![]() It has no place in comedy.” It was another to belatedly realize that he’d said it while living with his own cancer diagnosis. If your mother dies when she’s 30, that’s not tragedy. It was one thing for him to tell me this: “People think things are tragedy. It was only in retrospect that we learned the profound depth of Macdonald’s commitment to concealment. about his book, he took me aside and said that sour comments he’d previously made to me about women comedians had been made “in character” - an oddly uncharacteristic clarification. And still, the layers of slipperiness accrue: I think back to a moment when, before we were about to go onstage for a public Q. I asked him about this once and he said, and I’m paraphrasing some saltier wording, that if you believed he meant his jokes about women and gay men then you were a dimwit - and if he did mean them, then he was a dimwit and thus irrelevant. Macdonald’s comedy had recurring strains of seeming misogyny and homophobia that made you wonder whether it was what he actually thought. That commitment to dissembling wasn’t always so larky. For the paperback, its subtitle was changed to “Not a Memoir.” The lone book he wrote, a minor classic called “Based on a True Story: A Memoir,” was a comedic novel dressed up as a celebrity tell-all, the costume so convincing that some readers missed the joke. Macdonald liked to portray himself as a rube from small-town Canada, yet could conjure opinions on such matters as the merits of competing Proust translations. He claimed to know Bob Dylan, another canny self-mythologizer, and shared unlikely stories about the two of them discussing scripture and sharing beef stew. He elevated tales of his gambling misadventures to the stuff of myth. Macdonald - whose moment of greatest stardom, a 1994 to 1998 stint anchoring Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live,” represented merely a blip in a longer, more fruitful career as a stand-up - was just as wily about the truth offstage, and just as happy to play with it. “I’d always learned,” he said to me in another one of our interviews, “that concealing everything was art.” Confession, believed Macdonald - who had an ex-wife and grown son, though you would never have known it from his material - is “something you do in a dark booth beside a holy man” and “doesn’t really even have a place in social intercourse.” The result of this belief was that his form of honesty, at least as it was expressed through his comedy, was the inversion of just about everyone else’s. That’s all it is.” For him, comedy that wore personal experience as a badge or was motivated by expressions of personal identity, politics or emotions were all symptoms of the disease of conceit. “Nothing can be easier,” Macdonald said during one of our several interviews. And that can be summed up in a single word: confessional. Those obfuscating qualities mean it’s probably easiest to define his comedy by defining what it wasn’t. Norm Macdonald was a complicated, often inscrutable guy, one who (mostly) adhered to now quaintly old-fashioned codes of privacy and propriety, a rascally self-mythologizer and a levels-deep ironist. What made the comedy of Norm Macdonald so different from so many successful contemporary comedians, and what placed him profoundly at odds with our culture’s demands for how truth and authenticity are conveyed, was how tantalizingly little it gave away of its creator. But the whole joy of it was to go along.” That’s because the subterfuge was the point. But it was more fun to go: ‘Really? I didn’t know you had a farm, Norm.’ And he’d go, ‘Yeah, I got a farm for my three daughters.’ And again I’d be thinking, No, you don’t have three daughters. “And he’d sit down and I’d say, ‘What’s going on, Norm?’ And he’d say, ‘Well, Conan, I bought myself a farm.’” O’Brien laughed at the memory of a familiar Macdonald gambit. “He’d come out with this twinkle in his eye,” says Conan O’Brien about the comedian Norm Macdonald, who was a favorite guest on his various talk shows over the years. He became a comedian’s comedian by bucking the conventions of our confessional age. ![]()
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