NORM MACDONALD’S NEW BOOK KEEPS YOU GUESSING.

If getting you primed for one experience only to left- turn hard into another is a very Norm Macdonald thing to do, than deepening the expectation with a quasi- philosophical consideration of the nature of memory, and then immediately suggesting that the impresario of Saturday Night Live has a growling addiction to government- grade morphine is the kind of thing that only Norm Macdonald would do. “It turns out your memory isn’t the precise court stenographer you think it is, getting every word down just so,” Macdonald explains in the preface to his memoir, Based on a True Story. “It’s more like the sketch artist way at the back of the courtroom who is doing his level best to capture images that no longer are. “So it won’t be a true story,” he continues. “It’ l l be based on a true story, like every story I’ve ever told. But I promise you this: it’ ll be the truth, every word of it, to the best of my memory.” The story that follows certainly has something in common with Macdonald’s story. It’s about a man who has been on Saturday Night Live, who wrote and starred in a film called Dirty Work and on a sitcom called Norm – which we know because he wears a branded jacket, hat and t- shirt, respectively, with all those milestones, so people always know who he is. This is the Norm Macdonald who gets his job on Saturday Night Live because Lorne Michaels shared his mo n u me n - tal morphine habit, who helps a Makea - Wi s h kid fulfill his final dream of beating a seal to death on the ice floes of Newfoundland, who has a ghostwriter driven to suicidal ideation by the idea of turning Norm’s rambling thoughts into yet another celebrity tell-all. “I thought that the only way the book would sell would be a memoir,” explains Norm Macdonald, over the phone, his voice somehow even more subdued than his usual deliberate cadence. “I didn’t really want to write a book that was explicitly meant to be funny. I didn’t want an Erma Bombeck, this-is-a-funny-book kind of thing. “No one wants to read a comic novel,” he continues, pausing after each statement. “Because they’re all awful. So I wanted to write a comic novel and trick people into reading it.” Though its central narrative is a Las Vegas-to-Atlantic- City bender that features plenty of morphine- dipped cigarettes, a sidekick who used to be a rent-boy providing “services” for cash under the Brooklyn Bridge and a run from a high-stakes loan shark, there is some true story to base this on. Macdonald does at least frame it around his actual biography. He grew up in the Ottawa Valley, and started doing stand-up at clubs like YukYuk’s, eventually touring with the likes of Sam Kinison. His esteem among his fellow stand-ups led to a slot on SNL in the spotty but legendary Sandler-Farley years, Macdonald being the rare pure stand-up who did more than write for the show. He settled in as host of Weekend Update, probably the most avantgarde take on the slot the show has had, and was rather famously dumped by NBC head Don Ohlmeyer, allegedly because he was too harsh on O. J. Simpson (though here Macdonald suggests it was because he had lightened up too much on the man he repeatedly called a muderer on national television.) PostSNL, Macdonald has strung together some movies and TV shows, but he has chiefly been a professional comedian, one who is frequently cited as being under-used. He is a favourite late night guest, with some particularly memorable spots on Conan and Letterman, and he has recently used his high esteem to put together his first stand-up specials – his first, Me Doing Stand-up, was in 2011, and another is on the way with Netflix – and more recently launched a video podcast, that, true to style, is essentially a collection of discursive jokes, with famous people.

Still, Based on a True Story is studded with plenty of outright BS, from the horribly dark to the gleefully silly. Every moment of potential insight, like getting the SNL gig, is immediately turned into something far more bizarre.

At its most basic level, comedy is exactly this kind of left hook of expectation. You thought that man was going to keep walking down the road, but he falls into a manhole cover. You thought Henny Youngman was going to use his wife as an example, but he literally just wants you to take her. You think a comic is going to get nastily personal at a roast of one of his friends, and instead he hits him with a pillowy soft selection of material from a 1950s insult joke book, as Macdonald did during a legendary set during the roast of Bob Saget.

If Norm Macdonald is one of the funniest comics of his generation – and there are plenty of other funny people, from David Letterman, who booked him as the comedian on his final show, to Louis C. K., who provides the foreword to Based on a True Story ( not to mention the network of former collaborators and distant well- wishers who will debate just where Norm is in their personal top fives) – it is because he knows how to set off this juxtaposition so well. He knows how to build your expectation so deep, that even the slightest hitch can be hilarious – and the wild, ridiculous swings he often employs, in that pointedly dry tone of his, can be something else entirely.

Stand-up might always be the purest expression of that sensibility, but in a twist that fits one of his drier jokes, it also might be the least visible aspect of his public persona. Because of its place in our consciousness, Macdonald’s run on Saturday Night Live – specifically, his time behind the Weekend Update desk – will always define him. It is both an ideal and an imperfect showcase.

On the one hand, Macdonald, more than most stand- ups of his calibre, never really worked all that well as an actor. He certainly doesn’t have what you would consider range: the biggest stretch he ever took with a role was probably Burt Reynolds on Celebrity Jeopardy, and even that is just a sort of sillier and more oblivious puff-up of his general presence. Something like Dirty Work – a potential SNL launch pad that was funnier than its box office fizzle suggested – is basically just pure Norm, right down to its hyper- literalism and jokes about prison rape.

That presence doesn’t translate particularly well to the demands of filmed comedy of any description. Macdonald likes to play with the audience, whether it’s a full crowd or just another comedian: he reels them in and jerks them around, but he always makes them come to him. Films and sitcoms – at least the relatively straight-ahead ones that Macdonald has made – tend to work the opposite way: they force themselves on the audience, overwhelming them.

