If there’s one comic whose identify will without end be related to O.J. Simpson, it’s Norm Macdonald. After Simpson was acquitted for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in 1995, Macdonald, who was Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update host on the time, joked, “It is finally official, murder is legal in the state of California.” He was relentless in going after the disgraced soccer star, regardless of reportedly being warned not to by NBC’s higher-ups; the truth is, the long-standing rumor was that Macdonald was fired from SNL due to NBC president Don Ohlmeyer’s friendship with Simpson. Here’s a ten-and-a-half-minute compilation of Macdonald’s O.J. jokes to offer you an thought of how usually the topic got here up over time:
As unlikely as it might appear, Macdonald and Simpson really got here shut to assembly on a couple of events. The first time was a whole coincidence, and Macdonald occurred to be {golfing} with Kato Kaelin, who was a witness throughout Simpson’s homicide trial. “I was going to go up to him, but who was I with? Kato. And Kato was afraid,” Macdonald informed The Daily Beast in 2017. Kaelin shared his personal recollection of that day with the Daily Mail the previous year, saying, “The girl I was with came to find me and said, ‘You won’t believe who’s here. O.J. Simpson is golfing. He’s hitting on me.’ In my head I thought, ‘That’s so O.J.’”
Curiously, Macdonald additionally apparently tried to interview Simpson a few occasions, however nothing ever got here of it. According to Macdonald’s shut good friend and collaborator, Lori Jo Hoekstra, when Macdonald was internet hosting his personal sports activities present on Comedy Central in 2011, he reached out to Simpson for a sit-down, with the stipulation that the murders can be off-limits. It’s unclear why it didn’t occur, however Macdonald made one other try to converse with Simpson for his podcast, Norm Macdonald Live, years later. “I thought I had O.J. and his lawyer said, ‘Oh yeah, O.J. will do it,’” Macdonald defined. “And then he came back and said, ‘Are you the Norm Macdonald that was on NBC?’ ‘Yeah.’ And he’s like, ‘O.J. said you were a little tough.’”
By 2019, Macdonald had some surprisingly constructive issues about Simpson publicly. Perhaps jokingly, Macdonald referred to Simpson on Lights Out with David Spade as “the greatest rusher in the history of the NFL,” which acquired a giant snort from everybody there. “Maybe I was the greatest rusher to judgment,” he concluded, to the remainder of the panel’s amusement. Whether or not he was critical is anybody’s guess at this level, however Simpson certain appeared to take it critically. As Hoekstra revealed to The Washington Post in 2024, Macdonald obtained a textual content message after the present thanking him for his feedback and alluring him to play a recreation of golf. Evidently, the textual content was from Simpson.
