The standup, most famous for Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live, could make the familiar feel strange and new
It was Frank Skinner who first brought my attention to Norm Macdonald. Years ago – I can’t remember how, as this was before YouTube – he showed me a clip of a matinee idol-looking man at the Montreal comedy festival, doing a bit about lying. But a very specific element of lying. “You ever lie for no reason at all?” he says, in his impossibly rootsy North American voice, crazily upbeat – which was so much part of his delivery, of his ability to charm but also to make the things he was talking about, often very familiar, become strange and new. “Someone says, ‘You seen that movie with Meryl Streep and the horse?’ And you go: ‘Yes.’” And here he pauses, and does another very Norm thing: he stares for a long time, nervelessly, at the audience, making them understand, just through pausing, that this is a lie, and that that is funny, before saying: “And then you think: what am I lying about over here? I stand to gain nothing from this lie.”
I was hooked. Much as I love many American standups, Norm – who was Canadian – had something going on which I perceive is unusual in that world. American standups are often clever and insightful and satirical and possessed of extraordinary stagecraft, but not that many of them are what I would call funny-boned: by which I mean, Eric Morecambe-boned, the ability to make you laugh while doing virtually nothing. Norm totally was. Watch him on Weekend Update on SNL, the gig that made him most famous. He often does nothing. He says the joke, and then leaves – on live American TV – the longest silence, letting the laughs build simply by the force of his impossibly twinkly eyes. Of course the joke in Norm’s case, was often something that most people would not say. That too was part of his technique, the juxtaposition between his extreme comic touchstones – “crack whore” was virtually one of his catchphrases – and his apparent sweetness. That sweetness is there too in his astonishing TV chatshow appearances – only Billy Connolly comes close for the greatness of these – notably in his legendary reframing on Conan of an old joke about a moth as if it were a Dostoevsky novel.
