Doug Abeles

So I figured, oh, I guess that's what you do.

So I arranged through a friend to do the same thing.

Actually, first I started with Letterman and for a couple of months, maybe three months, I got nothing on Letterman.

And my contact there said, you know, maybe you should stop.

You got phased out.

Maybe you should stop doing this.

But he did say, you know, your sensibility reads a little bit more like Norm Macdonald.

It set me up faxing in jokes to Norm Macdonald at Weekend Update.

And so before I started doing that, I kind of studied...

norm mcdonald i would um record uh you know vidi on v on a vcr you know record him doing update each week then i would sit down and transcribe each of his weekend update segments

I would transcribe it and I would read that transcription over and over again until like I really did have his voice in my brain.

So that when I sat down and went through the newspaper to find topical stories to write jokes about, I was it was as if I was reading those stories from his mindset.

And and I was able to kind of capture his sensibility, his voice.

in in in my jokes and then I when I started submitting to him it still took a couple of months but then there was like this one and they would never tell you in advance if they were going to use so you used to watch and hope I was watching at home I was watching by myself and lo and behold you know he ends up doing a joke that I wrote word for word and I was you remember it

The gist of, sorry.

It had something to do with the American figure skater, Tanya Harding, who she's the one that bashed the knee of Nancy Kerrigan.

And she sort of became a black sheep in the,

of the Olympic team.

Why would that be?

She was making a comeback.