🎧 'Cheers' & Art of the 'Norm!' Entrance
Rob Long on the pleasure of writing for George Wendt
Rob Long wrote on Cheers for four seasons, all of which also included writing for George Wendt, who died on May 20 at the age of 76. Today’s Martini Shot podcast is about those years together, and the transcript of Rob’s essay is in full below for paid subscribers.
This Martini Shot episode is a 7-minute read.
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This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.
Here’s an old rule for comedy: Words that have a “k” or a “k” sound in them, according to playwright Neil Simon, are funny. One of the characters in his great play, The Sunshine Boys, makes this point in some detail and is pretty convincing — at least, convincing enough that by the time I joined the business in the early 1990s, it was a solid rule of joke making:
If you’ve got a choice between two words, always pick the word with the “k” in it.
There aren't that many other rules, really, to comedy. The hard “k”, putting the funny word at the end of the sentence, making sure the set-up is clear enough — but pretty much every other rule is situational.
Sometimes a joke works because it's exactly what you expect. When famous miser Jack Benny acts totally in character, that’s funny. Sometimes a joke works because it’s totally out of left field. Which is pretty much every Monty Python episode.
What we say, sometimes, is that a joke isn’t clean — and we don't mean language. Certainly not these days when you can say pretty much anything you want. What we mean is, there’s too much going on in it, and the audience is processing too much to laugh. So you try to strip it down to its essentials — just what you need for the set-up to be meaningful, just what you need for the punchline to be punchy.
And when you get right down to it, a joke is a very simple thing. It has only two moving parts: the set-up and the punchline. And if you write jokes for a living, as I have done for 35 years, you learn that the basic rule of comedy is that if a joke isn’t working, there are only two ways to fix it. You can fiddle with the set-up or you can tinker with the punchline. And that’s about it.
My first job in show business — and pretty much my first job in life — I was a staff writer on the long-running hit sitcom Cheers, which is where I learned about set-ups and jokes. Cheers had a long-running joke staple we called “The Norm Entrance,” which was essentially the already simple joke structure whittled to a Zen kind of purity.
The format of a Norm Entrance was always the same, and if you were a fan of the show you probably know it by heart: Devoted barfly Norm Peterson, played indelibly by the late George Wendt, would walk into the bar and shout a cheery “Afternoon, everybody!” to the crowd. They would respond with “Norm!” shouted in unison. And then someone behind the bar — Woody Harrelson, Ted Danson, the late great Nicholas Colasanto, whoever was behind the bar for that scene — would offer the greeting set-up, usually something like, What’s going on, Mr. Peterson? Or, What are you up to, Norm? Or, What’s the good word, Norm? And George Wendt would stride across the bar to take his seat at his usual spot — downstage, stage left, on a bar stool — and time his response perfectly so that he’d be seated by the time the laughs started.
I’d rather talk about what’s going in Mr. Peterson, he’d say, gesturing for a beer and waiting for the laughs to subside. Cross the stage, quick upstage turn: My ideal weight if I were 11 feet tall, sit, wait for the laugh. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and I’m wearing Milk Bone underwear, sit, sigh, take his first sip.
Norm entrances were a pain to write — something about the simplicity of the form, perhaps — and if you were working on a script you’d do almost anything to avoid having to write one.