Conan says NBC tried to ban Norm Macdonald from his show - The A.V. Club

Beyond his bona fides as a former Saturday Night Live star (to say nothing of the cult status of projects like Dirty Work), Macdonald enjoyed a reputation as a “comedian’s comedian,” the kind of guy who could walk onto the set of a talk show and casually reduce professional joke-tellers to tears and begging requests to “Please don’t make me laugh at this.” As we noted in our round-up of the many clips of Macdonald that circulated online this week, he was one of the best “bad” talk show guests of all time, injecting irreverence and energy into a sometimes very rote formula.

This is per The Daily Beast, reporting on a podcast O’Brien released this week as a way to talk about Macdonald’s influence on his career.

“The word came down, ‘You can’t book Norm Macdonald anymore,’” O’Brien revealed on the podcast.