I’ve long believed that to understand a society, a culture, its people, there’s no better place to look than comedians. Comedy is a medium that does its best to defy performative opinions. It lives and dies on the instant feedback of a raucous chorus of laughter, the desperate silence of a failed punch line. There’s no room for ambiguity. Something is funny or it is not; you cannot fake a laugh. It follows, then, that comedians are some of the most honest brokers in cultural life. They have to see the world and describe it how it is—otherwise they will fail.
The late great Norm Macdonald was not only an incredible comedian; he was also someone relentlessly clear-eyed in how he saw the world. Saturday Night Live’s most famous Canadian son—and the subject of Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald, a new Judd Apatow documentary released on Netflix last week—was as much a great thinker as he was a great joke teller. He developed many distinct followings over his career, launching a cult classic YouTube podcast that inspired a generation of comedians with absurd jokes that would never have aired outside of his own channel.
I discovered Norm late, only a few years before his death in 2021, but I was transfixed. His deadpan delivery, his commitment to the bit above all else, the fact that he could bring actual humor to an awards show red carpet, made me fall in love with his jokes in a million different ways. And now, nearly a decade later, his witticisms have crept into my speech and I find myself frequently looping back to jokes he made—including his final perfect punch line, when he reacted to hearing that Adolf Hitler had died decades ago with the deadpan, “Did he? I didn’t even know he was sick.” Millions repeated that joke after he passed away from cancer—a disease he’d kept secret for 10 years.