Reacting and analyzing the greatest moth joke ever told by Norm Macdonald with Conan O’Brien

Dead Men Walking

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So, I'm going to attempt to analyze one of the greatest jokes ever told. This is

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Norm Macdonald appearing on Conan O 'Brien, and we are going to react to it, listen to it, and give a little comment on why

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I think this is one of the funniest jokes ever. So let's take a look. I'm sitting with Norm Macdonald, and not all your material comes from the news, is that right?

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No, some of my material comes, my strongest material comes from real life. Real life? Like for instance, today

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I was driving in a car. Which that right there, I'm going to stop this quite often, and hopefully we get through it.

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Excuse me, but that's an inside joke with comics too, is people come up to them all the time and go, where do you get your material?

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Where do you get, how are you so funny? Where do you get your material? And the inside joke with comics is, you know, oh yeah, real life or all day life.

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And so even that right there, is he setting the premise for something that's ridiculous.

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Car, you were kind enough to bring a car to bring this old chunk of coal here to the studio. We send cars for our guests, yes.

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And I like that he's using the chunk of coal. Norm did this very often, and he would go to this old timey references, he would say chunk of coal and stuff like that, and he's already setting up the premise that this is going to be a throwback joke, without it being a throwback joke, but he's getting you ready for it by using that language.

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So I got in it, and I get material that way, so my driver... What do you mean, how do you get material that way?

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You get in the car, and what happens? My driver tells me a joke. The driver we sent to pick you up told you a joke?

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Yeah. And you're going to tell it now on the show? Yeah, that's how I get it. So this is a sign of a great comic too. When you set the expectation low, then you can overachieve.

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So never overpromise when doing comedy. He's setting that expectation low. This is just a joke I heard from my driver, and then he's going to go into this epic joke as we see.

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Let's watch. My material. Okay, why don't we just have him on next time?

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Oh, that guy. No, that guy. Wait till you hear me do it. So the guy, he goes,

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I say, I'll be the guy. A moth goes into a podiatrist's office.

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A moth goes into a podiatrist's office. You are correct. I like this little subtle way too where he's like, alright, stop interrupting me,

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I'm getting into my flow. By saying, you are correct, he's kind of making fun of the fact that Conan interrupted him, and he sets the tone for the joke.

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A moth goes into a podiatrist's office, and the podiatrist's office says, what's the problem?

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And the moth says, what's the problem? Where do I begin, man? He goes, I go to work for Gregory Alinovich, and all day long

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I work. Honestly, Doc, I don't even know what

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I'm doing anymore. I don't even know if Gregory Alinovich knows. He only knows that he has power over me, and that seems to bring him happiness.

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So, right away, if you're familiar with kind of the storybook jokes, you know, a priest and a rabbi and a minister going to a bar, those kind of storytime jokes, this is what he's doing here.

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This is a very old joke with a punchline and a premise that's, you know, ages old.

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But at the same time, he's making it his own by adding all these very intricate details which

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Norm was so great at. And one of the reasons why I love him so much. But listen to all the detail, and even when he messes up some of the detail later on in the joke, you'll see that it still works.

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But I don't know. I wake up in a malaise, and I walk here and there. And the podiatrist says, oh yeah?

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And the moth goes, yes. And he goes, at night I sometimes wake up and I turn to some old lady in my bed that's on my arm, a lady that I once loved,

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Doc. So he's taking a joke, just keep in mind here, that is very surface level, not a lot of detail, not very morbid, usually, and he's making it very detailed, and right away he's talking about a moth taking his own life and feeling suicidal and depressed, and he's kind of turning it on its head, which is so genius.

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Let's keep listening. I don't know where to turn to. My youngest, Alexandria, she fell in the cold of last year.

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The cold took her down as it did many of us. And Conan is going along with this, and you can see him smiling and smirking, and Conan has talked about this quite often on his podcast and other places, where he just absolutely loved when

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Norm would come on, because it would just go in crazy different places, and you can see

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Conan, he's in that place now, it's another comic, he's realizing, oh, it's going to be one of these. Just watch

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Conan's face as well during this, which is very telling. And my other boy, and this is the hardest pill to swallow,

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Doc. Gregaro. Ivanilidovich.

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I no longer love him. What a great use of timing there too, where he holds that punchline, he kind of holds that line for an extra two seconds, which

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Norm was famous for. He would do the stare after the joke, the silence after the joke, the gap between the joke.

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Most people would rush through this joke and make it a 30 -second, 60 -second joke.

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He's taking his time, and there's a backstory to this, why he dragged this out as well, but for comedic effect, you can see that he's really prolonging each of those to get those laughs, and it makes it funnier, because he's building tension, and tension is awesome in comedy.

