"He makes his work look effortless."

August 23, 2016 7:47 PM

Will somebody please give Norm Macdonald another TV show? by Geoff Edgers, Washington Post
"If we could have, we would have had Norm on every damn week,” Letterman says. “He is funny in a way that some people inhale and exhale. With others, you can tell the comedy, the humor is considered. With Norm, he exudes it. It’s sort of a furnace in him because he’s so effortless. The combination of the delivery and his appearance and his intelligence. There may be people as funny as Norm, but I don’t know anybody who is funnier.” -- David Letterman
(Norm Macdonald, most recent previously: 1, 2, 3, 4)
posted by Room 641-A (31 comments total)

Reminder that if you have problems accessing the WaPo site, opening the link in private/incognito mode often works.
posted by Room 641-A at 7:49 PM on August 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

I get sort of a Bob Newhart style of comedy from Norm
posted by robbyrobs at 8:00 PM on August 23, 2016 [4 favorites]

I love Norm. I love you, Norm! Another TV show...someone give him a whole TV channel!
posted by sallybrown at 8:17 PM on August 23, 2016

So a moth goes into a podiatrist's office... (SLYT)
posted by splitpeasoup at 8:22 PM on August 23, 2016 [31 favorites]

Hi, Norm!
posted by octobersurprise at 8:26 PM on August 23, 2016

Dude's a bit of a homophobe. Just sayin'
posted by a lungful of dragon at 8:41 PM on August 23, 2016 [2 favorites]

The only time I even remotely considered eating KFC lately it was solely because at that moment Norm was Colonel Sanders.

Also, when I imagine Death it is always with Norm's voice, which makes it somehow less scary.
posted by kinnakeet at 8:43 PM on August 23, 2016

Bob, you have a lot of well-wishers here tonight, and a lot of them would like to throw you down one! A well. They want to murder you in a well. Seems a little harsh, but -- apparently they want to murder you in a well. Says here on this card.
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 8:46 PM on August 23, 2016 [17 favorites]

No, we really don't need to give him another show. He's had many chances to make his voice heard on TV, and he's used it to promote bigotry against LGBT folks too often and too recently.
posted by lemonadeheretic at 8:55 PM on August 23, 2016 [5 favorites]

This just goes to prove my theory that Germans love David Hasselhoff.
posted by Capt. Renault at 9:03 PM on August 23, 2016

With the exception of some of the more absurd/stupid fake satellite interview stuff (Bob Dole: Clinton has a third nipple! That nipple squrts acid on God-fearing Christians! The people deserve to know the truth about Nipplegate!) the funniest things I remember from 90s era Conan all involved Norm.

The thing is it seems like of people just don't get him for whatever reason. I link the Moth joke to someone or I link the Carrot Top/Box Office Poison Conan clip or some other random thing and it is at best 50/50 on whether they think it is funny or not. Norm makes me laugh more and more easily than any other comedian alive but it seems like half the people I try to get interested in his stuff just stare blankly in confusion.
posted by weretable and the undead chairs at 9:11 PM on August 23, 2016 [3 favorites]

I was excited to discover his podcast.

I was sad to see that there are only a handful of episodes available.

Then the first homophobic joke came up. Then the second and third. Then some borderline racist stuff. Then the transphobia. Somehow Norm manages to make it sound like it is all some innocent confusion or misunderstanding, like he does not mean any ill. But I don't buy it.

Then I was no longer sad about the number of episodes.

Come on Norm! You are one of the funniest people ever! And you are smart! It's not so hard to listen and learn once in a while.

I would love a new TV show after he talks publicly about this issue, if he shows he has learned something.
posted by Doroteo Arango II at 9:25 PM on August 23, 2016 [14 favorites]

Norm'll do okay. If Don Rickles can still pay his bills, Norm has a future.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 9:35 PM on August 23, 2016 [2 favorites]

Can someone give me an example of one of these Norm Macdonald homophobic jokes?
posted by andoatnp at 10:00 PM on August 23, 2016 [2 favorites]

The gay pride one is easily searched for.
posted by notyou at 10:03 PM on August 23, 2016

Is that the worst of it?
posted by andoatnp at 10:06 PM on August 23, 2016

Norm's "Twilight Zone" Sketch
posted by a lungful of dragon at 10:55 PM on August 23, 2016

I imagine this is the gay pride joke people are referring to (you have to CTRL-F for his name in the page, but having quotes by all those other mainstream comics on the page also serves to establish that the norm in standup comedy is to be about as sexist/racist/homophobic as your average Republican uncle).
posted by splitpeasoup at 10:58 PM on August 23, 2016

Cobras and Panthers
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:01 PM on August 23, 2016

There's a deservedly infamous Norm bit from a long time ago:

During the February 24, 1996 episode, Macdonald made a controversial joke about the sentencing of John Lotter, one of the two men who committed the notorious murder of Brandon Teena: "In Falls City, Nebraska, John Lotter has been sentenced to death for attempting to kill three people in what prosecutors called a plot to silence a cross-dressing female who had accused him of surprise sex. Now this might strike some viewers as harsh, but I believe everyone involved in this story 'deserved to die'."

I dunno about recent stuff but I've heard a few people allude to it.
posted by atoxyl at 12:01 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Cobras and Panthers

I can see how this can be read as homophobic - as a lifelong hater of musicals, I thought this was about the conceits of that genre. Like there's a character who's in a musical, operating under the assumptions of realism, so unprepared for the imo huge and unreasonable demand for the suspension of disbelief required to make/enjoy musicals. So he's confused when he sees that his mates - without having discussed or practiced it, and without knowing why - have spontaneously coordinated and executed a dance routine, to some level of skill, instead of preparing for the knife fight he's expecting. Except he's really in a musical, so he's wrong, they are doing the knife fight right.

