Norm Macdonald Refused to Do One Thing to Save His Job on ‘SNL’, and It Had Nothing to Do with O.J.

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

Comedy legend has it that Norm Macdonald lost his gig as Saturday Night Live’s most acerbic Weekend Update anchor because he refused to stop joking about O.J. Simpson. But that’s not exactly true. Macdonald’s partner-in-crime, longtime SNL writer Jim Downey, tells a more nuanced version of the story. 

NBC honchos were indeed angry about the relentless O.J. jokes but blamed Downey for their endless repetition. Their solution: Get rid of the writer. “The network went to Norm and said, ‘We want to get rid of Jim Downey,’” said Downey himself on an episode of Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend. The network wanted Macdonald to know that it was giving Downey the ax and ensure that he was cool with the decision. 

Macdonald was anything but: “No. You can’t fire him. If you fire him, I quit.”

That’s crazy, responded the network. Downey isn’t helping you. The segments are too mean. 

None of that mattered to Macdonald, explained Downey. “He said, ‘Well no, I’m not doing it without him.’”

And he didn’t. Both men lost their jobs even though NBC would have been happy with simply firing Downey. The crazy thing? Macdonald never told Downey how he’d stood up for him: “I didn’t hear that for years. I heard it from some network executives,” Downey said. “If that had been me, you bet Norm would have heard about it.”

Macdonald “just didn’t want it to ever be about anything but being funny,” Downey said. “He didn’t want to be brave or fighting a good fight. He didn’t want to do heartwarming stuff. He just wanted to be funny.”

Looking back, Downey believes leaving on top cemented Macdonald’s legacy. “Norm I know took it much harder than I did,” Downey explained. “I sort of looked at it philosophically. You know what it’s like? You know the A.E. Housman poem, To An Athlete Dying Young? You know, “Before fame outran the man” kind of thing? Maybe I have that backwards.”

The actual passage from Housman’s poem goes like this:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man

Downey’s point: It’s better to get out on top. “We were yanked off,” he concluded. “Maybe that’s better than risking that (phenomenon) where you peak and then it’s downhill. We didn’t get that. We weren’t put in that position of having to make that decision. It was made for us.”