Norm Macdonald Killed before He Died

D uring a lockdown period in the summer of 2020, Norm Macdonald knew he was dying of cancer, which would end his life the following year. But he told almost no one about his plight, and other comics were stunned when he passed. Just before going into the hospital for a procedure, he worried that he might not be able ever to perform again, so he recorded one last 50-minute routine in his living room, seated at his computer. What amounts to his farewell Zoom call also constitutes his final Netflix star turn, Norm Macdonald: Nothing Special.

The act (followed by a half-hour of roundtable discussion featuring Macdonald’s pals David Letterman, Dave Chappelle, Molly Shannon, Conan O’Brien, Adam Sandler, and David Spade) is triply eerie: the stifling combination of the lockdown, terminal illness, and the raw format, which captures Norm via only two stationary cameras, tends to minimize mirth. Norm does not look strong (he says he is hiding his white hair under a baseball cap), the special is uneven, and some of the jokes don’t work. Others are killer, such as a climactic bit about his mother that’s so digressive it’s a successor to his famous moth joke.

Many viewers will find that the absence of a responsive audience robs the special of its comic energy. I didn’t laugh much, but as a Norm fan, I appreciated the urgency of his valedictory words. And the impishness of his willingness to lob a few jokes about the linguistic legerdemain that tends to go with discussions of transgenderism.

Macdonald indulges a few hokey old bits, but there is a lot of fresh, sharp material here. As a kid, he claims, “I said to Dad, ‘I think I’m a little girl!’ And he said, ‘I thought you had a c***.’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah,’ you got me.” Macdonald adds that all of the above should never be said: “The only reason I tell you that is to show how hateful we were back then.” He notes with pride, however, that his family was ahead of its time: “For instance, we had a gender-neutral bathroom!”

In some of his best bits, Macdonald comes at the question of living from several oblique angles. How come no one ever survives a plane crash except in the Andes? What is the etiquette of cannibalism after that? How should one go about dining on one’s co-pilot? He wonders why people abort their children with Down syndrome when we can all see that folks with DS are remarkably happy: “Happiness — the thing we strive for the most — people pity these people that have it. ‘Breaks my heart when I see ’em. You know why they’re happy, right? It’s on account of they don’t understand life’s horrors. . . . You know what’s the saddest part about it? There’s no cure! They’ll probably die happy!’” A few years ago, Macdonald told us he was a regular National Review reader, and his allergy to leftist cant is pretty obvious here.

Without ever directly mentioning that he has deadly cancer, Macdonald does a number of bits that reflect on illness and mortality, and they’re dizzying. He says going gray imparts useful information, as though God has told him, “I made your hair white, what’d you think that was all about? Get your affairs in order!” He notes, accurately, that getting old means worrying quite a bit about how your left arm feels. If it aches, it’s either “an impending heart attack, or nothing at all.”

Waking up in the morning feels pretty good, for a moment, until reality washes over him: “Life gets all over you like a cobweb, and you go, Goddamn, that’s not fun!” Alluding to the possibility of being “plugged into the wall” in his final days, he teases “my sister” (he didn’t have one, as far as I can tell) for being the one who would likely approve pulling the plug while he’s in a coma: “Used to have dreams. Now it’s just a gray thing. Oh well. He used to make apple pies for me.” He reflects that, right after the plug is pulled, a doctor might rush into the room: “I got some great news! Oh, did you guys pull the plug? Ahh. . . . Nothing, no. Nothing at all.” That’s funny under ordinary circumstances, but from the dying Norm, it’s something else.