Norm MacDonald Laughing Quotations

Comedy is surprises, so if you're intending to make somebody laugh and they don't laugh, that's funny.

There are these showcase clubs where 14 guys will go on in a row and people are laughing at everything, and I'm like - 'I can't laugh that much. That's so weird to me.'

I completely understand why a businessman would fire me from [Saturday Night Live]. Because he was seeing Jay Leno kill 10 minutes a night, doing his monologue with wall-to-wall laughs and applause, then I do 10 minutes a week to, sometimes, breathtaking silence. He's just listening for the laughs.

[Televised stand-up] never really makes me laugh. The only one I ever saw that I liked was Richard Pryor, and that was [shot on] film.

The only two TV shows I saw do that, where they don't warm them up and you can really bomb, was Saturday Night Live - and that's why it gets a lot of heat, too. Obviously it gets criticism fairly, too. But a lot of it is because Lorne [Michaels] lets the audience decide and doesn't force them to laugh.