Norm Macdonald was fired from Weekend Update in 1997 after NBC executives decided he wasn’t funny. A year and a half later they asked him to host the show. He didn’t open with gratitude or a comeback story. He opened with a logical problem: How does someone go from “not funny enough to be allowed in the building” to “funny enough to host” in eighteen months? The monologue that follows treats the invitation itself as the setup.