Norm Macdonald Was Hired by Dennis Miller After Writing ‘The Greatest Joke Ever’

Since nobody’s making a Tales From the Crypt: Bordello of Blood legacy sequel any time soon, Dennis Miller was free to chat with his pals David Spade and Dana Carvey on the most recent episode of their Fly on the Wall podcast. 

The former Saturday Night Live cast members touched on topics ranging from Spade’s pitch for a Joe Dirt cartoon, SNL’s joke swap and Miller’s hair plugs. Side note: Tolstoy’s War and Peace is available to listen to for free on the same devices that people use for podcasts. 

Miller did offer up one particularly interesting anecdote involving an entirely different former Weekend Update anchor: Norm Macdonald. 

Before Macdonald joined SNL, and even before he worked for Roseanne, the young comedian was hired to write for The Dennis Miller Show, and his application process was highly unorthodox and extremely concise. “I heard there was a new kid in L.A. from Canada,” Miller explained. “Eddie Feldman, my writer, said, ‘There’s a guy here, he’s great. I saw him, his name’s Norm Macdonald.’” 

Feldman went on to recount one of Macdonald’s bits that he’d seen him perform at the Improv, involving an unhoused man’s confused dog. Macdonald would later do the same routine while playing himself on The Larry Sanders.

Miller was so impressed that he straight-up offered Macdonald a job. “So I get on the horn with Norm,” Miler recalled, “and I say, ‘Hey, I know you’re just here, and I’m just saying if you wanna stopgap writing job, I’ve got this talk show.”

While Miller had already made up his mind about Macdonald, he still had to go through the proper procedures. “I said, ‘I’d hire you right now. But just the protocols dictate you send in some sort of a batch of jokes or something.’ And Norm said, ‘I don’t do batches, but I’ll send in one joke and you guys can make a determination.’”

So Macdonald sent just one joke into the offices of The Dennis Miller Show. “The joke is, he reads the AP wire story of Jeffrey Dahmer’s trial, and it’s so grotesque and detailed, you know, the actual transcript about disembowelment… And he reads the whole thing. And then he says at the end, Dahmer defended himself by saying, ‘He started it.’”

Macdonald, incidentally, claimed that the punchline was really “they started it.”

While the joke may have come off as cool and effortlessly hilarious to Miller at the time, during an interview with The New York Times in 2018, Macdonald revealed that he worked hard on that joke. He ended up buying a copy of USA Today and going through it “article by article” in an effort to write a “topical” joke that would fit Millers’ show. 

“It’s like the greatest joke ever, so we hired him,” Miller noted, adding, “I always thought he was a genius.” 

Dahmer, on the other hand, was just a real jerk.