- Cultish Creative
- Posts
- Jim Downey Obsesses Over Writing Jokes (A Norm MacDonald Story)
Jim Downey Obsesses Over Writing Jokes (A Norm MacDonald Story)
As Downey told it to Conan
Matt Zeigler
June 02, 2025
When Jim Downey and Norm Macdonald were working on Weekend Update together for Saturday Night Live, they approached it a lot like the punk movement. As Downey put it, “There was nothing there that was a form of cheating. We weren’t adorable, we weren’t warm, we weren’t gonna do easy political jokes that played for ‘claptor’ and let the audience know we were all on the same side. We were gonna be mean, and to an extent, anarchists.”
It might have looked like anarchy, but the process underneath, it was far more deliberate. Now, I don’t want to ignore the anarchy either. The performance felt like chaos. They had that sound, like in the way Norm’s delivery came off while doing the OJ jokes. But, if you only think about the performance, you might miss the craft, which is what we’re here to focus on.
And even the most snot-nosed punk protest of a performance, if it’s worth an ounce of the rebellion it’s supposed to represent, has a nearly endless supply of craft-focused energy underneath it.
There’s a story that Downey tells, from 2023 when he appeared on Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, I go back to over and over in my head. I can’t believe I haven’t written about it here before, honestly, so here we go. To start, I just need to transcribe Downey telling Conan the story.
Norm and I would spend, like, insane amounts of time obsessing over the precise wording of a joke. And, I remember there was one that I thought actually benefited from our kind of neurotic attention to detail.
It started off as a joke about Penthouse Magazine, who’d had this cover story - which, even if you didn’t read Penthouse, you would see the cover on newsstands, and it was, “This week: shocking photos of alien autopsy.” This is Penthouse magazine. So they claimed it to be actual photos of an aliens autopsy.
So the joke we started out with, which I think would have been good enough, was, “This week, Penthouse magazine released its much awaited photos of an alien autopsy. According to those who’ve seen the issue, the photos were sharp, clear, and easy to masturbate to.” So. Anyway.
Then I thought - that could be better. There’s a better rhythm to that. So, I first suggested that it should be, “[This week…] and, quote, easy to masturbate to.” Because I just liked it for rhythm.
And then, I came up with one of my greatest contributions to the season which was, I added the word, “surprisingly,” so that the joke became kind of different. So the joke was like, “…According to those who’ve seen the advanced copies, the photos are sharp, clear, and quote, surprisingly easy to masturbate to.”
You got this image of a guy going, “You know, at first I - I didn’t think this would work. But, goddamnit, this is f****** hot!”
I know. I’m 14. But, beyond the humor. Think about this. The detail.
Finding the joke isn’t actually that hard. Any 14-year-old probably could have come up with the basic riff.
But, noticing the rhythm of the joke. Where the pauses go. Where the inflection shifts. How the words come out of your mouth. There’s a way things sound funny that has nothing to do with words.
And then, to slowly realize, in defiance of the evening news-medium they were mocking, he first added the “quote.” It gave it an air of authority. It gave the statement an extra pause on the ramp up. It also slows the audience down. They know a joke is coming because this is SNL. But anything that can drag out the anticipation, or the uncertainty of where it is going, is going to help.
But, because it still wasn’t perfect, they kept fussing. One word change, still not enough, but what could help make it perfect?
“Surprisingly.” Again, the rhythm. The inflection. More delay. More signaling to the audience, in the way the person in the joke is also surprised by this twist-to-punchline. And, at 4 syllables, the stutter-step delay, even more time to build up to the crash landing.
You don’t learn that without practicing, without asking - what’s the funniest possible way we can say this - in a safe space, with friends, over and over.
There’s nothing mean here. There’s hardly anything outwardly dirty. But, there’s a choke hold on the way authority is established in a news broadcast, and a stubborn proof of just how far you can lean into its absurdity to make a laugh.
This is why it’s punk. This is why it’s anarchy. The joke is a subversion of how we communicate news, of how we talk about truth. Downey and Macdonald were out to prove that you deliver absurdity just as capably as you could deliver information. If they could do it, for laughs, why can’t anybody do anything with the format?
Not everybody would laugh. Some people would definitely be offended. But who could argue with the twist and turn to payoff in its structure? You couldn’t NOT be surprised by it. That’s not lazy, it’s ingenious.
Jim Downey’s GREATEST CONTRIBUTION to the whole season of the show, with an iconic live-playing actor, was to add a single word.
Punk. And, practiced. It’s beautiful.