“I’ve never liked television for the reason that everyone laughs all the time,” Macdonald admits. “I don’t even like watching television, because every joke destroys. You feel like you’re going mad just watching. I feel alienated by it, because it’s like — well, why am I not laughing? But a sitcom audience is complicit with the whole affair. They’re participants, they know what their job is.”

The Weekend Update desk is much closer to Macdonald’s natural home, screwing around with a crowd – sometimes, fairly quickly, a mildly hostile one. The segment’s well-established format, the fake news, as he called it, limited some of his rambling absurdity, which was a shame, but Macdonald and his collaborators, specifically long- time SNL writer Jim Downey, found a way to reduce jokes down to their essence. Their often-stated goal was to craft jokes where the punchline was the same as the set- up. The expectation of Weekend Update was that they’d have some snide remark about something in the news (the Seth Meyers style); the turn, often as not, was that the news itself was plenty ridiculous, and all Macdonald needed to do was lay it out for you.

An often cited example of this is the Lyle Lovett/ Julia Roberts divorce: “Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts were divorced today. The reason: he’s Lyle Lovett and she’s Julia Roberts.” Macdonald has another favourite, though.

“We did one when Marlon Brando said something about the Jews controlling Hollywood,” he explains. “He got in trouble, so he went and apologized to the Jewish leaders, and they said, ‘ Okay, you can work again.’ Which is exactly what happened. It was just so funny to say what actually happened, and they couldn’t go after me or anything.”

The Brando joke points to something often overlooked in Macdonald’s comedy: the extent to which abject absurdity is dealing with the inherent absurdity of the world, the ways in which we gloss over or even just refuse to admit how complex and connected comedy and tragedy, silliness and seriousness, really are.

In the right light, it can look something like moral clarity. For instance, Macdonald’s tenure on Weekend Update coincided with the O. J. Simpson trial. At a time when punchlines were not in short supply, Macdonald’s were devastating in their simplicity: all he did was point out that O. J. was a murderer. Almost every joke, again and again. (He did something similar with Michael Jackson, who he relentlessly called a “homosexual pedophile.”) The bluntness is not just working against the usual chirpy sarcasm of a topical joke; it’s revelling in the absurdity of making cute jokes about such horrible subjects, piling on the bleakness of the world in a space we use as a relief valve from it.

In stand-up and in Based on a True Story, Macdonald tends to live in this weird contradiction even more. One of his favourite styles of joke is epitomized by the moth story, which he recounts in the novel. In it, a horribly depressed moth wanders into a podiatrist’s office, and proceeds to recount a tale of existential woe straight out of a Tsarist Russian novel. The moth explains how he no longer loves his wife, how he is torn up by the loss of his daughter and can barely look at his son because he sees the same cowardice that ruined his own life. The podiatrist is sympathetic, but wonders why the moth has come to him, a foot doctor. “The light was on,” says the moth.

That’s the opposite angle, finding a cute joke in a story of unrelenting bleakness, but it is the ultimate expression of Macdonald’s ability to turn the tables on an audience. The joke is almost cosmic in its juxtaposition of horror and silliness. It represents the heaviest way of setting up expectation and then pulling the rug out from under you. It’s also very pointed proof that you can’t get complacent with Macdonald, that as soon as you have settled in and are trusting him, he is going to upend you completely.

“Even before I was famous, I would perform at Yuk-Yuks, and people came there with the express purpose to laugh. They knew that if they didn’t laugh, they wouldn’t have a good time,” Macdonald says of his early stand-up days. “So whoever was on stage was really irrelevant to the situation. When the audience is laughing at every single person … you can’t really take much pride in making them laugh, because it’s like going there to get drunk. They came there to laugh, and they’re going to experience laughter from anything put in front of them. All you can do at that point is annoy them. You know, just to get a different reaction out of them.”

Assuming that story is true, it seems safe to say that Norm Macdonald has always been looking to take you to the last place you were expecting.

Queen Elizabeth II visited Russia this week, becoming the first English monarch to set foot in the Soviet Union. The visit, which will last for two weeks, is expected to have absolutely no effect on anything whatsoever. You know, with Hitler, the more I learn about that guy, the more I don’t care for him. This week, pilot Linda Finch marked the sixty-year anniversary of Amelia Earhart’s attempt to fly around the world, by setting out on her own round- the-world flight. Finch took off on Monday from the same Oakland, California airfield as Earhart, and hopes to reach Europe by next Wednesday. By Sunday evening, if all goes well, she plans to have mysteriously disappeared forever. You ever see The Dating Game? That’s a weird game show. The prize on that show: another contestant. Talk about cheap. the NORM FORM How Norm Macdonald’s comedy continues to set your expectations before pulling the rug out from under you There are only two categories in cliff diving: there’s ‘ grand champion’ and ‘ stuff on a rock.’ I consider Amy Schumer the funniest person on the planet. If you take me out of the equation. They say that if you’re afraid of homosexuals, it means that deep down inside you’re actually a homosexual yourself. That worries me because I’m afraid of dogs. I don’t do much. I’m too lazy. That’s my problem. Hang around my couch, watching the TV. Just too lazy. I realized this the other day, I get hit by a truck tomorrow – a big truck could hit me – paralyze me from the neck down. Wouldn’t effect my lifestyle a bit really. Kenny G has a Christmas album out this year. Hey, happy birthday, Jesus! Hope you like crap! Following the passage of a new city ordinance, strippers are now forbidden to give lap dances in the city of Houston, Texas. Or, as I refer to it: Nazi Germany.

And in music news, number one on the college charts this summer was Better Than Ezra. And at number two? Ezra.