Twenty-Five Years Ago, Norm Macdonald Returned to ‘SNL’ and Ripped NBC A New One

Long before Lorne Michaels decided Shane Gillis was too toxic to join SNL’s cast but the perfect dude to headline his show, NBC had the bright idea to fire Norm Macdonald for crimes against O.J. Simpson before immediately bringing him back as a host. 

This week marks the 25th anniversary of Macdonald’s bitterly caustic return to SNL, just months after NBC’s Don Ohlmeyer — coincidentally, a good pal of Simpson’s — gave him the boot. Michaels wouldn’t fire Macdonald himself, either because he was (famously) a conflict avoider, because he disagreed with Ohlmeyer’s decision or both. That left Macdonald to call Ohlmeyer personally to learn whether or not he still had a job. He didn’t, with Ohlmeyer blaming the move on a subpar Update: “It’s just not as funny as it should be.”

The fan backlash was immediate. It didn’t help that Colin Quinn, by his own admission, wasn’t great as Macdonald’s replacement. “I loved my first two and a half years (on SNL),” Quinn told Howard Stern. But “doing the Update thing was just ugly.” Maybe that’s why Michaels tried to patch things up by immediately bringing Macdonald back to host in October 1999. 

Macdonald being Macdonald, he wasn’t simply going to return to 30 Rock and pretend that nothing had happened. If NBC wanted to make nice, Macdonald would address the pink-slip elephant in the room. Not surprisingly, Saturday Night Live has omitted Macdonald’s monologue from its official YouTube page (nearly all host monologues are included there), but the damning jokes aren’t hard to find.

“When the people here asked me to do the show, I’ve got to say, I felt kind of weird,” Macdonald began his monologue. “I don’t know if you remember this, but I used to actually be on this show. I used to do the Weekend Update news routine, you remember that? That’s where I did the make-believe news jokes. That was me, you know? So then, a year and a half ago, I had sort of a disagreement with the management at the NBC. I wanted to keep my job. Right? And they felt the exact opposite. They fired me because they said that I wasn’t funny. Now, with most jobs, I could have had a hell of a lawsuit on my hands for that, but see, this is a comedy show. So, they got me.”

What changed in the intervening months to earn Macdonald an invitation to return, other than a slew of bad publicity? Macdonald shined a harsh spotlight on NBC’s hypocrisy. 

“How did I go in a year and a half from being not funny enough to be even allowed in the building to being so funny that I’m now hosting the show? How did I suddenly get so goddamn funny?! It was inexplicable to me, because, let’s face it, a year and a half is not enough time for a dude to learn how to be funny! Then it occurred to me: I haven’t gotten funnier, the show has gotten really bad!”

I can’t remember any other monologue in which the host talked about how much Saturday Night Live sucked. But NBC and SNL were no longer the hands that fed him, and Macdonald had no problem biting back. 

“Okay, so let’s recap. The bad news is: I’m still not funny,” he concluded. “The good news is: The show blows! All right, folks, we got a bad show for you tonight!”