Conan O'Brien: NBC Tried to Ban Norm Macdonald From My Show - The Daily Beast

During a long, emotional and often hilarious conversation about his friend, Conan O’Brien revealed that he was told directly, “You can’t book Norm Macdonald anymore.”.

In 1998, Norm Macdonald was fired from Saturday Night Live, evidently for making too many jokes about a good friend of NBC’s west coast president: O.J.

Now we know that the longtime NBC executive, Don Ohlmeyer, tried—and thankfully failed—to get the comedian banned from the network’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

“Norm had the most unique comedic voice I have ever encountered and he was so relentlessly and uncompromisingly funny,” Conan O’Brien, who hosted Macdonald on his various shows at least 25 times over the past three decades, tweeted on Tuesday after news broke of his friend’s untimely death from a secret bout of cancer at age 61.

Without the platform of a nightly show, O’Brien used an emergency episode of his popular podcast Thursday night to reminisce about the time he spent with Macdonald, joined by his longtime sidekick Andy Richter and producer Frank Smiley.

Because Ohlmeyer was responsible for installing O’Brien at Late Night five years earlier, the host said he felt feelings of “loyalty” towards him.

He said Ohlmeyer responded with something like, “I expected better from you.” But O’Brien stood his ground and won, hosting Macdonald as the lead guest on Late Night four more times between 1999 and 2009 and another four times during his very short tenure as host of The Tonight Show from 2009-2010.

And then he came back and said, ‘Are you the Norm Macdonald that was on NBC.

Towards the end of the podcast, O’Brien said he’s had a “gnawing regret” that Macdonald will never get to experience all of the adulation that has been heaped on him following his death, even if he wouldn’t have been able to really take it in

When it’s his “time to go,” O’Brien said, “Someone can string together a couple of Norm Macdonald appearances and give me a really strong shot of morphine and I’ll just go out laughing, that would be nice.”