Last September, comedy legend Norm Macdonald lost his nine-year battle with cancer.
(Well, "lost the battle" is how most people would say it, but according to this great clip, MacDonald clearly believed the battle ended in a draw.)
At the time, social media was flooded with tributes to the well-liked, well-respected and Saturday Night Live alumnus.
But among the most popular tributes was the one Comedy Central shared of the time Macdonald was asked to roast his friend Bob Saget.
You can click here to watch the roast for yourself.
And if you do, it's quite possible you'll think it's... not very funny.
Truthfully, I didn't fully understand what was happening when I first watched the clip, for three reasons:
1. I usually found Norm Macdonald's jokes to be hilarious, but this roast wasn't nearly as funny (at least to me) as basically anything else I had ever seen him in;
2. Norm Macdonald was reading his jokes from cue cards, something which I had never seen before in all of the celebrity roasts I've watched (and I've watched quite a few);
3. The other celebrities on stage found his roast increasingly hilarious.
So I began searching the Internet to figure out what I was missing about this "secretly funny" roast, and it didn't take me long to find out what was happening. But in order to understand what was going on, you needed to know three things.
First, Norm Macdonald and Bob Saget were very good friends.
Second, Bob Saget was a famously nice guy who, by all accounts, everybody in the industry seemed to genuinely like and respect.
And third, Norm Macdonald didn't want to say anything bad about his friend, even as a joke and even though that's exactly what people expected him to do at a celebrity roast.
But Norm wasn't going to do it. A week before the roast was scheduled to happen, Macdonald informed Saget he planned to read jokes from a 1940's joke book instead of roasting him, simply saying, "I can’t say mean things about you because you’re my friend."
When Macdonald died, the Comedy Central clip was shared as a testament to Macdonald's character: here was a man who refused to say anything negative about his friend, even as a joke. That is incredibly admirable.
On Sunday, Bob Saget died unexpectedly.
And I'd argue the Comedy Central roast deserves to again be shared on social media.
This time, it can serve as a tribute to the beloved actor we knew as "Danny Tanner" from Full House and as the longtime host of "America's Funniest Home Videos".
And as a reminder that we should all strive to be the person so well-liked and respected that people refuse to say anything bad about you... even as a joke and even when that's exactly what people expect them to do.
Let's all strive to be "Bob Saget Nice".
