Pour One Out For Norm From Cheers - George Wendt Has Passed Away At The Age Of 76
Hollywood Reporter - George Wendt, who bellied up to the bar to portray the beer-quaffing everyman Norm Peterson for all 11 seasons of the fabled NBC sitcom Cheers, has died. He was 76.
Wendt died peacefully in his sleep at home, his family confirmed early Tuesday morning.
“George was a doting family man, a well-loved friend and confidant to all of those lucky enough to have known him,” a rep for Wendt said in a statement. “He will be missed forever. The family has requested privacy during this time.”
Born in Chicago and raised on the South Side, Wendt got his start in the 1970s with Second City, the famed improvisational comedy troupe that was based in his hometown.
Later, he popped up on Saturday Night Live as Bob Swerski, one of the “superfans” who gathered at Coach Mike Ditka’s restaurant in the Windy City to watch “Da Bears.”
Wendt appeared in movies including Dreamscape (1984), House (1985), Fletch (1985), Gung Ho (1986), Plains Clothes (1987), Never Say Die (1988), Guilty by Suspicion (1991), Forever Young (1992) and Spice World (1997).
Survivors include his nephew Jason Sudeikis, the only son of one of his six sisters.
I would like to add that he also made a stellar cameo in one of the biggest music videos of all time, Michael Jackson's "Black Or White"
And as the Hollywood Reporter casually mentioned, he held it down anchoring The Superfans as Bob Swerski on SNL. One of the greatest bits of all time, and he wasn't even acting.
I'm not going to write a big long eulogy about Mr. Wendt because I honestly didn't know much about him.
(I had zero idea he was the uncle of noted Lakers & Knicks fan, and now apparently nepo-baby, Jason Sudeikis.)
But I did know that he was a Southside Chicago guy. Which is why the Superfan gig came off so easily for him. And of course everybody knows him as Norm from Cheers. Between the Boston and Chicago ties, Mr. Wendt deserved some recognition on the blog. So pour one out for him tonight and this week.
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(After hitting publish on this blog, my dad called me a mamaluc for not knowing about this, and sent me this article about how the Norm "greeting" became such a huge cultural thing back in the day. Pretty cool/funny.
EW- On any given episode of Cheers, there are a few things you know to expect: Drinks will be served, Sam and Diane will bicker, and Norm will be greeted. But only one of those episode staples gave the writers a particularly hard time… and it had nothing to do with Sam and Diane.
"The writing with the greatest degree of difficulty was writing an entrance for Norm," Cheers writer David Isaacs tells EW as part of our examination of perfect TV punchlines. "He would always come in and they'd say, 'Hi, Norm,' and then the running joke was the question, so: 'How you doing?' 'What's up?' 'What are you up to?' And then you had to write a joke from Norm's 'my life is just nothing' attitude to fit that, which is hard because it's like writing a joke from nothing. You don't get a running start because it's not coming out of context, it's not coming out of the conflict or situation, so you have to write a joke by itself."
For Isaacs, his favorite Norm joke came from his writing partner, Ken Levine. "It was one of my favorite lines ever on Cheers, We said, 'Okay, let's try, What are you up to?'" And Ken just said, 'My ideal weight if I was 11 feet tall.' I said, 'You just broke the bank. We'll never top that.'"
Levine, however, has a different favorite joke, but it also has a little something to do with Norm (played by George Wendt). "When I was a kid, there was an episode of The Honeymooners called 'The $99,000 Answer.' And Ralph Kramden, who's the Jackie Gleason character, is on a game show," Levine recalls. "And you have to guess the title of songs. So he's practicing for a whole week. By the end of the week, he knows every song from every musical, from every show, everything else. And so they get on the show and the first question is like, 'Okay, identify this song.' And he didn't know it. I was 10 when I first saw that and I did not see the joke coming, and I laughed so hard. So I always wanted to do the equivalent of that episode. I always wanted to base an episode leading up to one monster joke."
Levine got the chance to do just that with the season 9 episode titled "Breaking in Is Hard to Do." The premise is that Lilith and Frasier are starting to worry that their baby, Frederick, hasn't started to talk yet. When Frasier volunteers to watch Frederick for the day, he naturally takes him to the bar, where there's another subplot at work. "We have a subplot going where they put parking meters out on the street," Levine says." So Frasier brings the baby to the bar and every hour, Norm has to go out and feed the meter. And so every time he comes back in, we had to do those Norm entrances. And we had four or five of them."
It all builds to the final Norm entrance, which occurs at the end of the episode, when Lilith returns to find that Frasier has spent all day with their child at the bar. "She's just horrified," Levine says. "And then Norm comes in and the baby goes, 'Norm.'"
The joke worked beautifully. "It got a thunderous laugh. I remember turning to David saying, 'This is something I always wanted to do. I will never do this again,'" Levine says with a laugh. "Because it was so stressful when you realize that you are building a whole show to one joke and if the joke doesn't work, the whole episode dies. So it's like, we did it, we got away with it. I will never do that again. But that's one of my favorite punchlines."
Reading that it's pretty crazy to think that they used to really tape television shows in front of live studio audiences. That Frasier baby clip is at the bottom.)
Here's the best of good old Cheers Norm that I could dig up.
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And finally, here's 20 minutes of EVERY. SINGLE. DAMN. TIME. Norm entered the bar and at least one person hit him with good old, loud, "Noooooooorm!" (Goals as the kids say.)
Rest In Peace.