A joke is a very simple thing. It has only two moving parts: the setup and the punchline. And if you write jokes for a living, as I have done for 35 years, you learn that the basic rule of comedy is that if a joke isn’t working, there are only two ways to fix it. You can fiddle with the setup, or you can tinker with the punchline, and that’s about it.
My first job in show business — and pretty much my first job in life — was a staff writer on the long-running hit sitcom Cheers, where I learned about setups and jokes. Cheers has a joke staple we call the “Norm entrance,” which is essentially the setup/punchline structure whittled to pure simplicity.
The format of the Norm entrance is always the same, and if you are a fan of the show, you probably know it by heart: devoted barfly Norm Peterson, played indelibly by the late George Wendt, walks into the bar, shouts a cheery “Afternoon, everybody!” to the crowd, and they respond with “Norm!” shouted in unison. And then someone behind the bar offers the greeting setup, which is usually something like, What’s going on, Mr. Peterson? or What are you up to, Norm? or What’s the good word, Norm? Wendt would then stride across the bar to sit at his usual spot — downstage, stage left — and time his response perfectly so that he’d be seated by the time the laughs started.
He’d say something like, I’d rather talk about what’s going in Mr. Peterson, gesturing for a beer and waiting for the laughs to subside before crossing the stage and making a quick upstage turn. My ideal weight if I were 11 feet tall, he would say, sitting down and waiting for the laugh. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and I’m wearing Milk Bone underwear, he would conclude, sigh, and take his first sip.
Norm entrances were a pain to write — something about the simplicity of the form, perhaps — and if you were working on a script, you’d do almost anything to avoid having to write one. If you were a writer out of favor, perhaps your last script came in weak, or maybe you were having trouble fitting in, you were sometimes assigned to go off and write as many Norm entrances as you could. But the secret to a successful Norm entrance was that it almost didn’t matter what you wrote because Wendt could sell it with his slow, lumbering walk, beaten-down expression, and genius for timing.
Also, people loved Norm so much that if a line of dialogue referred to beer, wives, or any other Norm-related topic, the audience would just start laughing in anticipation of his reply. They would laugh, in other words, on the setup. The punchline was already written in their minds by Wendt’s indelible performance over the years. His total embodiment of Norm was so rich and complete that people naturally thought he and Norm must be nearly the same person. But Wendt was a devoted husband. He was a true family man: funny, animated, and anything but beaten down. And while it is true that Wendt liked beer and preferred to perch on a stool for most of an episode, he was different from Norm in one major respect: Norm was a lovable loser; Wendt was just lovable.
And here’s how you can measure his immense, and sneaky, comic talent: Wendt could get a laugh on the setup. Not many people can do that.
When Wendt died on May 20, 2025, social media — and my email inbox — unleashed a flood of remembrances and testaments to his sweet and gentle nature. But there were also lots of clips of Norm entrances. Each one is a gem, mostly because of Wendt’s ability to make it all look easy. So let me amend what I wrote above: there are three ways to fix a weak joke. You can adjust the setup, rewrite the punchline, or just let Wendt do it because nobody could walk into a bar like him.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.