Norm Macdonald Tried to Get O.J. Simpson on His Show After Trashing Him for Years
· Vice
If there’s one comedian whose name will forever be associated with 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 at the time, joked, “It is finally official, murder is legal in the state of California.” He was relentless in pursuing the disgraced football star, despite reportedly being warned not to by NBC’s higher-ups; in fact, 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 give you an idea of how often the subject came up over the years:
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As unlikely as it may seem, Macdonald and Simpson actually came close to meeting on a few occasions. The first time was a complete coincidence, and Macdonald happened to be golfing with Kato Kaelin, who was a witness during Simpson’s murder trial. “I was going to go up to him, but who was I with? Kato. And Kato was afraid,” Macdonald told The Daily Beast in 2017. Kaelin shared his own 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 also apparently tried to interview Simpson a couple of times, but nothing ever came of it. According to Macdonald’s close friend and collaborator, Lori Jo Hoekstra, when Macdonald was hosting his own sports show on Comedy Central in 2011, he reached out to Simpson for a sit-down, with the stipulation that the murders would be off-limits. It’s unclear why it didn’t happen, but Macdonald made another attempt to speak 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 explained. “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 publicly said some surprisingly positive things about Simpson. Perhaps jokingly, Macdonald described Simpson on Lights Out with David Spade as “the greatest rusher in the history of the NFL,” which got a big laugh from everyone there. “Maybe I was the greatest rusher to judgment,” he concluded, to the rest of the panel’s amusement. Whether or not he was serious is anyone’s guess at this point, but Simpson sure seemed to take it seriously. As Hoekstra revealed to The Washington Post in 2024, Macdonald received a text after the show thanking him for his comments and inviting him to play a game of golf. Evidently, the text was from Simpson.
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