Everybody Knew His Name: ‘Norm!’

Man walks into a bar.

It’s the starting point for a million jokes. And for season after season on “Cheers,” some of the best of those were delivered by George Wendt, who died on Tuesday at age 76, as the long-suffering Norm Peterson.

We knew him, above all, from his entrances, throwing open the door of the show’s namesake tavern, greeted with a hearty — all together now — “Norm!” You could say that he was the character whom the show’s theme-song lyrics (“Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name”) were about.

Making his way in the world today, Wendt’s performance suggested, took everything Norm had got. A bedraggled accountant (later unemployed, later a house painter), Norm spent his days getting the stuffing kicked out of him by life, then returned to Cheers to replace that stuffing with beer.

“Cheers” did not take place entirely within the bar that gave the sitcom its name, but it mostly did. The setting was a place people came to escape somewhere else. And that meant that the actors portraying those suds-drinking refugees had to portray that somewhere-else entirely through the strength of their performances.

Wendt was the champion of that. His stage entrances — tie loosened, top collar button open, drawn to his bar stool as if it were a magnet — implied everything that he was hustling to get away from, every trouble he wished to drown. His wife, Vera, existed almost entirely offstage, but Wendt made their relationship real with his cheerful griping. You didn’t see his work day, but you saw how eagerly he washed down the aftertaste of it.