When Norm MacDonald was fired a month ago from his position as anchor of the “Weekend Update” segment of TV’s “Saturday Night Live,” it was hard not to feel sorry for him. He was funny. He was pert. Then he was gone. All we knew was that Don Ohlmeyer, president of NBC’s West Coast entertainment operations, thought the news had grown “stale.”

After seeing MacDonald’s limp stand-up routine Monday at the University of Maine, it’s not so hard to wonder again about his dismissal. MacDonald, who is clearly bright and quick on the draw, took the approach of the great inarticulate hero of the 1990s. He left off the ends of sentences, used the f-word every three syllables or so, and admitted to merely making stabs at conversation topics because he has no real opinions. “I blame the media” is his tag line. When asked if Kenneth Starr had gone too far, MacDonald proudly answered, “I dunno.”

For a few minutes, MacDonald’s languorous approach was funny enough. For the college crowd, which made up most of Monday night’s audience, MacDonald’s anti-literate approach to joking apparently can sustain an evening of laughter — especially if it’s about sex, racism, sexism and homosexuality.

He made one joke at the expense of Chris Farley, the SNL comic who died last year. He encouraged everyone to watch this Saturday’s tribute show to Farley and “then never watch `Saturday Night’ again.”

But MacDonald’s biggest crime was not that of bigotry. Bigotry can be a riot. His misdemeanor was that he clearly didn’t have enough prepared material. It wasn’t so much that he relied on the audience to fill in the gaps between his rants on sex between gays, sex in the Oval Office, sex in jail, and the supposedly uncontrollable sexual urges of males. Indeed, interacting with the audience, he showed his ability for quick and witty comebacks regarding sex.

Still, his act was stale with punch lines that fell warily on the floor. An hour into the program, MacDonald conceded that even though the show was being recorded for an album, he had presented “no usable material.” Evidently, this is not unusual for MacDonald, who has received repeated foul reviews of his stand-up routine. Although the UM crowd laughed heartily, at another university in the Midwest, the majority of a 1,300-person audience walked out because of MacDonald’s vulgarity and profanity.

The highlight of the evening was Boston-based comic Chris McGuire, who opened for MacDonald. His humor was the perfect combination of college-age rowdiness and well-honed humor. His Irish family is so white, he said, that they sweat milk. And their fair skin was God’s way of telling them to get back in the pub. Like MacDonald, McGuire showed he had a brain. Unlike MacDonald, McGuire used it.