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You want tension. And they're going, wait, why is he pausing? What is he going to say? They're hanging on every word, and it's just a great use of timing.

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As much as it pains me to say, when I look in his eyes, all I see is the same cowardice that I catch when

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I take a glimpse of my own face in the mirror. If only the cowardice was stronger, then perhaps.

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Now here he is extending this out, Conan's loving it, the audience is loving it, but he's taking something where you normally could have stopped in a joke, and moved on to the next part, and he's going to extend it, and he's just going to lengthen it to a place of ridiculousness, but still keep it in the realm of reality.

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Perhaps I could bring myself to reach over to that cocked and loaded gun that lays on the bedside behind me.

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Once again, very dark. This is a very simple joke. It's usually a G -rated joke.

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He's bringing it into that dark area where the juxtaposition of what we normally hear in a story time book joke like this, versus very dark.

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And then this hellish facade. How long a drive was this? Do you live in the valley?

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Where do you live? So I don't know if I would have made this choice that Conan did, where he's kind of breaking this up and saying, let's keep it moving.

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Now you have to realize, Conan is running a show. He's got producers and directors off camera telling him how much time we have to a commercial.

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So he's thinking, he's got a show to run, but you almost want to let Norm do

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Norm here. It's very hard to do on, what was this, NBC or TBS, whatever it was, on essentially network television.

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So hard to corral Norm because this could be two minutes or this could be eight minutes. And I think this is also

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Conan's subtle way of saying, yep, you've got five minutes, but let's keep it moving. Please, sorry.

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He says, Doc, sometimes I feel like a spider.

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Even though I'm a moth. Just barely hanging on to my web with an everlasting fire underneath me.

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I'm not feeling good. So you can see here too, so he has reiterated the same point of this moth five times now.

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And Chris Rock is really good at doing this, where he'll take a point and he'll say it over and over and over and over and over again.

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So -and -so can't do this. They can't do this. They just can't do that. They can't do that, right? Or whatever that premise is.

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And Norm is doing this in a storytime joke. So he could have just said the moth was upset, blah, blah, blah. Next thing you know, it's a 30 second joke.

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And then the punchline, he is elongating this and just getting those laughs because he's reiterating in, you know, four or five different ways, approaching it from every angle.

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This is how depressed, this is how crazy this situation is for this moth. So let's listen as he finishes it up here.

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And so the moth, the doctor says, moth, man, you're troubled. But you should be seeing a psychiatrist.

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Why on earth did you come here? And then the moth said, because the light was on. What a great setup for such an average joke.

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I mean, he pulled that out. And the story is here is that he didn't know that he was going to do this segment.

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They told him during a commercial break, hey, Norm, we had someone cancel or we need you to do five more minutes.

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And Norm said in interviews, I didn't know what the heck I was going to do. So he just tells this joke. And on the fly, he pulls this joke out into almost four and a half minutes instead of what is normally a 30 second one line joke.

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And the way he delivers that, the only way Norm can in that deadpan, just because the light was on.

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The payoff is so great because the buildup was so great.

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So sometimes in comedy and Norm was a genius in this as he would have all this buildup and then the punch line, which was just average.

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But the buildup made it that much better. And to get to that punch line was the joke itself.

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I love

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Conan's reaction here, too. Just the ridiculousness of this. I can't believe I just sat through four and a half minutes.

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Of this joke, because I'm sure Conan had heard this joke before. I heard this joke when I watched this live years and years ago.

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I knew this joke. The light was on. That's the punch line. And he's going, I cannot believe that worked.

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And I absolutely love Norm's genius here. Congratulations to anyone who stuck it through to the end.

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Here's the thing. Conan is playing to the audience. They're saying thank you for anyone who stuck it through to the end.

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Obviously, they can't go anywhere. But as a comic, you've got to believe that Conan is going, this guy is a genius.

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He's saying, yeah, stuck it through to the end because he's playing that same game with the audience of The Underman and saying, oh, yeah, that was such a horrible thing.

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But as a comic, the horrible long joke and everything. But as a comic, Conan is going, this is genius. And he said as much after the fact in many interviews.

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So Norm. What? We're pretty much out of time.

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So that's it right there, you guys. It's so good. And give credit to Conan because like he said, when

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Norm came on, it was like complete chaos. He didn't know what was coming out of his mouth. He would interrupt guests.

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He would say crazy, wacky things. And I think in this example, Conan really played into it well.

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Of course, he has to play to the audience and he's producing a show on the fly.

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But at the same time, he's letting Norm have his space, which is why I think Norm was such a great guest on Conan O 'Brien.

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And I think this is why this is one of the greatest jokes ever told. Just because it is such a simple, old timey joke that's been around forever.

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And Norm put his own twist on it like he did so many times. And I'll tell you what, I miss him because I'm a huge Norm fan.