Norm Macdonald is incredibly lucky. But don't get him a donut with sprinkles.

Chances are you remember Norm Macdonald for his stint on Saturday Night Live and as host of Weekend Update. Maybe you've seen him in a movie or heard him on an episode of Howard Stern. Maybe you've seen him do stand-up at a theater in Omaha or a club in Calgary. He performs a lot, so chances are that you've seen him are pretty high.

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Macdonald just released his first book, Based on a True Story: A Memoir. It's hilarious and filled with turns of phrase and hidden beauty like only a collection of Norm Macdonald stories could be. ("Death is a funny thing," he writes. "Not funny haha, like a Woody Allen movie, but funny strange, like a Woody Allen marriage.") The stories are all true, mostly. Macdonald's book is based on his own memory, of course, and memory's a funny thing—almost as funny as this book is.

Reading it, you'll be treated to the greatest pre-show routine of all time, the greatest Wink Martindale joke of all time, an appearance from the Devil himself, The Moth Joke, an extremely sad eulogy for boy who may have wanted to kill a baby seal, a countdown of the greatest Weekend Update jokes of all time, irony-free, deadpan descriptions of Rodney Dangerfield and Don Rickles, a pitch perfect "apology" for all of his O.J. Simpson jokes, a deep sense of melancholy, a hilarious misunderstanding about auto-erotic asphyxiation ("A fancy name for a filthy thing"), and you'll learn the true inventor of the "note to self" gag. It's exactly the sort of book you'd expect from Norm Macdonald.

I spoke to Macdonald over the phone this week about his the new book, looking back at his career, and the current state of stand-up.

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ESQ: There's very clearly a Hunter Thompson influence in the book—driving to Vegas, the alcohol and drug abuse. But you're clean and sober now, right?

Macdonald: Oh, yes, yes, yes.

So how much was the idea behind this to parody the comedy or movie star or general celebrity memoir? Did you start with a more straight-forward memoir idea?

I wrote about four different drafts before I got to the final one. The reason I zeroed in on the Hunter S. Thompson device was simply...to move the story forward, I realized what a brilliant device that was in Fear and Loathing to actually drive a car. To actually move a car is a very cheap and easy way to move a story. But it was never meant to be a parody. I wanted to say things that are true, but I was afraid of having libel suits against me. So I thought if I blend real actual awful things that, along with obviously fanciful chapters, that they wouldn't be able to sue me. I could be like, "The Devil's in the book, how can you be serious?" It was a way to protect myself, but I also like writing silly things.

I wanted to say things that are true, but I was afraid of having libel suits against me.

Along those, lines, did you ever perform in a mental hospital?

Yeah, yeah. I had to change the ending. It was so weird, the Gatlin Brothers had been just there. [The patients] had all these nice perks. But anyway, I had to change the ending because you can't say certain words. So I walked out and the guy shouts "Nice shoes, F-word." Then the other guy goes, "Jerome's right, them some F-word-ass shoes." Which I thought was way funnier, so I had to cut that and make up an ending, and I got lazy and end it with the guy biting me in the leg. But yeah, I did that.

What did you read to prepare yourself to write this? I'm assuming you re-read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but what else inspired you?

I didn't re-read that. I was kind of afraid to re-read it, I was so afraid of lifting lines, but I was already so familiar with that book. But nothing else really. I've got no education, but I've read a lot of books. I wish I had education, because it would've helped a lot. I don't think you can write a great book or even a good book without an education. I think you need to learn technique.

I think you can learn technique on your own.

You think so?

Yeah. OK, so when you were writing this, did you have a tape recorder handy? I know you mention Frank Sebastiano with the "note to self" gag, but was that ever something you did?

No, no, that was Frank. All my life I've bought tape recorders and taped stuff and then never listened to them. Or stand-up sets on videotape, and I just never watched them. Finally, I just gave up. Sometimes I'd think of a line and try to crowbar it in but it just never really worked. You know, just turns of phrase, or really bad metaphors. That's kind of forced writing, I guess.

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From what I picked up reading the book, there seems to be a recurring theme of failure and missed opportunities, though doused with humor, that's a little undercut in one of the last chapters were you say you've been lucky, but has failure been a big motivator for you? I know it was for Michael Jordan.

That's the Ghostwriter character. But he's right, I do feel lucky. You can be a failure by the world's standards and still feel lucky. There are so many different ways of grading failure and success. When you hit a certain point of success, or even geographically, being in Hollywood, for instance, you're surrounded by so much incredible success that it's easy to feel like a failure. Even though you feel like an asshole trying to explain it. I've known a lot of people that have moved out of Hollywood, they just go to another town, and if they find a job they fly back into Hollywood and have fun and then they go back to where they live.

Especially stand-ups. Louis [C.K.] has no interest in Hollywood and he still sees standup as his primary goal. There's a small community of stand-ups who define themselves as stand-ups. I look at everything else as a lucky accident. People like Louis, and Brian Regan, and George Wallace, and myself—they're all more successful and highly rated than me.

I don't know about that necessarily.

