Norm Macdonald Thought Alec Baldwin’s Trump Impression Was Terrible Comedy

If you asked Norm Macdonald, as CTV Question Period did in 2018, an old castmate did a much better Donald Trump impression than stunt-cast star Alec Baldwin. In fact, Macdonald didn’t find Baldwin’s version funny at all.

“When I was there, Darrell Hammond did Donald Trump. And that shows how far back Trump goes because that was 20 years ago,” Macdonald said. “Darrell did it then — it was a softer Trump, you know. I think it was a lot closer to his real self.”

Here’s the problem, according to Macdonald. “If you do an impression of someone, you have to like that person because you’re playing the person and people like themselves,” he theorized. “So you can’t play someone and have contempt for them at the same time. It doesn’t work as an impression.”

Macdonald clarified that his take was about comedy, not politics. “I have no political affiliation,” he maintained. “I just mean from a comedy level.”

“Where is the funny in Donald Trump?” CBC’s Joyce Napier wondered. “He does think he’s funny, right?”

Well, other people think he’s funny too, said Macdonald, confessing that he attended one of Trump’s big rallies because he wanted to see for himself what the fuss was all about. “He's enormously funny and entertaining.”

While Macdonald claimed he had no political affiliation, he found Republicans to be funnier than Democrats, at least on the national stage. “You need to be humble to be really funny,” he said. “I think that's why Ronald Reagan was the funniest president that I ever saw. He always had this humility to him.”

Not so with Barack Obama. “I was kind of lost,” Macdonald said. “People told me he was funny, but to me, he was too self-aware.”

Napier pushed back on humility being a key to comedy, at least when it came to Trump. Macdonald wasn’t claiming Trump was humble, was he?

“No, there’s no humility to Donald Trump,” he said. “Donald Trump is more funny in the way that a WWE wrestler is, so he is a different kind of funny which is sort of a self-delusion.”

Stand-up comics and politicians can both be victims of that self-delusion. “I’ve seen this happen with comedians too,” Macdonald said. “You start thinking you’re good because the people that come to see you all like you. But the reason they came to see you is because they like you. So politicians and comedians both make that mistake of thinking they’re much better than they are because they’re never criticized by the people that don’t like them.”