BroccoliManChild

For the lazy:

A polar bear cub asks his mother, Are you a polar bear?

The mother answers, Yes I am.

Cub asks again, Are you sure you are a polar bear?

Mother answers, Yes I am.

Cub asks, Is dad a polar bear?

Mother answers, Yes, he is.

Cub asks, are you sure he is a polar bear?

Mother answers, Yes I am pretty sure. Why are you asking if we are polar bears?

Cub answers, Well, I do not know about you guys but I am freezing!

Is Norm MacDonald a jerk in real life?

I hear you. I tried to do the same thing with Norm MacDonald's Moth Joke, and it just doesn't work the same way. It helped that Conan was the perfect straight man for the joke.

In case you haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO6t_9bVXc8

So did Norm tell it incorrectly? Because it didn't fall flat when he told it.

Oh, I totally understand that, but I've never considered the moth joke a shaggy dog story. It has an amusing punchline. Now, you're not the first person I've heard describe the moth joke as a shaggy dog story, so there appears to be room to disagree here. But, my impression is that Norm tells the story in shaggy dog style, but that doesn't make it a shaggy dog joke because it doesn't lack a punchline or a pointless punchline. You can tell the joke way shorter and it's still funny.

A guy goes into a podiatrist office and says, "I think I'm a moth."

The podiatrist says, "well, it sounds like you need a psychiatrist, I'm a podiatrist, why'd you come to me?"

The guy says, "the light was on."

I hear Norm described as an anti-joke comedian all the time,* but his jokes are legitimately funny and have punchlines that are designed to be funny. An anti-joke is where you are expecting a funny punchline but then you just receive a logical-type or non-joke answer. What I've always thought was funny is that the first joke kids often learn is "why did the chicken cross the road?" It's an anti-joke! It doesn't make any sense that a person's first introduction to jokes is an anti-joke for which that person has no frame of reference.

*Norm has said many times he hates anti-humor and meta-humor, but, of course, he's Norm, so one could argue that him saying that in itself is anti or meta.