You get pigeonholed, but that's OK because I pigeonhole people—everyone pigeonholes everyone. Like, once when I worked in an office, I got a donut with sprinkles, or some fucking thing, and this one guy was like, "Hey, that's the sprinkles on donut guy." That's who I was to him for the rest of the time I worked at that insurance company. "Are you going to get a sprinkle donut today?" I'm like, "No, what?" That's what we have to do to live.

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Where else has this happened to you?

Well, I got Weekend Update and lost Weekend Update, so that's the parenthetical that follows my name. But that's OK, I get to do stand-up for the rest of my life. People don't even know I do stand-up a lot of the time. They just think I'm an actor, and more and more actors are becoming stand-ups in their off times. The industry is falling apart, so comic actors going, "Well fuck it, I'll just go to a comedy club and learn how to do standup."

That's funny, I was just talking about that panel that Seinfeld, Louis, and Chris Rock did with Ricky Gervais, and Gervais says that he's never bombed and of course he hasn't—he's a huge star and has done stand-up like three times.

Did he say that?

Yeah.

I know that every comic hated that goddamn thing because the other three were actual stand-ups. And there's this one guy and you see his special and he's on about atheism and it's like, "Oh, god. How groundbreaking." But I certainly think he's funny, though..The Office is amazing.

It's incredible, yeah. So, I definitely read this book in your voice, it's unmistakably you.

[Laughs] Well that's good.

The other idea I had would be a primer on how to become a stand-up without being funny. I've seen it done 10,000 times, you know.

My question is, why now? Why didn't you write a book earlier, and are you going to write any more?

I had one idea: Norm and Adam Eget [the manager of the L.A.'s The Comedy Store and co-host of Norm's video podcast] Go To Mars. There's this one-way trip to Mars you can buy. Then I'd do a real memoir about before I got into show business with actually interesting stories that wouldn't be made up.

The other idea I had would be a primer on how to become a stand-up without being funny. I've seen it done 10,000 times, you know. I remember Robert Klein once said, "When I started there were only 100 comics and 10 of them were funny. Now there's 10,000 comics and only 10 funny ones." [That book idea] doesn't follow supply and demand. I've seen so many stand-ups where I'm in the back of the club watching and just astonished that it's working. It's not funny in any manner. So as a little exercise I've taken to just scribbling down what works, what makes people laugh. But it'd be a serious book. If you don't want to work in a cubicle and you want to have a job going around the country and drinking beer and stuff, I would tell people exactly how to do it. The problem then is it would work and then…

You're out of a job.

[Laughs) Right. I'd be priced out of the market. That's what happened with the last comedy boom. Bookers were like, "Fuck it, we don't need to get good stand-ups. The shit guys do just as well and we don't have to pay them anything. Why don't we get these local bad comics. Why on Earth would we hire a seasoned good one when they get equally big laughs."

In the book, you write about attempting to hire a hitman to kill Dave Attell so you can be with Sarah Silverman. Did Attell and Silverman ever forgive you?

[Laughs] I don't even know if I'm supposed to say they were a couple or not. I don't think they'd care. But they were wonderful together, I know they were very much in love at one point. It's kind of funny how their paths went. Attell's a guy always on the road. I've never seen anyone—none of us are on the road as much as Dave Attell. Not even close.

Dave can write jokes like no other. When he was on SNL he would just sit in his office and write so many goddamn jokes. He'd write a sketch and it'd be funny, but it would just be jokes. It'd never work—it'd just be a string of jokes. The sketch made no sense because it was just jokes. "You can't even space them out a little bit?" It's just machine-gun fire. I saw his last special, and I'm getting some late-onset OCD, I think, because I count everything now, but I watched his special and I think in the hour he had 140 jokes. An incredible amount of jokes.

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Along those lines, who, alive or dead, are the stand-ups that you look up to?

I look up to Louis a great deal. Brian Regan is my favorite comic because he makes me laugh the hardest. I like David Spade's comedy a lot. And, a lot of people don't even know he's a stand-up, but Kevin Nealon. He's so underplayed, and he reminds me a lot of Steve Martin. The jokes come from the perspective of a complete idiot.

OK, let's get into it—who don't you like?

There's new trend toward confessional comedy, and I don't think it's because I'm old. I just don't like it because in any art, the key is concealing, it's not revealing. These confessionals, this idea to just say anything that's true because it's true—that doesn't make me laugh. If the premise is you blew a priest when you were a kid, the punchline ain't gonna make me laugh.

Were there other stories from your rise that were cut for one reason or another?

Yeah, you have to cut stuff out when they bump up against each other. Or they're not absolutely necessary. The thing about it being a damned biography is you have exclude people that've helped you. I really hated doing that, it really bothered me. If anyone's ever helped me with my career, I've always done whatever it is they wanted. Dennis Miller was the first guy to get me a job, so anything Dennis Miller wants me to do, I'll do. Anything Adam Sandler wants. If it had just been a complete work of fiction, I would've had more latitude.

My biggest regret is people reading the book going, "Hey, what the fuck am I not in this book for? I gave him this and I did this for him." But there's no comic form to put them in unfortunately. But they'll all be on my Facebook page. Like on the Oscars—"Anybody I forgot is on my Facebook page." That's a great solace. These billions of people watching won't hear it, but you can go to my Facebook page.

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