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RIP Norm MacDonald


Rushman14
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Damn it. An all time great, taken way too soon.

 

A favourite among many, many favourites of his stuff is when he did a set at the roast of Bob Saget. Knowing those things are famously dirty and offensive, MacDonald's set is made up of the most inoffensive dad jokes possible. His commitment to that bit is so goddamn funny.

Here it is...audio only.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QfsXUPghXk

 

Genius.

 

Him and the late Cloris were the best parts of that roast. Love how he went outside the box with an Andy Kaufman style of humor.

Edited by invisible airwave
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this one really sucks. i loved him. his off-beat awkward style was genius.

 

RIP Norm.

 

Mick

 

This probably explains why I liked him on Weekend Update so much.

 

What a bummer.

 

Love how he just went after OJ Simpson in some of them.

His hammering of OJ on Update eventually got him fired. Not that Norm cared...

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SSVIg4Noqc

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Excellent essay by Geoff Edgers on Norm. As always, the great artists are brilliant but complex!

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/norm-macdonald-appreciation/2021/09/15/315f6f52-15eb-11ec-b976-f4a43b740aeb_story.html

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There's a bit on "Me Doing Stand Up", and it's not in every version of the recording, where he's talking about drawing the blinds in his bedroom. And he's saying how you only draw the blinds when you're about to do something shameful. You'd never draw the blinds when you're baking a pie for the old lady down the street. She doesn't do much baking for herself anymore, why she's got arthritis in her hands and has lost the ability to kneed.

 

Those tangential little comments. Good Lord, I'm going to miss those.

 

I've been thinking about why this loss hurts so much. When someone dies that's older or even just washed up, you feel sad, but you can accept it because they didn't really have anything left to say. You could close the book knowing the story had been written to completion. I don't feel that way here. I still need Norm, I could use his perspective, I still find a lot of utility in the way he thinks and communicates. There just isn't another source of that, and the demand isn't sated.

 

I feel a greedy sense of loss. I just wasn't ready to close this book. But I'm so thankful to have read what I got.

Edited by KenJennings
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I think we should go over to Germany and kill Hitler!

 

-- He's dead.

 

He is? I didn't know he was sick!

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https://babylonbee.c...d-clips-all-day

 

Nation's Productivity Down 97% As Everyone Binge-Watching Norm Macdonald Clips All Day

 

September 16th, 2021 - BabylonBee.com

 

article-9507-1.jpg

 

U.S.—National productivity plummeted this week as workers across the country have been doing nothing but binge-watching Norm Macdonald clips since Tuesday. From classic Saturday Night Live clips like his "Celebrity Jeopardy!" appearance to his constant roasting of OJ Simpson and excerpts where he confounds late-night hosts with his meta-anti-jokes, millions of Norm clips were getting passed around like crazy, causing everyone to stop doing their jobs and laugh like hyenas. "It's crazy—no one has done any work since Tuesday afternoon," said one financial analyst. "Entire businesses are in shambles, whole industries are collapsing. No one has so much as fiddled with an Excel spreadsheet for three days." At publishing time, the writer of this article had cut it short as he was too busy watching a clip of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee guest-starring Norm and just didn't have time to finish it off.

Edited by KenJennings
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https://babylonbee.c...d-clips-all-day

 

Nation's Productivity Down 97% As Everyone Binge-Watching Norm Macdonald Clips All Day

 

September 16th, 2021 - BabylonBee.com

 

article-9507-1.jpg

 

U.S.—National productivity plummeted this week as workers across the country have been doing nothing but binge-watching Norm Macdonald clips since Tuesday. From classic Saturday Night Live clips like his "Celebrity Jeopardy!" appearance to his constant roasting of OJ Simpson and excerpts where he confounds late-night hosts with his meta-anti-jokes, millions of Norm clips were getting passed around like crazy, causing everyone to stop doing their jobs and laugh like hyenas. "It's crazy—no one has done any work since Tuesday afternoon," said one financial analyst. "Entire businesses are in shambles, whole industries are collapsing. No one has so much as fiddled with an Excel spreadsheet for three days." At publishing time, the writer of this article had cut it short as he was too busy watching a clip of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee guest-starring Norm and just didn't have time to finish it off.

