrash wrote short, to-the-point jokes. There was never an ounce of fat in a joke written by Ross. Frank thought of new ways to tell jokes. (“Don’t I know it!”; “Or so the Germans would have us believe”; “Note to self”; “Or as Ted Kennedy calls it…THURSDAY.”) Together, they are the most copied joke writers of their generation.

  “Exactly,” said Downey. “That’s what I was getting at when I said the segment should have a punk feel.”

  This time I smashed my hand down hard on the desk. “I SAID NO SINGING, GODDAMMIT!”

  Jim sighed again. He was starting to realize that his dream of putting me on set with an electric guitar, singing and spitting on the audience, was not going to fly, so he decided to give up.

  Steve Lookner had submitted an early joke. “Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts are getting divorced. Insiders say the trouble began because he was Lyle Lovett and she was Julia Roberts.”

  I sure loved that joke. I’d never heard a joke where the premise and the punchline were so close.

  “Exactly,” said Downey. “That’s what I was getting at when…” But I glowered at him and he cast his eyes down. If he wanted to listen to his Sex Pistols records, he could do it at home.

  But Downey felt he should warn me that the type of comedy we were writing wasn’t traditional, and I couldn’t expect to get wall-to-wall laughs. This was avant-garde stuff. I didn’t tell him at the time, but if not getting laughs was avant-garde, I’d been avant-garde week in and week out in stand-up clubs across the country.

  Jim told me I had to think up a line to introduce the segment every week. The two best anchors were Dennis Miller, who opened the segment with “I’m Dennis Miller and what can I tell you,” and Chevy Chase, who opened his with “I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not.”

  I suggested, “I’m Norm Macdonald and here’s a string of jokes.” The group initially seemed amused but ultimately hated it.

  I said, “I’m Norm Macdonald and this is the fake news.”

  No one liked this at all. The news was real, I was told. The newscast itself was fake, but all the news within the segment was real. I disagreed vehemently.

  “Are you telling me that the first parts of these jokes are things that really happened?”

  “Yes,” said Ross Abrash. “We always start with a real story from the news, not a fake one, and then we make up the last part, or the punchline, which is a comment on the first ‘real’ part, the setup.”

  “Well, I say you’re a liar. You just make up the first part and then it’s easy to think of a funny second part.”

  “No,” Ross insisted. “I can assure you every setup we do comes from the real news. So saying ‘This is the fake news’ makes no sense and it makes you look like an idiot.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree,” I said.

  “No,” said Ross. “I will not agree to disagree. I will only disagree.”

  I didn’t know that was allowed, so I looked around the room. “Well, we’ve heard from Ross. Is anyone here in this room willing to agree to disagree with me?”

  Not a single soul agreed to disagree with me. However, everyone was in solidarity when it came to simply and violently disagreeing with me.

  Long after I left the segment, the term “fake news” became the ordinary way to describe what was done on SNL as well as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. So who’s the idiot now?

  People often ask how many jokes I contributed to Weekend Update. The answer can be a whole bunch or one, depending on how you look at it. I pitched it during that first meeting. “David Hasselhoff is a major recording star in Germany, where his two shows, Baywatch and Knight Rider, are huge hits. Which all goes to prove my theory, Germans love David Hasselhoff.” No one laughed.

  Jim said, “You can do it, Norm, but non sequiturs have to be done often to have any chance to work.”

  “Okay, Professor,” I sneered, “what’s a non sequitur?”

  “It’s a joke that makes no sense. It’s structured like a joke but has no content.”

  Jim was really starting to get on my nerves. That was no non sequitur. It was a real joke.

  The meeting had held such promise, but it was turning bad quickly, and I sensed that two camps were forming: the camp I was in and the camp everyone else was in. I knew where I was needed. I quickly excused myself and went to meet with Wally Feresten to discuss the size of the cue cards.

  —

  The new incarnation of Weekend Update premiered in the fall of 1994 and was an instant hit. The New York Times hailed it “punk-rock comedy,” which is what I had been intending for them to notice from the beginning. Frank and Ross wrote all day, every day, on Update, and by week’s end they had generated maybe two thousand jokes. We’d cut it down to thirty for dress and to about a dozen for air. By that time the jokes would be bulletproof, exactly like one of those punk-rock songs.

  We also filled the time with features, of course, and it was so fun to have Sandler do his Hanukkah song or Farley do anything at all, really. Later, guys like Jim Breuer and Colin Quinn came along and were perfect for features because they came from stand-up and knew how to perform directly into camera. And I got to sit right beside them and watch, and, when the camera wasn’t on me, I could swig warm bourbon from a flask.

  I knew Weekend Update was becoming popular, because my influence at the show began to build. I was a natural at reading cue cards that were held two feet from my face. I noticed that my power on the show was directly related to the size of the cue cards. I kept demanding larger and larger cue cards, until mine were over four times as big as any other cast member’s. I even negotiated for Wally to get his own personal trainer, who would work with him during the week, since the weight of the giant cue cards was beginning to prove too much for him.

  We were having a great time at Weekend Update until the grumbling began. I had heard things, but I just chalked it up to general grumbling. But it was not. It was grumbling that was specific to Weekend Update and specific to me.

  But I never worried. Weekend Update was the funniest it had ever been, and when you are that funny, you
can be sure that you will not be fired.

  30

  TOP 25 WEEKEND UPDATE JOKES

  OF ALL TIME

  (in no particular order)

  1. The Post Office announced today that it is going to issue a stamp commemorating prostitution in the United States. It’s a ten-cent stamp, but if you want to lick it, it’s a quarter.

  —CHEVY CHASE

  2. At the White House this week, President Clinton officially came out against same-sex marriages. What’s more, the president said he’s not too crazy about opposite-sex marriages, either.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  3. A new FBI study shows that, for the first time, Americans are more likely to be killed by a stranger than by a loved one or acquaintance. Their advice? Introduce yourself to as many people as possible.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  4. The American Academy of Pediatrics has announced its list of unsafe baby products. Topping the list this year is the really, really, really, really, really high chair.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  5. Dr. Jack Kevorkian was responsible for another death this week. This time it was a fifty-eight-year-old woman. She’s the twenty-sixth of Dr. Kevorkian’s patients to die since 1990. When are people going to realize this man is not a good doctor?

  —NORM MACDONALD

  6. The richest girl in the world, billionaire Athina Onassis, celebrated her tenth birthday this week. What’s it like to be the richest girl in the world? Well, to give you some idea, at the party they had two cakes.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  7. A new hangover-free vodka is on the market. The ads claim that the eighty-proof vodka is so pure it’s virtually headache-free. But, before you run out and buy it, remember, it causes massive anal bleeding.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  8. Julia Roberts told reporters this week that her marriage to Lyle Lovett has been over for some time. The key moment, she said, came when she realized that she was Julia Roberts and that he was Lyle Lovett.