Norm Macdonald Returns to Television!

He should stop making rape jokes first and foremost. After that we can invite him to ilx.

Everything is political!

Being apolitical is political

and acceptable!

and in some cases preferred, even

but the case is very specific. politics in comedy can be good. norm explicitly putting politics into his comedy would be awful. clearly the person complaining that colin kaepernick brought politics into his football is terrible. but the person complaining that norm macdonald is not explicitly putting politics into his comedy show is also (much less) terrible.

wait so yr friends are yr enemies I'm confused

xp

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, 11 September 2018 23:29 (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah
its that ppl with whom i disagree with politically are certainly not automatically 'enemies'

I think the impression he gives that he’s not doing a craft is fact the craft

― ILX’s bad boy (D-40), Friday, 31 August 2018 23:05 (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes btw....tho he does imo do it with a sideways look, its not completely deadpan

stewart lee draws attn to the same thing which is different again, performing v deliberately that he is not performing, called back enough routine after routine that its a loop at this stage

A) Norm tells funny stories sometimes.

B) Norm is exactly the kind of uninformed moron who would support Trump. But because *we* like him, that's ok.

C) Fuck Norm.

does he support trump

There's a bootleg of one of his standups where the audience asks if he voted, and he says, nah, besides, he's Canadian. To which he adds, "Yeah, if you thought your vote was pointless..."

I don't know why Trump won. One reason was KellyAnne Conway, who is one of the most charming and lovable people I've ever seen.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) December 29, 2016

I have heard him talk about trump and i do not get the impression he’s a big trump supporter.

Yeah I don’t think he is either but he’s notoriously tone deaf when it comes to certain political and social issues. Though in his defense he’s pretty vocal about not wanting to talk about them

tone deaf is, like so much else, just a substitute for "doesnt say what id like", right?

KellyAnne Conway, who is one of the most charming and lovable people I've ever seen.

As humor, this is jejune and moronic. If it is in any way representative of his work, it is fair to call it tone deaf, but more accurate to call it dumb and unfunny.

xp more in the sense that he can't really see anything outside of his white guy comedian bubble and often doesn't consider some really basic things

"It’s always bad when you have to apologize for the apology," said the old white man who turned out to not be a friend of the liberals after all

"The remark I made about people with Down syndrome is terrible," the old white man continued. "I mean, you'd have to have Down syndrome to think it wasn't," he continued.

"I really Jewed that one up"

Norm on Tom green was classic af

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmV2t2SqHz8

When he shuts down the kids guitar dreams it’s mint

Sorry this is the link

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OeefXf08dsU&t=65s

Total trolling on the view tho

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Il1rCHgsmDo

Dunno Norms the best imo

New show is good so far. Essentially the same as the YouTube one

There’s a great interview on New York mag’s site. David Marchese might be the best interviewer in America right now.

http://www.vulture.com/2018/09/norm-macdonald-in-conversation.html

Awesome, thanks for that unperson

Chainsaw ref is to Eric Andre right?

that is a good interview! nice to see the interviewer push back on norm's boneheaded views, though overall it's fair to him

I guess there came a time, and I missed it, when revealing everything started to be considered art ... But I can look at other art forms and see how postmodernism has destroyed them, and now threatens to destroy stand-up.

Fuckin postmodernism strikes again, what won't that shit ruin

What are you trying to subvert anyway? Entertaining people?

norm is such a meta comedian and he doesn't even know that he's involved in the postmodern

You know, I think about my deathbed a lot.

Q:What do you think about it?

I think I should never have purchased a deathbed in the first place.

xp Yeah, a little rich to complain about postermodernism or meta-comedy given his "autobiography." (Which was hilarious.)

Do you really think sex is a shameful thing?
Yeah, I do.

what a weirdo

Just a Christian

Why not?
Because stand-up is a form and to subvert something, you have to do it perfectly first. I remember somebody showed me a talk show with “subversion” in it — the guy chainsawed his desk. It was so stupid. Why did you build a desk in the first place if you were only going to chainsaw it?

is he talking about Eric Andre here ?

i mean, yes

if "subversion" is comedy poison then what do you call appearing on a roast and doing an entire set of clean grandpa jokes from the 1920's?

This is why you don’t ask artists to talk about their own work! They do not discuss it very intelligently.

Norm like to play with audience expectations of joke structure, but they're still traditional jokes - the moth routine, for example. I'm not sure that's "meta". I think he's right to mark a difference between himself and, say, Adult Swim style creepy non-sequitur humour.

the frogbs example i think is quite germane

the humour in that bit is not the jokes themselves which are bad and hackneyed, it's doing those jokes in that context. it's meta

I dunno, I find it fairly straightforwardly funny - I'd call it "conceptual" rather than meta.

My favourite bits in that routine are the (apparent) ad-libs: "Seems harsh, by they want to MURDER YOU IN A WELL."

His roast was brilliant, basically what renewed my interest in Norm as an adult. Always liked him growing up but obv was more interested in the flashier comedy ppl at the time.

His old man conservatism is disappointing but it’s always been apparent. The “I don’t care or know anything about politics” line was never totally convincing.

Can’t justify his shitty takes or why he’s one that I find myself giving more of a pass to than others. Guess because he feels like his own unique thing operating in his own mental sphere. For me feels related to David Lynch’s recent, walked-back Trump comments.

I really liked the two episodes I saw of his new Netflix show.

the humour in that bit is not the jokes themselves which are bad and hackneyed, it's doing those jokes in that context. it's meta

this sort of meta is also bad and hackneyed. "Don't get it, man? It's funny because it's NOT funny!"

I mean it was a roast and in that context it’s kind of the opposite of hackneyed.

I don’t think anyone else could pull that off nearly as well either.

His old man conservatism is disappointing but it’s always been apparent. The “I don’t care or know anything about politics” line was never totally convincing.

If there's conservatism underneath, he knows that he can't win with it. I genuinely don't think he's trying to take a counter position to court some untapped conservative comedy-loving audience. he's more like the ilxor on the irrationally angry thread, annoyed that another task has been added to his work that was never in the job description. but he also knows that he'll fail if forced to perform this task. so he overstates some opinions on comedy to justify a relative silence. still, from the vulture interview (and I feel like he's said this before):

I always bristle when people say, “The comedian is the modern-day philosopher.” There are modern-day philosophers.

(you'd have to have some base faith that the 'people' are not horrible, though)

Yeah, I think that’s mostly OTM. Things are p. heavy right now and I’m averse to this hard binary we’re are falling into. Obviously don’t see him as an active agent of conservatism, but still moments arise that are cringey.

I need to read that interview.

Ugh, “cringey” is an understatement though. Someone mentioned his interview on the Tom Green show here and I listened to it today at work. He was talking about when he was on The View and said something like “who’s that fat BLACK lady on the show” in a way you couldn’t really paper over. I think dude legit harbors contemptuous views about women and minorities in general.

Maybe I should make some sense of this internally before hashing it out on the internet.