An appreciation of underachiever and comedy treasure Norm Macdonald.
This is a column about the comedian Norm Macdonald that is being written in the spirit of Norm Macdonald. I don’t even have a plan for the rest of this lead paragraph; just a lot of disorganized thoughts and observations. But I’ ll start with a question: if you had to explain Norm Macdonald to a stranger by comparing him to someone else in the annals of entertainment, to whom would you refer?
He briefly (1994-97) had a big job at the heart of American culture, as host of the Weekend Update segment on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. He lost the job under controversial circumstances ( translation: he angered a powerful TV network imbecile). Since that time, by the standards of the television industry, Macdonald has been a persistent underachiever — except as a beloved, unpredictable talkshow guest. This reminds us that talk shows used to be full of that sort of performer: people who dined out on comet-like successes so long that eventually few remembered why they had become famous in the first place.
In that sense, you could explain Norm Macdonald very easily. He’s a 21st- century answer to Charles Nelson Reilly, Robert Goulet or Paul Lynde (who all, just so there’s no mistaking my point, surely carried embers of authentic genius). The problem here is that Macdonald has never quite stopped doing first- class work in dribs and drabs — a beloved cult movie here ( 1998’ s Dirty Work), an excellent comedy album there ( 2006’s Ridiculous), a thwarted attempt to do sports on Comedy Central in a Daily Show- esque format ( 2011’ s Sports Show With Norm Macdonald). The Sports Show lasted nine episodes, but people will still be talking about it long after they pull the plug on Bill Simmons’ analogous HBO project, which has proved leaden. Even Macdonald’s ta l k- s how a ppearances have been immortalized unexpectedly by YouTube.
All the while, Macdonald has been out on the road, doing stand-up comedy roughly 500 nights a year, which has given him the luxury of treating Hollywood as a distasteful hobby. Unlike some of his less talented colleagues from SNL, he didn’t become a movie star or make millions from a long-running sitcom. But his monk- like devotion to stand- up means he can earn as much as he cares to, perhaps almost without limit. By his own account, he has thrown away large fortunes on gambling.
Looking back, what you notice about his quilt- like oeuvre is that almost every minute of it bears Macdonald’s stamp — the ceaseless quest for comic spareness; the sense that the ultimate joke would be a plain fact stated in a few words. He has rarely taken any job that involved merely reading someone else’s writing. He insisted on a form of creative control, even when he was guesting on talk shows, and refusing to rehearse his material with David Letterman and Conan O’Brien's booking agents in pre-interviews.
His latest experiment is what he describes as a comic novel — or, rather, what he now describes as a comic novel after titling it Based on a True Story: A Memoir and allowing it to be promoted as non- fiction for some years. This Andy Kaufman- l i ke leg-pull has had the effect of snapping Norm Macdonald into focus a little more clearly: he is still keeping the joke in the air among duller interviewers, while simultaneously chatting with The New Yorker about his love for Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver. Every interlocutor gets a subtly different Macdonald, and I am not certain there is any level of erudition he is unable to meet.
(He is not strictly working class, but any working- class kid has had acquaintances like Macdonald: unobtrusive, unkempt guys without formal education who do low- status jobs — it would still shock us if a member of the Royal Family married a stand- up comic — but who turn out to have mastered Ovid or celestial navigation in their spare time.)
By not t al king much about his background and speaking in a slow, deliberate way, Macdonald has managed to persuade many Americans that he is a sort of Kaspar Hauser- like child of nature from the inchoate northern wilds. There is an added pleasure in this for Canadians because we know better. It would be an insult to Macdonald to praise him as a mere national treasure, but there is a Canadian aspect to this game, a sense in which he is using the big empty spaces on the continental map to confuse ( to snow?) Americans.
The real joy is that the book is being well received by serious critics. It’s like the sensational Elvis Presley impression Kaufman used to do as a punchline, but with a degree of difficulty multiplier of about a billion. Somehow Macdonald is, in flogging a book, also creating a work of performance art that uses TV and radio shows, print, podcasts and late- night Twitter as a cybernetic canvas. It defies explanation or summary. Like a stand- up performance, it can only be truly experienced as it is happening.
Unlike a stand- up performance, it cannot quite be monetized. But the book has done well, and if Macdonald’s prior career is any indication, it will go on attracting audiences. As he is canny enough to know, that’s the nice thing about a book: you can go on selling copies for as long as people are willing to buy them.
NORM MACDONALD: COMEDIAN, AUTHOR … BOREAL PERFORMANCE ART GENIUS?