The king is dead, long live the king. Beyond being one of the funniest stand up comedians of all time – and my favorite bar none – Norm Macdonald was also a tremendously astute social critic and a true student of comedy. He had a towering intellect which he publicly almost always downplayed. The reason was obvious to Norm. As he made clear during a conversation with Larry King:
”What a comedian should be doing is being funny, that should be his goal. To be funny. I feel to some comedians their goal is to be smart, and the funny is like a collateral thing. . . . Nobody likes a guy smarter than them. That’s the worst you can be, a guy smarter than the audience. They’re gonna hate you.”
This disposition was perhaps most discernible when Norm visited shows like Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect (a precursor to Real Time). In this setting, Norm identified an interesting dynamic; the invited political pundits and experts were all trying to be funny, while the invited comedians were all trying to be serious. Norm rejected that premise and doubled down on being the dumb guy – always leaning against the wind. When the subject turned to whether the military should allow for the consumption of pornographic material Norm went on an epic tirade about the awfulness of pornos with all male casts. Who would wanna see that!?
Norm was always at least three steps ahead of everybody else. As the culture in which he operated became more politically sensitive Norm would often use the stifling zeitgeist to his advantage. Acting as if unaware and confused about what words were appropriate in what setting. A running joke during the 2010s was him substituting the word ”retard” for ”down syndrome” whenever he had a derogatory aim in mind. The ”apparent” faux pas but with the best of intentions added a layer of meta (Norm hated this word) which made a mockery of the whole song and dance that is an unhealthy obsession with words and identity.
”A good name for a dog is Syndrome. Then when he tries to attack someone you can yell ‘Down, Syndrome!‘”
If you only sparingly interacted with Norm you probably came away thinking he was enormously out of touch. But if you were part of the cult that lived and breathed Norm Macdonald it was obvious that the most clueless guy in the room was the only one with a clue.
In a magical turn of phrase Norm numerous times came out as ”a deeply closeted gay man.” He wasn’t coming out though. He remained deeply closeted ’til his death.
Norm was a true iconoclast but acted as if willfully unaware of this fact. His set at The Roast of Bob Saget was yet another example of Norm taking an established form and turning it upside down and inside out – if not for anybody else but for his own amusement. Daring the audience not to laugh at jokes he’d taken from a joke book his father had given him when he first started out in comedy, and at a brilliantly graceful retort to an ill-advised comment by Jim Norton later in the show. Accepting Norton’s premise and inverting it. No crude jokes or remarks when the circumstances allowed for it. Only when they didn’t (see The Time Norm Got Kicked Out of Iowa). Total disarmament.
Norm is perhaps best known for his time at Saturday Night Live and the events leading up to his dismissal. Apparently he wasn’t funny. Norm didn’t seem to bothered by the event. He had always said that ”comedy is subjective.” He hadn’t really always said that, but he continued – even at his most downtrodden – to be the butt of most of his own jokes in a touching interplay with a protective David Letterman on the day of his firing.
Norm thought the world of Letterman. And the feeling was mutual. While Norm’s segments with Conan are the ones most frequently referenced and the ones with most laughs per minute, his numerous visits to the Ed Sullivan Theater felt like the reunion of father and son. Norm was the last stand up comedian to perform at The Late Show with David Letterman.
According to Norm the holy grail or the platonic ideal of a joke would be one so economical that the set up and the punchline were almost identical. This is as close to perfection as Norm came:
“Julia Roberts told reporters this week that her marriage to Lyle Lovett has been over for some time. The key moment, she said, came when she realized that she was Julia Roberts and that she was married to Lyle Lovett.”
Norm had no truck for political humor but was always critically aware of the political backdrop against which his jokes were operating. He was a master at manipulating audiences’ reactions by adding layers of context, then revealing them as fake.
In a famous Weekend Update joke the set up informs the audience of a survey which asked participants ”who are safer drivers, men or women?” The dichotomy is well-established and it’s fairly obvious that the punchline will have a gendered bent by reference to the result of the survey. The first reveal – and the punchline – however is that the set up of the joke is moot cause ”the percentages in these pie graphs do not add up to one hundred percent because the math was done by a woman.”
We have no way of knowing the perceived relative ineptness between the genders as it relates to driving cause of the obvious ineptness of women as it relates to math. It’s a funny joke.
The initial laughter of the audience turns into hissing as more people catch themselves laughing at a joke that doesn’t align with their political sensibilities. Race and gender jokes are taboo, especially coming from a straight white male, so Norm changes the political context while the joke obviously remains the same.
”For those of you hissing at that joke, it should be noted that that joke was written by a woman. Now you don’t know what the hell to do.” The audience laughs, as if relieved the joke didn’t originate with a man. The joke transmutes from cementing ”sexism” to undermining an arbitrary stereotype by using it for comedic leverage.
But Norm doesn’t take prisoners.
As the laughter dies down he pulls the rug out from under the audience with the most savage of tags: ”Nah, I’m just kidding, we don’t hire women.” For the politically sensitive and comedically dead the joke has gone from sexist to progressive to the most sexist thing ever to originate from a place that doesn’t even hire women. As far as emotional manipulation goes this is on par with the works of Alfred Hitchcock.
Norm’s intellectual prowess found an outlet in his fictional autobiography ”Based on a True Story.” It’s a frightfully entertaining read which prioritizes existential angst over reductionistic truth. It’s a true work of genius. The few times Norm spoke about his religious and philosophical inclinations he often referenced the Russian literary canon as having a big influence on him, and stressed the tremendous insights of Tolstoy and Gogol.
Once on the Conan O’Brien Show Norm was informed that he had one more segment with Conan than he initially thought. He had nothing to say and was looking to run out the clock. He remembered a benign street joke about a moth that goes into a podiatrist’s office that Colin Quinn had told him about. But the joke was only about 20 seconds long, not enough to fill a seven minute segment. Unless of course you merge the high with the low and deliver a street joke as written by a 19th century Russian novelist.
While most celebrities today live as open wounds on social media Norm doesn’t seem to have told close to anyone about his illness. His decision to keep the matter private makes me love Norm even more. It’s an epic inversion of what’s expected and only adds to his legend. Things are as they should be when the most common reaction to Norm Macdonald’s passing – other than a tremendous outpouring of love – is ”I didn’t even know he was sick.”
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