The late comedian mocked everyone and everything, and wasn’t looking for validation.
The late comedian mocked everyone and everything, and wasn’t looking for validation.
A fter Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley filed for divorce, Norm Macdonald shared the sad news on SNL’s “Weekend Update”: “According to friends, the two were never a good match. She’s more of a stay-at-home type, and he’s more of a homosexual pedophile.”
Yow. Sometimes great comedy is so funny it shocks, stings, hurts. At the time, you didn’t say “Michael Jackson is a homosexual pedophile.” It was considered rude. MJ gave us “Billie Jean,” so we all gave him a pass on the molesting-little-boys thing. Norm said the unsayable, and kept saying it.
Macdonald wasn’t a shtick comic (although he did some killer impressions), nor was he known for extended bits. He mainly stuck to the ancient structure of setup-punchline. And his punchlines really punched. They left big purple bruises. As my friend Daniel Tenreiro explained yesterday in a piece that is better than this one, Macdonald did not give a fork about what forces he might run afoul of, sometimes to his great cost.
Macdonald died yesterday after what he would not have termed a battle with cancer, aged 61. He didn’t become a major movie star like his colleagues Adam Sandler, Mike Myers, and Chris Farley, although his 1998 film Dirty Work is very funny. He didn’t work out as a sitcom star (his most successful effort, the little-seen ABC effort The Norm Show, later called Norm, lasted two years), and his David Letterman-ish talk show Norm Macdonald Has a Show was canceled after one season on Netflix in 2018. Macdonald worked steadily as a stand-up, and several of his specials can be seen on Netflix and HBO. They’re bound to get more attention now that Macdonald has departed too soon.
Macdonald risks being reduced to that undesirable title, “comedian’s comedian,” suggesting a guy who is too peculiar or too extreme to appeal to the public, like the late Bill Hicks.
Ah, but then there’s YouTube. Macdonald’s work turns out to be a perfect match for the short-attention-span video format. Yesterday, his famous moth joke, told to Conan O’Brien back in 2009, went viral in a four-minute clip. It’s not a bit; it’s just a standard setup-punchline joke, except that the middle lasts three minutes, instead of the usual three seconds, and contains so many vivid Kafkaesque details that lead you so far away from the setup — it’s a moth talking — that the punchline is not just funny, it’s the catharsis that follows the epic struggle, like the reunited lovers sharing a hug in the train station after the Russian Revolution goes to hell in Reds.
Today, Macdonald’s “Weekend Update” stuff is recognizably of a different comedy era. It feels like forbidden material that was smuggled out by dissidents when the regime was distracted by cracking skulls elsewhere in the cultural empire. There’s a nine-minute reel of Norm’s meanest Hillary Clinton jokes. Norm bashes, slices, sets fire to, and generally destroys Hillary Clinton, and I know what you’re thinking: somebody was mean to Hillary Clinton? On Saturday Night Live? The show that, after one of the funniest moments in U.S. history, the Hindenburg-style crash of Hillary Clinton’s political career in November of 2016, sent out its top talent to sing a mournful ballad in Hillary’s honor?
Yeah, Norm didn’t play that way. He’d give a little Boy Scout smile but then let rip with what the ordinary guy was thinking, and what most ordinary guys have been thinking since first hearing the name Hillary Clinton is: Wow, do I ever hate Hillary Clinton. Future historians, consulting the historical record and completely baffled by the major media’s praise of Hillary Clinton, will turn to Norm’s Hillary jokes and say to themselves: Ah, now I get it. People despised her on sight, and she just kept making it worse. Macdonald noted, after Hillary’s plane was grounded on an overseas trip because of a frayed wire, President Clinton “was said to be furious, and demanded an immediate investigation of what went wrong with Operation Frayed Wire.”
One day, when a woman returned from space, Macdonald said that the president had told the world, “One day we’ll be able to send an American into space indefinitely, and I hope it’s a woman.” Pause. Hillary’s photo appears on the screen.
Macdonald went after right-wingers as well; when Pat Buchanan was running for president, he noted that Bob Dole claimed it would be a disaster if anyone but he became president. But Buchanan warned, according to Macdonald, that if anyone but he became president, “Blacks would retain the right to vote.” Norm did gay jokes, fat jokes, jokes about women. Jesse Jackson launched a protest of the movie Twister, according to Norm, because in the movie, “Not enough black people are killed by tornadoes.” Norm’s capsule review of the homoerotic Tom Cruise–Brad Pitt movie Interview with the Vampire: “Not gay enough.” (It was in fact the gayest thing ever.)
Norm mocked a sponsor of his podcast, mocked the cast of SNL when the show invited him back to host after he was fired, mocked Barbara Walters to her face on The View. He mocked other comics. He mocked David Letterman so effectively that Letterman, amused, had him on his show and challenged him to mock him from two feet away. So Norm did it. With Norm, Letterman said, you never saw any of the punchlines coming. The combination of delight and shock was evident from the audience reaction: Often you’d hear an “Oooooh!” sound beneath the laughs. Today’s late-night comics aim for clapter. Norm drew blood.