Top 206 Quotes & Sayings by Norm MacDonald - Page 4

I've always been very averse to innuendo, especially sexual. I find it cowardly or something.

[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.

I'm not original, but I strive toward it as much as possible. I tried really hard on Weekend Update to do something that I considered original, which was, I tried to cut all cleverness out of the joke.

Few criminals die sensible of their crimes.

It is better to be idle than employed in ill.

I hate fame. I hate being recognized, because I don't know how to talk to people.

The promises we break are usually such as we are most forward in making.

I've seen people in theaters, and it just doesn't work, because you're talking to the guy next to you the whole time.

A man's enemies are those he should endeavor first to make his friends.

Richard Pryor is my favorite stand-up ever.

Louis [C.K.] is great. But I don't know how many you could do.

When I started in Canada, I just did stand-up.

There's no show business in Canada, so everybody just did stand-up and we all thought, "Oh, we'll just keep doing stand-up." And then I'm like, "There's more work in the States."

[sam] Kinison, when he started out, he'd come to Canada when I was first starting, and he'd always [bomb].

There's that saying, "I don't know art, but I know what I like." The inverse is kind of true. I know art, but I don't know what I like. You get so immersed in it that nothing appeals to you.

On Update, the only real original thing was trying to take away the cleverness of the punchline and make it as blunt as possible.

Jealousy seldom punishes with the severity it suffers.

I've been in theaters. Like Brian Regan, who I love - loved him so much more when he did the Improvs. And then in a big theater - nobody's that good.

We would seldom be deceived by flattery, did our own conceit not promote the delusion.

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.

Our passions may be compared to certain slaves--the more severity we show them, the better they obey us.

I don't have to meet actors. I'm really blessed that I don't have to do all that horseshit.

You're used to a TV show, and TV is just made for TV shows. It's not made for live events.So anyways, I was resistant to it, but I did it anyway.

I tried to make the punchline as close to the setup as I could. And I thought that was the perfect thing. If I could make the setup and the punchline identical to each other, I would create a different kind of joke.

If you watch that show and you didn't know it was called Seinfeld, you'd think it was called 'The George Costanza Show'.

We are often less grieved at disappointments than at ourselves for having said much concerning the certainty of our expectations.