(He may be homophobic, I've definitely heard him use the word "gay" in the heteronormative way, but not sure this skit demonstrates it. But I could so be wrong.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 1:30 AM on August 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

Ctrl-F "moth" and yes you are still my people.
posted by whuppy at 5:50 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Recently, I took a friend of mine on a Norm MacDonald binge. It was the sort of evening where you're too sleepy to do anything meaningful, and a TV plus YouTube equals hours of increasingly–deranged laughter.

Norm at his best is close to untouchable. He makes me shriek. His Bob Saget roast might get funnier every time I watch it.

If you're picking random Norm MacDonald videos, however, it's only a matter of time before you come across a (prolonged) joke about men getting raped by men or something similar. That isn't the only one that comes up if you look for things as innocent as "norm macdonald joke", but I don't feel like reviewing all of his clips to remember which ones have idle gay or trans or rape jokes in them, and it's a whole chunk of them anyway.

Many comedians subscribe to the theory that comedy ought to be purely about what's funny and what's not, and, if you look at that Norm joke from the perspective of what things come together to make a thing funny, it's pretty masterful. Many people, myself included, find it difficult to laugh at even the most brilliantly–crafted joke if it seems to be expressing hate for the undeserving. I can't say I found myself tempted to laugh at that clip this time around. I might've laughed at it on YouTube night, I'm not sure, but it stuck with me enough that I knew exactly how to hunt it back down.

I love Norm but think it would be a mistake to ignore the ugly bile at the heart of much of his material. It's why I'm wary of his stand–up specials: I really don't want to inflict potentially nasty shit on myself when I'm looking for a laugh. And it's why I'm delighted that some comedians manage to be brilliant, edgy, and tediously politically correct.
posted by rorgy at 6:05 AM on August 24, 2016 [10 favorites]

[McDonald:] "I believe everyone involved in the [Brandon Teena] story 'deserved to die'."

Sheesh. I was sort-of-defending him earlier in this thread, but I take it all back. The hell with him.

he's great in bed and very respectful to his one-night stands.

I heard Hitler was nice to his pet dogs, but that doesn't cancel out the Holocaust.
posted by splitpeasoup at 7:59 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Hearing Norm Macdonald's moth joke is one of the few times in my life that I ended up laughing so hard that I started crying and couldn't breathe by the end of it*. In a way it's hard to recommend that clip to people because it has to hit you at the right angle and you have to be in a particular mood to really let it get to you. But my god it got me.

Norm also had a really funny Twitter feed, but suddenly he deleted(?) all his old tweets and just talked about sports instead. I wish I had saved some because they were hilarious as well.

*One of the other times was the Brothers Grimm episode of The Dead Authors Podcast. And every Jack Handy quote ever.
posted by littlesq at 8:33 AM on August 24, 2016

I also [GOSSIP WARNING] heard, from an old acquaintance, that he's great in bed

Great at what?
posted by octobersurprise at 8:35 AM on August 24, 2016

Same, same.
posted by cotton dress sock at 9:07 AM on August 24, 2016

As littlesq mentioned, Norm had a pretty funny twitter feed for a while, but he lost me when he started live-tweeting golf matches. However, my favorite tweet of his was this: "I will name my dog Holy Roman Empire, for he is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire." It still makes me laugh, especially when I say it aloud.
posted by OurOwnMrK at 12:26 PM on August 24, 2016

I thought I was getting a little emotionally distant, so I bought a book called "How to Hug," but it just turned out to be Volume VI of the Oxford English Dictionary.
posted by 4ster at 12:43 PM on August 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

More about remembering and not so much about prior art, but "How To Hug" is quite similar to an old Martin Mull joke where he is in a dismal motel in the middle of nowhere, and finds a book called "Girl to Grab" which he excitedly expects to be somewhat pornographic. It turns out to be a single volume from the encyclopedia.

I can see why the joke would have puzzled the writer's daughter. Back in the last century many homes actually had a set of some encyclopedia sitting visibly on a shelf.

There was a very long story from I don't know where about the father of a poor family who is convinced by a traveling salesman to subscribe to an encyclopedia. Every so often -- I forget the frequency -- but they receive a volume, one at a time, as they are printed. After they get the first book, the family gets in an argument about types of apples. Someone remembers that they have the encyclopedia now, so they go to look up "apples" but the entry only says, "SEE POMOLOGY". The B volume comes, along with an unexpected pregnancy, so to console themselves by trying to look up "baby" but the entry only says, "SEE GESTATION".

It goes on and on like that, until after many years the old man is on his deathbed. He has them put him by the window, where he can watch for the traveling salesman to bring the Z volume. It's been long and difficult because it wasn't always easy to find the money each time a volume arrived, but they stuck with it. The salesman arrives, the old man clutches the book, and dies happy.

The salesman asks whether the family is responsible for any debts incurred by the father, and they say "yes" without any idea of what he could mean. So he says, "There is one more volume: the index!"

And then I guess they all bought overcoats and lived happily ever after.
posted by OurOwnMrK at 5:33 AM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

Am I the only one here who always just didn't like his work and felt his delivery killed the laugh
posted by gusandrews at 7:53 PM on August 25, 2016