It's worth noting that Norm was a committed fabulist (I say this as his #7 fan). He would lie about anything and everything, to the point that it's impossible for an outsider to tell what is the real Norm Macdonald and what is the character "Norm Macdonald". He has at least 2 "meeting Bob Dylan" stories that are completely different.
The joke here is that this is something he only told by text, that was initially on his Twitter account, and it was a long-winded, typed story that ended with "don't be fooled by typists."
Note that the bit could also have alluded to the fact that he was a deeply closeted cancer patient. There's almost a decade of Norm content that has to be totally recontextualized.
1. Book of Job favorite book? Not impossible but. ...
2. References to the "original" Book of Job. No such think AFAIK.
3. The three friends in the story match the three others in the book of Job.
4. Elihu possibly matches the old man with the funny story.
due to the seemingly incomplete ending of the book of job, many people suspect the original ending was too extreme and was omitted later. how extreme and in what direction has been debated for a long time.
I’ve known a few people like this and I always got the feeling that it was a defense mechanism and they were deeply afraid of people finding out who they really are as a person.
Norm was an entertainer, yet a very private person. I half think all of his misleading was an attempt to keep people from knowing him too well. The other half thinks it was just a joke to him...like his age. Every time he mentioned his age it was incorrect in one direction or another.
We're talking about a guy who didn't even tell anyone (that we know of) that he was dying of cancer. He went so far as to say that doing so would be narcissistic, as it only burdens other people. Pretty interesting take I think.
The trick for that is to realise that what actually happened millennia ago isn't really too important most of the time, and that yarns and fables reveal extremely important cultural information beyond what could be gleaned from a dry factual account.
Hell, even in the modern era there's loads of things that absolutely unequivocally did not happen, and everyone understands and agrees with that, yet collectively goes "but it's better if we pretend it did though".
There's some old adage about truth and good stories...
I’m actually writing a book about this in the context of MMORPGs and the generation of “real” story and narrative. Can I reproduce this comment, it’s just too on the money to ignore.
I know this is a weird question, but I’ve been having fun playing around with the idea of exposing the workflow and research behind the book as opposed to restating context from others (and limiting my area of generation to the novel arguments.)
I could be generously described as a fabulist when talking amongst friends and I definitely just view it as mental practice. Being forced to think on your feet on a regular basis is a great way to improve your public speaking ability, your creativity, and your general knowledge (as you need to learn and retain all kinds of nonsense to come up with some plausible-sounding excuse for whatever absolute bullshit you last said).
That it muddies the waters of "who I really am as a person" is probably true, but that's mostly just an unintended side effect. It's just that my real person is definitely way less entertaining than a well-constructed yarn or joke.
Reminds me of Frank Abagnale, Jr. ('Catch me if you can') who despite making up the story of his life is actually a security consultant and has made millions out of his 'life story'
https://whyy.org/segments/the-greatest-hoax-on-earth/
Yeah that’s why everyone says now “I didn’t even know he was sick” – Norm couldn’t really tell anyone even if he had wanted. No one would believe him. I also clearly remember him saying “I’m 68 years old now” in one of his standup, getting a round of applause in return.
That happened with Andy Kaufman, too — long after he had passed, many people maintained that the cancer was a long-con put-on and he was in fact still alive.
Norm has said publicly in a radio interview that he thought that talking about cancer in a stand up act was the height of narcissism.
In regards to Norm's age, Norm incorrectly listing his/others' ages has been a recurring bit over the past three decades in many, many appearances in both his standup sets as well as television appearances. It's a meta joke poking fun at the idea that the specific age even matters.
if you listen to the conan podcast where they reminisce about norm, the producer indicates that norm actually did stay with bob dylan and hang out at his place. so this could be true and removed at dylan's request. what's up in the air is whether or not the producer got his info from norm / real events, or twitter/entertainment news...
This was the point of his book (one of?) that he wanted to tell some stories but probably legally couldn’t, so he sprinkled some truths in and called the whole thing made up. It’s pretty practical way to be a celebrity IMO.
I asked him about this once. The primary reason it was structured the way it was, was that he wanted to write a novel but couldn't get any publishers to take him seriously as an author. They only wanted a memoir, so he published a metafictional one.
Every few weeks, I hunt YouTube for Norm Macdonald material I haven't seen yet. I've been doing this for a few years now. My family usually responds with an eye-rolling "OK..." when I want to imitate one of his long routines, but I had great success over the years with his moth joke [0] and the professor of logic joke [1]. Last week, I wanted to look up some details about his SNL dismissal on Wikipedia and skimming over the article I suddenly realized that some personal details about him were now written in the past tense.
> his moth joke [0] and the professor of logic joke [1]
You may already know this, but those are his versions of old street jokes. Comedians often fill time with short street jokes that have been told for decades (often to connect between longer bits), but Norm is one of the few who decided he would stretch one to fill an entire interview.
