Back to Norm (2005 TV Movie) User Reviews

norm, as usual, lazy

[pluto8 · 4/10 · 10 June 2005]

Norm MacDonald is one of those rare performers who has a great natural comic gift. He can just stand there with that silly look on his face and crack me up. His Burt Reynolds impression is hysterical, as are several other of his celebrity characterizations. But it's a puzzler as to why he can't do sustained comic work. He was often hilarious on Saturday Night Live in skit work, but his sitcom "Norm" was flaccid and suffered from the presence of tedious and boring side players. This new half-hour Comedy Central presentation is similarly lazy and loose. It feels as if it might have been written over a weekend and never rehearsed before shooting. The only flickering bright spots were the Andy Rooney bit and the skit with the guy who wanted a threesome for his birthday. But even they were weirdly paced and ended up being sort of one-trick ponies. Norm, we love you. Get some discipline and get to work.

PS. The fisherman in heaven in the opening scene is Max Wright, the befuddled character from ALF and also "The Norm Show."

some good moments

[cmdyfn · 7 October 2005]

I am more of a Bruce McCulloch fan than I am of Norm's, so I watched the show because I found out he directed it. A lot of it was your typical sketch fare, with a few better moments. Rob Schneider had a funny cameo in an unfunny sketch. The Threesome sketch was sort of predictable but overall was the best part of the show. Janet Varney was hilarious as Norm's wife trying to make peace with Norm's wishes. Chris Farley's brothers were also in Back to Norm and are very funny. I also liked the Andy Rooney bit but overall I was disappointed. Bruce has a new movie coming out that I can't wait to see. He wrote and directed it. I hope that Norm will either improve his sketch stuff or stick to stand-up, where he is his funniest.

Lots of unfunny skits with no punchlines.

[planktonrules · 1/10 · 27 June 2020]

Wow...rarely have I seen anything more unfunny than "Back to Norm"...a failed pilot for a skit comedy show starring Norm MacDonald. Many of the skits were very tasteless...the sorts of things that could almost never be funny. And, in these cases and others, the punchline to finish up the skits just fell flat. Godawful and horribly written...I just wonder WHO thought comedy skits about suicide, jihadists killing themselves, threesomes and a woman who lights her abusive spouse on fire as well as Roofies could ever work?! Tedious, unfunny and awful....and those are the best things I can say about this show that was justly never approved as a regular series. It might just be one of the unfunniest comedies I've ever seen. Even cancer is funnier than "Back to Norm"!

Average

[General_G · 5/10 · 28 August 2005]

This show just passed for me. It could have been better then it was, but it wasn't. Norm MacDonald could be a funny guy but he just doesn't try hard enough. I think he would make a good stand-up comedian and had done some on this special, but I have never seen him do funny stand-up. I don't know much about Janet Varney. She really wasn't that funny in the show. I see Rob Schnider a lot like Adam Sandler, they both are bad at sketch comedy and funny in some movies (even though I thing Adam Sandler is a sell out these days). Rob was average just like Norm's performances. I think it would have been a lot funnier if Chris Farley were in it, but of course he is no longer alive. Maybe even replace Janet with Janeane Garofalo even though she wouldn't fit the profile as that character, it still would have been funny.

Forgettable comedy special

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 18 February 2018]

"Back to Norm" is a television comedy special from 2005, so already way over a decade old that runs for a bit over 20 minutes only and for that we have really many writers and directors working on it. One of the writers here is also the star: Norm MacDonald, who is known from Saturday Night Live and several other projects, but probably only in the United States as honestly here in Germany I don't remember coming across him anywhere knowingly. The kind of humor is the way you'd expect it to be given his other works. It is fine that it is pretty dark and politically incorrect most of the time in terms of several subjects, but that alone is of course not enough and I would not say it was particularly funny, in the second half even less than in the first. The quality decreased during this one. The inclusion of fairly famous actor Rob Schneider could not change that, even if he admittedly is also not liked by everybody. He was okay I guess. So was Norm, but the material overall simply wasn't good enough, neither for the stand-up routine, nor for the prerecorded sketches and not for everything else at the studio. I myself am not too surprised this did not get picked up as a recurring series. i give it a thumbs-down. Don't watch. Or only once, that is definitely enough like in my case.