One of the unfortunate casualties of the current vogue for censorial wokeness has been the freedom to make jokes.
Exactly what humour is and what makes something funny, let’s leave to the psychologists (and even they aren’t quite sure) but a feature of all jokes is surely honesty. Not necessarily truth (let’s leave that to the philosophers) but expressing an honest thought or feeling, either personal (as per Woody Allen, ‘comedy is telling people they are not alone’) or social.
Which all means a good comedian should have the cojones to be resolutely honest with his audience.
Last week saw the death of Norm MacDonald, an American comic with the biggest, brassiest cojones in the business.
Norm lived for the audience’s sharp little intake of breath following his foot going right up to the edge of (and sometimes a tad over) the good taste line.
Most New Zealanders, save comedy geeks like myself, will be unfamiliar with him; Norm had middling success in US TV and film without reaching the heights of your Jim Carreys or your Adam Sandlers.
But he was funnier. Because he was shockingly, almost pathologically, honest.
Early in his career, he discovered that he could get away with almost anything if he said it through his endearingly mischievous grin. His comic persona, if you could call it that, as he seems to have been the same on stage as off, was an unpretentious, blue-collar, sports-loving everyman.
His first success was on Saturday Night Live, an American TV comedy institution where he began a fake news segment called ‘weekend update’. Although popular, his relentless mocking of OJ Simpson during his murder trial and his willingness to call out Michael Jackson as a kiddie fiddler (before it became fashionable), got him in trouble with the higher-ups. A sample gag:
“When he was in hospital Michael Jackson decorated his room with two big pictures of Shirley Temple. But don’t get the wrong idea: he’s a homosexual paedophile.”
Eventually, he was fired, rumoured to be because of the friendship between Don Ohlmeyer – the president of NBC – and OJ Simpson (Ohlmeyer threw a party for Simpson when he was acquitted). Norm himself maintained that he was fired for general insubordination – reacting to the producer’s suggestions he tone down his attacks on Jackson lest he sue, with, “Sued by Michael Jackson? That’d be cool.”
His failure to really break through was in part down to this attitude; he just couldn’t play the fake Hollywood game.
His appearances on talk shows were full of deliberate sabotage of their phony format – shaggy dog stories, weird topics and ‘blocking’ of the host’s attempts at humour. In the clip below, Norm does the one thing you are not supposed to do on a talk show: publicly bag the movie another guest is there to promote.
His contrary moves were legend – going to a ‘roast’ where comedians try and outdo each other in crassness and reading jokes from a 1950s cheesy joke book, turning down lunch with comedy legend Johnny Carson because he had “no good stories”, refusing to ever learn how to drive, promising a publisher a memoir and delivering a strange semi-autobiographical comic novel instead.
But what really got him in trouble with the media elite was his politics. He didn’t have any. Or rather he wasn’t an avowed lefty. Norm always claimed to be apolitical, saying he didn’t know enough to have an opinion. If only our current crop of celebrity activists were as wise. But it didn’t stop him trolling those who were only too political. In 2000, after the Bush/Gore election, he was a guest on ‘The View’ – a chat show featuring four very left-leaning lady hosts. Watch them fall for it hook line and sinker:
If this weren’t offensive enough to Hollywood sensibilities, he soon came out as a professing Christian. It was one of the few things he seemed to be serious about; hosting a 2015 comedy contest, he disagreed with another judge calling a contestant ‘brave’ for his anti-Christian jokes, saying ” I think if you’re going to take on an entire religion, you should maybe know what you’re talking about.”
Perhaps it was his Christianity that inspired his defence of comics Louis CK and Rosanne Barr when they ran afoul of the Me Too movement. This defence took the form of a plea for forgiveness for celebrities that make very human mistakes. Ironically, he was shown no forgiveness himself for daring to critique the Me Too movement; a 2018 appearance on The Tonight Show was cancelled after some producers “were in tears” at the thought of such a moral monster doing the show.
In his final years, after effectively becoming too politically incorrect for the major networks, he found a home of sorts on the internet in a series of video podcasts, Norm Macdonald Live. Revelling in freedom from content censors, he unleashed jokes that would make your average social justice warrior’s hair turn from pink to white. A favourite bit was claiming his sidekick Adam Eget was a holocaust denier – usually when he had Jewish guests.
Norm once wrote, “A joke should always surprise, it should never pander.”
Something that modern comics (nowhere more so than here in New Zealand) who make a career out of pandering to the political Left, mirroring their comfortable nostrums on race, gender and politics, seem to have forgotten.
Norm never made anyone feel comfortable. A profane Christian with a gambling addiction that caused him to go bankrupt three times, he was hardly a comfortable guy himself.
Geniuses seldom are.
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