Shane Gillis gets a little choked up when he watches old clips of Norm Macdonald. He once told Bert Kreischer about the time his girlfriend caught him crying while he was watching a tape of Macdonald’s emotional final appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman.
“She was in the other room and just heard me,” Gillis confessed, recreating his sniffles while wiping away the tears. “She came out, and I was like, ‘Fine, I’m fine.’ Yeah, Norm got me.”
Lots of comedians have affection for Macdonald, but he holds a special place in Gillis’ heart for sticking up for him during a rough patch. “He reached out when I was getting canceled. A lot,” Gillis told Kreischer. “And he said some really cool things.”
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Macdonald would know something about getting fired from Saturday Night Live for making jokes that people don’t approve of. “They said, ‘Ohlmeyer wants you out,’” he remembered in SNL oral history, Live From New York. “I still didn’t think it would happen in the middle of the season. And no one would come right out and say it.”
Lorne Michaels, notorious for avoiding face-to-face confrontations, wasn’t talking. So Macdonald asked around the office. “I had to do ‘Update’ that Saturday, so I’m like, ‘Am I doing it or not?’ And they’re like, ‘Uh, we don’t think you are.’”
Macdonald was out, and his constant punchlines about NBC exec Don Ohlmeyer’s pal, O.J. Simpson, were the reason. “We just couldn’t believe it,” said writer Tim Herlihy. “There was a real sense of disbelief.”
“It was really all about O.J.,” said Michaels, who reportedly fought to retain both Macdonald and Gillis — and lost. He’d bring both men back to host SNL, leading the show that deemed them too controversial to employ.
Macdonald’s support of Gillis wasn’t just in private messages. “You see when Norm Macdonald went after SNL?” asked Joe Rogan on a 2021 episode of his podcast. He pointed to Macdonald posting a Gillis clip on his social media soon after Gillis was canned, with a caption that read something like, “This is better than anything SNL has done.”
“He put this up,” marveled Rogan. “‘You fucking idiots, you lost this guy.’”
Both Gillis and Kreischer mourned Macdonald in their own ways. Kreischer recalls receiving criticism on social media for not posting a tribute to Macdonald after the comedian’s death in 2021. “So now you tell me that the mob gets to tell me how to grieve?”
“I just posted one of his jokes,” Gillis said. “But I didn’t want to post like, ‘I loved you’ or something like that because who the fuck am I?”
Kreischer never posted a tribute, but “wrote like nine different things and this is when I cried. I’m in the house, I’m drinking a bottle of wine and I started crying. Because he was just was so cool to me.”