For a few days this week, Norm Macdonald was the Worst Person Alive on certain corners of the internet. We’ll get to that. Right now, we have to talk about Wayne and Shuster.

The veteran standup comedian now has a show on Netflix, titled, well, Norm Macdonald has a Show. Its 10 half-hour episodes find the affable Canadian — still known best to many for his years on Saturday Night Live — in veering conversations with Drew Barrymore, David Spade, David Letterman, Jane Fonda, Chevy Chase, M. Night Shyamalan, Michael Keaton, Lorne Michaels, Judge Judy and country-music veteran Billy Joe Shaver.

If that list seems to have a dash of the eccentric, it’s nothing compared to the end of each episode, in which Macdonald and his sidekick/abuse object Adam Eget move out from behind the desk and sing the song performed at the conclusion of each program from Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster on CBC in the 1970s, ending: “Adieu mon vieux. À la prochaine. Goodbye ’til when we meet again.”

Netflix is a service with massive global ambitions that nevertheless gave the thumbs-up to a recurring reference that will only resonate with people over 45 raised in Canada — and won’t necessarily delight all of them. But to hear Macdonald tell it, the people vetting the show loved it, once he’d showed them the original on YouTube.

“That’s such a f--king great song and it’s so cool and sweet at the same time,” Macdonald, 58, told the Star this week in a phone interview. “And the guy I really wanted to be a guest of the show is Lorne Michaels. And so I thought it would be fun at the end of the show for him to hear that — you know, because he was married to Rosie Shuster (an original SNL writer and Frank’s daughter) who grew up on the Wayne & Shuster show.”

Perhaps it’s his fondness for funny people who have managed to climb the ladder in show business that explains the comments he made to the Hollywood Reporter this week — which were published soon after our phone conversation with him.

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He said that after Roseanne Barr’s career self-destruction this year, he got the likewise disgraced comic Louis C.K. to call her to commiserate, adding, “There are very few people that have gone through what they have, losing everything in a day. Of course, people will go, ‘What about the victims?’ But you know what? The victims didn’t have to go through that.”

Within an hour he was being denounced, within a few hours more he was apologizing on Twitter, and his scheduled appearance on Tuesday’s Tonight Show was abruptly cancelled. The next day he went on The Howard Stern Show to further apologize, but dug himself an even deeper hole with an ill-advised remark about people with Down Syndrome. By Thursday he had to apologize for his apology, in an awkward appearance on The View.

Time will tell whether the Quebec City native is lastingly damned. What we’re left with right now is the Netflix show, an exceedingly minimalist creation (scarcely more impressive visually than the sporadic YouTube series that preceded it) focused strictly on people he wants to talk to and whatever they have to say.

It’s a talk show without most of the trappings — no house band, no monologue, no sketches, no audience besides the crew, and almost no mention of the uninvited co-star of every other American chat show in 2018: Donald Trump.

“I really wanted it — and I think that’s why Netflix liked it — to be not time-stamped. We don’t do any political jokes on the show — nothing. For a couple of reasons: one, I’m so fatigued by Trump. For someone who isn’t political, it’s just every conversation and it’s really tough. I want a respite from that and it’s nowhere.”

In place of all of that, there are jokes on the fly (and pre-written jokes, often corny, circulated around the desk at the end), and more organic conversations touching on faith (with Fonda), drugs (Barrymore) and whatever laughs Macdonald discovers along the way, including doing what other show hosts are loath to do: outclass the guest.

Macdonald, not a natural interviewer by his own account, says Letterman came to him with the idea for the show, and told him, “I wouldn’t give this advice to anyone else, but with you, just make it a conversation and see where it goes … if the guest thinks of something funny and it’s not as funny as what you thought, then you say your thing.”

His thing isn’t just not about Trump — it’s not much about the current era at all. There’s no talk of Kanye West or Cardi B but, instead, references to ’50s heartthrob Troy Donahue, Jaws co-star Robert Shaw, and a 40-year-old Wesson Oil commercial.

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“Unfortunately,” he explains, “I stopped consuming mass entertainment 20 years ago. I decided to rewatch everything another time.”

He can’t avoid modernity entirely. Asked if his colleague Louis C.K. might be a welcome guest on a theoretical season two, he’s a rather firm no.

“I think Louis is the funniest guy there is but we’d have to deal with it in a serious way. And that’s not what the show is about.”

After that conversation with the Star, the online fury erupted and that season two is looking a bit less certain. It might help that Netflix head Ted Sarandos has, Macdonald says, become a personal friend. Or it might not: Sarandos “said ‘you’re my favourite comedian,’ and I said ‘Oh my God, can I have 20 million dollars for a standup special?’ And that’s not how it works. Turns out he’s also a businessman.”

Still, Macdonald — who years ago told the Star that doing standup was “all I’m interested in or good at” — figures this perch is a decent approximation of his touring act.

“I have seven or eight hours of material, so I can kinda just go on stage and talk to the audience and trust that I’ll have something to say,” he says. “This is the closest thing to standup comedy that there is on television. I cannot act. I don’t have to do anything that I’m terrible at. I can just talk.”

Garnet Fraser is a deputy entertainment editor and a contributor to the Star’s Entertainment section. He is based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @garnetfraser

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