Not the Norm
Five years after his death, Norm Macdonald’s comedic legacy lives on.
A couple years ago, an animated comedy series was released online titled—in a reference to the Covid-era trope “the new normal”—The New Norm. It was so clumsily and unsubtly anti-woke that, as I was watching it, I didn’t even crack a smile. But then I did start laughing. I had imagined Norm Macdonald’s reaction if he could see his humorless namesake.
The late Norm Macdonald is a comedic deity. I never hear a bad word about him. His fans, myself included, are enthusiastic to the point of devotion. Our heads are full of references to his work. We mumble sacred utterances like “hold the fort” and “9/11 was a national tragedy.”
Somehow, we all simultaneously think that he was speaking directly to us.
This has only become more true since Norm’s death in 2021. I know my own affection has strengthened and deepened since his passing.
But why? Norm had a small body of work—a few specials, a film, a sitcom, a comedy album, a talk show, and a book. And even some of this scanty output (the sitcom, for instance) hardly rises to the level of comedic legend.
For answers, I watched Judd Apatow’s new documentary Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald.
Norm takes the form of a collage of clips, most of which feature Norm himself speaking. (That I can’t stop calling him “Norm”—rather than “Macdonald” —is a sign of the warmth with which he is regarded by his devotees.)
This was a good decision on Apatow’s part, because most of us found Norm through clips. And while his formal body of work is small, he made an awful lot of appearances on TV, radio, and podcasts. There, he always seemed to be more original, authentic, and fun than other interviewees. “The hole you get into with Norm is crazy,” says the comedian Matt McCusker, referring to the hours that can be spent browsing Norm clips.
Because Norm is largely made up of Macdonald’s own words, we learn few of this most mysterious comedian’s secrets. This was initially disappointing, though I suppose if we love a man we should respect his desire to keep things private. (Unless, of course, he’s Bill Cosby.) Apatow was friends with Norm, and I can hardly fault him for not barging into rooms that the great man had kept locked.
Norm Macdonald did not tell us much about his life. His hilarious and beautifully written book Based on a True Story is heavily fictionalized, and he even kept from the world the fact that he was dying. Apatow’s documentary is moving in how it stitches together Norm’s elliptical references to illness and death. (“If you die, the cancer also dies…. That’s not a loss, it’s a draw.”) Almost no one knew that he was pondering his own fate.
Nor, unlike modern comedians of all stripes, did Norm try to sell us his beliefs. Yes, his quiet faith, and his quieter contempt for various modern absurdities, would sometimes shine through. But above all he was focused on what was funny—on subverting expectations, on playing with language, on unpicking the inherent strangeness of cultural habits.
He loved the original and the unpredictable. Sometimes, this involved being edgy, as with the ruthless O.J. Simpson jokes that would eventually get him fired from Saturday Night Live. But when being edgy was predictable, he could flip the script. When he was invited to the roast of Bob Saget, for example, where comedians were expected to exchange distastefully insulting barbs, he instead told a series of innocuous, old-timey jokes.
Without ever being didactic, and while maintaining a thin pretence of being a know-nothing, Norm hid philosophical depths beneath his comedy. “I remember a psychiatrist telling me I gamble to escape the reality of life,” he once joked. “But I told him, ‘That’s why anyone does anything’.”
It’s funny, inasmuch as it’s an unexpected twist on conventional wisdom, but it also makes you think—not because it’s entirely true, perhaps, but because it’s true enough to be interesting.
And Norm was unapologetic about his humor. He defied the censors, like the people who fired him from SNL, but he also defied his audiences. His fellow comics have marvelled at the enjoyment he seemed to take in bombing. As long as Norm thought a joke was funny, whether the viewers laughed was immaterial.
And anyway, more often than not the crowd would (eventually) come around. Apatow’s documentary shows us that, although now we say “remember when that genius Norm Macdonald told a lot of deliberately bad jokes at the Bob Saget roast,” at the time a lot of people in the audience were thinking “why is this idiot Norm Macdonald telling bad jokes.” But Norm enjoyed the comic nature of a good cringe. In clip after clip, as you watch Norm, you can see the twinkle in his eye as he prepares to surprise, annoy or exasperate someone.
Norm’s qualities—his courage, his integrity, his unsentimentality, and his delight in humour —are in short enough supply in the modern world that his work seems even more refreshing and valuable. Self-important, oversharing, and attention-seeking modern comedians, in other words, have increased his stature.
But as I watched Norm, it struck me that I’m not sure Norm would really like his adoring fans. Our wallowing in his old jokes might seem downright tedious to a comedian who loved fresh, surprising humour. And our uncritical affection might provoke his ire. When I see my fellow Norm enthusiasts reproduce his jokes with reference to current events—or, worse, post his photographs beneath their own jokes—it strikes me that Norm was independent-minded and original enough that we really don’t know what he would have thought about them. What I suspect he might have thought, though, is that instead of referencing “I didn’t even know he was sick” or “that’s my lucky stabbin’ hat” for the ten millionth time, we should find something new.
But sorry, Norm. There is comfort in the familiar—and in the purely funny. I’m going to reread Based on a True Story and listen to Gilbert Gottfried’s appearance on Norm Macdonald Live yet again.
Then I should find something new to laugh about.
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