He also filled an entire Comedy Central Roast appearance with mundane jokes that he took from one of those silly "101 Jokes" books. Many of the jokes were so out of date they made puns on tech that is no longer used (like some joke that depended on the audience understanding that "Underwood" was a popular typewriter company back in the day.)
Somewhat related-- there's a video somewhere of Andy Kaufman essentially throwing an entire Saturday Night Live audition. He does a nervous recitation of a long, shitty monologue based on lyrics from a crappy 70s pop song, repeats it twice (making exactly the same mistakes each time), then recites the opening to the old Superman tv show in a purposely bad southern accent. Norm obviously did his pranks in an attempt to entertain an audience, but I cannot figure out what Kaufman's motive was in his audition. In any case, I found it hilarious and Norm was obviously greatly influenced by a lot of Kaufman's stuff.
I recently watched norm talking to tom green about his disastrous "the view" appearance (which I then looked up, it was definitely something) but at the end he said he loves bombing during stand-up. I'm not sure any comedian other than norm loved bombing.
Norm had a way of telling jokes. He usually inserted himself into jokes and told them as they were stories from his life. Plus he was an expert at turning silly jokes to great ones and improvizing. For example, the Swedish-German Andy Richter joke[1] where you can see the moment he decided to seize an opportunity to turn something not-funny into funny. I'll miss his way of storytelling and delivery.
They address this in Conan’s retrospective about Norm.
Andy was very uncomfortable about that joke because he didn’t want being gay to be a subject of ridicule, and he didn’t know how to face the gay crew members on the show, or gay friends and family, after making fun of the mere fact somebody could be gay.
At first I didn’t emphasize because the value of Norm MacDonald is that anything is fair game in the service of comedy and entertainment.
But now I get it. For Norm it was an improv bit in the middle of a “standup” bit on some show he was taping. For Andy it was an externally-imposed combo of ruined relationships, happening in the middle of his 9-5 entertainment industry career.
Both sides are valid, and I say this as someone who’s lovingly absorbed every Norm clip there is.
I'm a bit surprised that nobody has mentioned how much we have failed as technologists that a story is being shared by png images of text... brave new world indeed.
I love hearing the stories from other comedians about Norm deliberately bombing, then saving, then ending with bombing a show, or variations on that, as a way of showing off to his fellow comedians. Or using uhms and ahs and verbal ticks, breaking up the flow of speaking, making things awkward, then tweaking a bit of a story and bringing it home with a punchline.
One of the strangest and most wonderful things to arise from the explosion of podcasts is the discussion among professionals of respected people in different fields. We all see George Carlin and Dave Chapelle and the major headliners, but that level of fame doesn't always accompany a high level of excellence.
I would never have known to pay attention to Norm as more than another good comedian without hearing his contemporaries and colleagues discuss his mastery and craft. I love that we're given a peek behind the curtains, that comics can point at Norm's genius and say "Look! Pay attention! This is special and beautiful and precious!"
I do know the meaning of tell as in "betrays/reveals/is a sign that", but it wasn't clear what it would be a tell of (that the story is true? that the story is false?).
In either case, the Band eating with Dylan in the 90s would indeed be a tell that it's a made-up story, but I see no reason for Norm to use this particular tell to convey so. There are tons of either funnier or more contemporary and relevant tells he could use.
I was thinking that too, in fact I wondered whether in some way the writing style was intended to be humorous ? Probably not. I don't know who Norm Macdonald is except for some reason in the last few weeks YouTube thinks I might be interested in him. Just another YT puzzle.
Oh, OK, I'm sorry, he's died recently, hence the YT prompts. 61 doesn't seem very old.
I'll go forward and offer my own interpretation: highly creative people experience the process of creation as something that comes _through_ them, not _from_ them, that's why Bob Dylan calls them "stenographers". I think most people have experienced some glimpse of this when you lose yourself in flow, wether you are dancing, coding, or writing. Norm doesn't understand that calling the author of his favorite passage a stenographer is actually praise, because he means it comes from a higher source than the ego. One week later he understands the koan and tells Dylan, who laughs.
Some of Norm's jokes are intentionally very long with a lousy punchline, making them funnier... which I could see in this case because the story was told with every sentence in its own tweet, making it painful to read chronologically (and possibly adding another element to the "typist" bit).
But in the other cases usually the joke is much more obvious, so again, I'm not sure.
Norm was pretty big into literature, especially the Russians. I wouldn't be surprised if he had aspirations to be a writer and the style of this piece is for aesthetic and not humorous purposes.
"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."
I just had a weird experience on mobile where I for a second quite enjoyed spastically swiping left then right, scanning down the lines as if I were some quaint analogue mechanism reading like a human me ght, for the first time.
I saw Bob Dylan at a grocery store in Los Angeles yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything.
He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?”
I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying.
The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.
When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.