:laughing guy:
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Interesting tribute to Norm...

In his introduction to Hobbes’ Leviathan, Michael Oakeshott speculates as to what makes one a philosopher. It’s not knowledge one accumulates, says Oakeshott. It is, rather, a perspective, a disposition with which one is born. As he says:

Philosophy springs from a certain bent of mind which, though different in character, is as much a natural gift as an aptitude for mathematics or a genius for music. Philosophical speculation requires so little in the way of a knowledge of the world and is, in comparison with some other intellectual pursuits, so independent of book-learning, that the gift is apt to manifest itself early in life.

These words came to my mind this week as I reflected upon the life, and untimely death, of Norm Macdonald. Norm’s path to becoming one of the most respected stand-up comedians of his generation was unlikely. Born into poverty in rural Canada, Norm suffered from debilitating social anxiety until a definitive moment redirected the course of his life, as Norm’s sui generis gift manifested itself.

One day, Norm’s father asked him to walk a family friend to the store. The man was blind and asked Norm to describe the road and trees and sky to him as they walked. Norm recounts that this exercise—of naming and describing creation—took him outside of himself, thus alleviating his anxiety. From then on, Norm was an observer and describer of the world.

To be sure, Norm’s take was distinct. He had what Oakeshott called the “natural gift” of a bent mind. He saw a homeless man with a dog and considered the experience from the vantage point of the pet—“this is the longest walk ever!” Whether he was behind the Weekend Update anchor desk, a microphone, or his Twitter account, Norm invited us to see the world from his idiosyncratic perspective.

The line between philosophy and comedy is already thin, and Norm blurred it further. His quasi-memoir, Based on a True Story, is as funny as you’d expect if you’re a casual fan, and as profound as you’d expect if you’re an avid devotee of Norm’s work. There, Norm interprets his gambling addiction as a quest for hope:

Most people would think it’s the wins that keep the gambler going, but any gambler knows that this is not true. As you place your chips on the craps table, you feel anxiety and impatience. When the red dice hit the green felt with a thunk and you’re declared the winner and the chips are pushed toward you, you feel relief. And relief is fine, but hardly what a man would give the whole rest of his life to gain. It has to be something else and the best I’ve come up with is this: It is a particular moment. A magic moment that occurs after the placing of a bet and before the result of that bet. It is after the red dice are thrown but before they lie still on the green felt where they fall. It is when the dice are in the air, and as long as they are there, time stops. As long as the red dice are in the air, the gambler has hope. And hope is a wonderful thing to be addicted to.

For many, comedy is a cynical exercise of enumerating the irrational absurdities of life. Not so for Norm, as he said: “Smart man says nothing is a miracle. I say everything is.” He went out of his way to see and name the miraculous beauty of creation. Norm was to Christianity what Woody Allen is to atheism. He didn’t talk about the world for a living out of resentment or anger, but out of love and boyish curiosity. It was as if we were the blind man and he was taking us all on a walk, careful to describe the normal, mundane objects around us in such a way that we could see the world afresh.

“The Enlightenment turned us away from truth and toward a darkling weakening horizon, sad and grey to see,” tweeted Norm, “The afterglow of Christianity is near gone now, and a stygian silence lurks in wait.” Norm Macdonald lived in an enchanted cosmos—bright in color, teaming with life. Norm saw differently, and therefore more, than secular man. His eyes didn’t just look at brute objects, but through them, seeing the internal coherence and grandeur of nature.

Norm remained, to the end, a man of hope. Peter Kreeft calls hope “a kind of prophetic intuition that beneath all appearances and all apparent injustices, reality is just, is good, and has to be good, in the end.” He goes on to say that to have hope is “a kind of almost mystical intuition, a seeing. It’s a judgment, an assertion.”

The man who gave us Turd Ferguson was born with the eyes of a philosopher, a mystical intuition to see as Oakeshott thought Thomas Hobbes saw. By faith, Norm Macdonald’s eyes were fixed on hope as he fell asleep, and when he awoke those same eyes beheld hope’s substance.

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