"Norm!!"

It’s usually not a good idea to build a whole show leading up to one big joke. Why? Because if the big joke doesn’t work you are pretty much left with nothing but a big hot steaming turd. On the other hand, if the payoff does work, the episode can be a home run.

Who (over 40) will ever forget the classic HONEYMOONERS episode where Ralph is on a quiz show and has a week to become an expert in popular music.

HONEYMOONERS SPOILER ALERT!

He enlists Norton to play songs on the piano. But before every one Norton plays the intro to Swanee River. It drives Ralph bat shit of course. By the end of the week he knows every song ever written, can tell you the composer, the year, everything. So he gets on the show and the first song he has to identify is Swanee River. His eyes open wide. He has no idea. Trust me, the first time you see this you laugh for ten minutes.

But it’s usually not worth the risk.

That didn’t stop us from pitching the following idea to CHEERS: Frasier and Lilith are worried that their baby, Frederick hasn’t spoken yet. They fear the worst: that he might be average. They blame themselves of course, and then each other. Frasier suggests he might be better suited for caring for their son during the day. (at the act break he says, “I’ve done a horrible thing. I’ve left our child alone with its mother!”)

The next day Frasier has Frederick and brings him to the bar. At the same time, they put parking meters on the surrounding streets so Norm has to leave every two hours to feed the meter. Every time he returns we do a “Norm entrance”. Finally, Lilith enters and is outraged that Frasier has brought the baby to this worst possible environment. Frederick’s growth will be stunted. Now he’ll never begin talking. Just then Norm enters, says, “Afternoon, everybody” and the baby says “Norm!”

Everyone in the room laughed and we went off to write the script. Then it hit us. What the fuck were we thinking? This was already the 9th season. It was hard enough to come up with one Norm entrance. Now we had to dream up with like five. We had to establish this pattern so that Frederick would have heard the name a lot. The other CHEERS writers would walk by our office, peek in and say, “Hey, how those Norm entrances coming?”

The night of the filming the payoff received a huge explosive laugh. We were heroes. The audience applauded wildly when we were introduced. It was now time to get our just desserts. We sauntered up to the other writers and asked with a swagger, “Well, now what do you think?” Almost to a person they answered, “You’re still schmucks”.

The episode is called “Breaking In Is Hard to Do”. You decide.