Shtick Like Norm 🎙️ (Remembering comedian Norm MacDonald)]

In case you missed it, we lost a great comedian this week in Norm MacDonald. Brian shares his thoughts on a very funny man.

Transcription

Shtick like Norm.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today it was announced that Norm MacDonald, comedian extraordinaire, famous for his time on Saturday Night Live, his television show Norm, many other accomplishments his movie Dirty Deeds.

I mean, he’s done a million things that he’s passed away from cancer at an early age, I believe he was 61. And it’s a funny thing with comedians, I don’t always feel as attached to comedians, as everybody else does necessarily, and entertainers in general, I don’t connect with all of them.

Norm was one of those that was interesting because he was somebody that I did connect with it early on in my partial career as a comedian and writer and comedic actor. I guess you could say that he was one of the early ones that I would watch on Saturday Night Live and paid very close attention to how the jokes were delivered.

He was a person also who studied the art and a lot of people refer to him as the comedian’s comedian. He wasn’t as wildly popular as a lot of the other people that he surrounded himself with. But most people who have a comedic tendency, have huge respect for Norm McDonald. Because of what he was able to accomplish.

I just wanted to point out one little thing that you can use in your business, especially in content marketing, one of the things was just one of the lessons that norm did on a regular basis. And you can see it in his work on Saturday Night Live.

So on Saturday Night Live, he played a lot of characters, he did a Burt Reynolds impression, the absurd impression really wasn’t Burt Reynolds. But for some reason, everyone went along with that.

But when you can create those type of characters that always has an effect, but the most famous thing he did was Weekend Update, which is the regular news program, a satire news program on Saturday Night Live that’s been on forever, and where they oftentimes will pull a piece of news out, and then make a little joke about it, or create an absurd piece of news and put that out there.

So he would do odd things that no other host of Weekend Update had ever done. One of the things that he would do is he would pick an absurd statement and he’d repeated every week, in a very odd way.

So one of the first ones he did was this con, he’d say, or so the Germans wishes to believe. And he saw he would say a piece of news that wasn’t funny at all. They turn in the camera would grab him from a different angle and say, or so the Germans wishes to believe. And he’d hold it.

Then there was odd laughter because people didn’t understand what it was. But when he repeated it over and over and over again, it became a joke unto itself, because it made absolutely no sense.

Like he said, himself, it’s a non sequitur. He had this non sequitur humor, meaning it was something that didn’t go anywhere. And it was funny because it didn’t go anywhere, because it had no reason for being there.

He would do this with little sayings. He said, he would say, you know, which proves my theory Germans love David Hasselhoff, and he’d say it in odd times. He bring it up every episode every week.

He used these terms, he get obsessed about one thing, like this was during the OJ Simpson trial, and so forth. And so he’d make a joke about OJ Simpson, being a killer on a regular basis, where he just drove it into the ground.

And this is early on when a lot of people were still given the benefit of doubt and everything. But he had just stuck to it.

He’d pick one thing, he’d stick to it with his own confidence. And you could tell them, and from what I’ve read about his time on the show, there were a lot of people that disagreed with the directions that he took on the show, and I think he probably partially got fired because of it.

But he would, he would stick on something. And it proved out in the end because he stuck to it.

If he would have stuck to it. If he wasn’t confident about it. It would never have flown, it would never have worked in the short run.

You see any of these video clips you go watch clips of this. Go find it on YouTube. You could find clips where originally it doesn’t happen. People don’t laugh. It’s a live show.

So you got to get the people to laugh and even if the applause signs on, they aren’t necessarily laughing. And but he would do it week after week after week, and he did this, he does this in his comedy, everything else that because he was a stand-up comedian. So he does, you could see a lot of these elements in his comedy. He just sticks with something. And he keeps going and keeps going.

Eventually, you’re laughing at the fact that he’s stuck on that one thing. The same thing, it’s not just humor. It’s anything that you are passionate about, that matters to your business that you think would help the end-user at all, especially when it comes to content marketing.

If you stick with it, if you just sell out to that concept, and look at it from a million different angles, and keep bringing it up and keep bringing it up and keep bringing it up. It will stick eventually, you have to stick to it. Like normes, McDonald’s stuck to things. That’s just a quick, quick little thing.

There are a million things you can pick from any performer. That’s good at what they do. You can pick something you can pick a million things out of what they do and be able to use it. That’s one thing that I’ll pass on today, just in memory of Norm Macdonald who is a who’s really great at his craft. So hopefully that’s helpful. If you’re looking for strategies that you can use in your business. I’ve got a book can’t see it that well. There it is. I had it kind of off to the side a couple of nights ago it dropped and I put it back up there haphazardly.

So, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. You can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com. It’s my book, I wrote it, who will be back tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.