While some comedians might be swayed not to tell a joke because it’s offensive or it’s unnecessarily mean or it deals with the deaths of millions of people, the late Norm Macdonald only cared if a joke was funny, poor taste be damned.
Here are 11 such bits that take the darkest of topics and turn them into something you can’t help but laugh at…
There are countless very dark jokes Macdonald told about Simpson during his run as the anchor of Weekend Update, but maybe the best was the one about O.J.’s “Lucky Stabbin’ Hat.”
The ESPYs must have known Macdonald was going to bring up O.J., right?
While Macdonald was famous for telling jokes about O.J., another frequent target was Michael Jackson’s sexual preferences.
Macdonald’s idea of a funny running joke was repeatedly calling his Jewish sidekick a Holocaust denier in front of celebrities.
9/11 wasn’t too risqué for Macdonald to talk about either, like this joke about “9/11 Airlines” from Norm Macdonald Live.
Much of this Conan appearance was dedicated to purposefully corny jokes about Macdonald’s fictional battle-axe of a wife, but eventually he gets to a tremendously tasteless joke about a woman in a coma.
Macdonald’s winding tale about Conan’s sidekick, the Swedish-German, is a story for the ages.
When Conan was just days away from his final appearance as host of The Tonight Show, Macdonald came on to give him a gift basket that he meant to give him seven months earlier, when O’Brien began hosting.
The best part about this hilarious bit, which was just days after the death of Steve Irwin, is Jon Stewart’s helpless pleading for Macdonald to stop telling it.
While many say they don’t understand how someone could take their own life, Macdonald dedicated a whole bit to taking the exact opposite position by highlighting the misery of the human experience.