If Norm Macdonald, who died last week, (and yes that’s the way he spelled it) was not the funniest man who ever drew a breath, I don’t know who was. I took a mental inventory the other day of other comedians that I found to be hysterical. It was a short list: Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, early Steve Martin, occasionally David Letterman and Joan Rivers. That’s about it. Norm was better than them all. As someone said upon his passing, “He did comedy they way other people do breathing.”
BTW, I owe a debt of gratitude to David Letterman for telling The Greatest Joke Ever Written in an interview with Esquire magazine. As this is a family blog, I shall not repeat it in this space. Ask me about it sometime though.
Macdonald’s highest and best use (as we say in real estate) was as the Anchor on SNL’s Weekend Update. His flat affect, his slightly nasal accent of no fixed abode and sense of timing was perfect for that role. That and his dadesque wordplay in the service of reading the “news.” A personal favorite? With the face of the Chicago Seven’s Jerry Ruben superimposed in the background, Norm gleefully shouted out “Yippee! Jerry Ruben is dead! Oh. Wait. I read that wrong. Yippee Jerry Ruben is dead.” He also famously attributed the breakup of Marie Presley and Michael Jackson to Wacko being “a child molesting homosexual.”
Someone asked me back then if I thought NBC and Macdonald were worried about getting sued for slander by Jackson. Uhhhh no. I mean, c’mon. Wacko couldn’t stand up to discovery.
After SNL he worked in movies, did voice work for cartoons, did guest appearances on talk shows and returned to standup.
Here’s another thing I admired about Norm. At the time of his death it was disclosed that he had been suffering from cancer for the last 9 years. He never made that fact public knowledge. According to his publicist, he didn’t want his illness to distract from the jokes. He was a comedian first and foremost. Maybe he thought that people wouldn’t laugh at a guy they pitied.
Perhaps I am projecting based on what we all know now, but he doesn’t look good in recent videos. He was slender man. But his face was puffy in his last images. I’ve known people with cancer and lupus who had to take massive doses of prednisone. Their faces looked like that.
But who knows?
Anyway, how many celebrities lives are closed books? Pretty rare. That was a major point concerning the documentary of Ronald and Russell Mael of Uber strange band Sparks. The flick lasts some 2.5 hours and we don’t know anymore about the Mael brothers than we did going into it. That’s pretty rare. My friend Philip Martin wrote in his review of the movie something along the lines of “Ronald and Russell Mael think their personal lives are none of our damn business. And they’re right.”
Me? I don’t have any particular need to know about a celebrity’s personal life. For every Michael J. Fox, whose struggles with Parkinson’s Disease is both inspirational and instructive, there’s Kim Kardashian trying to pass the California bar without benefit of a law degree on reality TV. Or, God forbid, Caitlyn Jenner who just tried to run for Governor out there, undeterred as she evidently was by a lack of political experience and/or introspection. And, we now know why Elvira called herself the Mistress of the Dark. That is because she was in the closet. Well, no more. She along, with her fright wig and pushup bra, have come out. Did I need to know that? Do I give a rat’s ass? No. I could go on. So could you.
I have all the respect in the world for a guy like Norm who went out on his own terms. Perhaps he thought revealing too much about himself was undignified. Or un-Canadian. We now also know he had no use for war as a metaphor for coping with cancer, saying that a bad outcome is no worse than a draw since the disease entity dies when the patient does. Nobody wins. Nobody loses. It’s a draw. Maybe, like the Maels, he simply thought it was none of our damn business. And he was right.
Gold standard source Wikipedia reports that Norm died from leukemia. The legit press evidently “scooped” by Wikipedia. How about that?
Imagine what Norm Macdonald could have made of that.
