variety of manual labor jobs in between periods of school and before starting in comedy. He had an older brother, Neil Macdonald, who is a journalist with CBC News (and is married to Joyce Napier, a journalist with CTV News) and a younger brother named Leslie. Career Macdonald's first performances in comedy were at stand-up clubs in Ottawa, regularly appearing on amateur nights at Yuk Yuk's in 1985. He did not appreciate how well his first performance at the club had gone, and he bolted out, saying he would never do it again. The club's owner, Howard Wagman, had to persuade him to come back for more. Eventually his confidence grew. Six months later he performed at the 1986 Just For Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal, and he was heralded by the Montreal Gazette as "one of this country's hottest comics." By 1990, he would perform as a contestant on Star Search. He also appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, and the host became a huge fan, saying: "If we could have, we would have had Norm on every week". He was hired as a writer for television sitcom Roseanne for the 1992–93 season before quitting to join Saturday Night Live. 1993–1998: Saturday Night Live Macdonald joined the cast of NBC's Saturday Night Live (SNL) television program in 1993, where he performed impressions of Larry King, Burt Reynolds, David Letterman, Quentin Tarantino, Charles Kuralt, and Bob Dole, among others. The following year, during the show's twentieth season, Macdonald anchored the segment Weekend Update, a spoof news section. His version of Weekend Update often included references to prison rape, crack whores, and the Germans' love of Baywatch star David Hasselhoff. He would occasionally deliver a piece of news before taking out his personal compact tape recorder and leave a "note to self" relevant to what he just discussed. He commonly used Frank Stallone as a non-sequitur punchline. On the Weekend Update aired on 24 February 1996, Macdonald joked about John Lotter's sentencing: And finally, in Falls City, Nebraska, John Lotter has been sentenced to death for attempting to kill three people in what prosecutors called a plot to silence a cross-dressing female who had accused him of rape. Now, this might strike some viewers as harsh but I believe everyone involved in this story should die. The comments were met with sharp criticism from trans and queer communities and organisations