Norm Macdonald Returns to Television!

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.

there were definitely some very strange episodes of his podcast like that. they also felt pretty self-destructive or performative, though.

I'm not saying Norm should just get a pass for everything, but for me at least I don't feel as critical of Norm because he comes across as a mostly compassionate and sensitive human being, in spite of probably having political opinions I'm not ok with?

I think his conservatism is more of the sad, pessimistic variety than the virulent/hateful variety.

the interview above did not leave me with that impression

Which one, the View?

Or the Vulture one? What in particular? I mean the way he discusses trans people is maybe not exactly up to date, but it seems well-meaning if fumbly. I'm not saying it's "ok," I just think this ok/not-ok binary the internet has created is a bit heavy handed sometimes.

that's fair

We had two trans family friends when I was growing up and one of my friends is now stepfather to a trans kid, but pronoun issues were barely on my radar until maybe 5 years ago, and I'm online a lot. When I was a kid it was still totally commonplace for mainstream movies and shows to be hostile to trans people for comic relief, to the point that it never even occurred to me that there was something wrong with it. I think people who seem like they are trying deserve a little slack if they haven't fully kept up, especially older people.

*when I was growing up = came out as trans when I was in high school, before that I don't think I knew anyone trans

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.

yeah this is otm

i do think that the cruelty and wrongheadness are intrinsic part of NM's comedy. i mean, they are a bad part of his interviews, but essential to the standup

Lynch was totally quoted out of context

And he did not walk them back so much as he clarified them

I'm not saying Norm should just get a pass for everything, but for me at least I don't feel as critical of Norm because he comes across as a mostly compassionate and sensitive human being, in spite of probably having political opinions I'm not ok with?

This is how I feel-- he might not always be progressive but he's never ever hawkish

Yeah.

Vulture piece is v. good. Generally been fascinated by his interviews where he’s not, you know, “performing”. Thought this one in particular pulled out thoughtful responses. Interviewer did an impressive job of addressing issues without being scolding or adversarial, which will kill things right in their tracks. Tact worth noting.

I think it's worth noting that when he says sex is "shameful," in context he is saying that society and media continue to treat it as shameful.

Yeah, generally sounds like when pressed on something that’s wtf on the face of it he does a good job of clarifying and making it reasonable.

Though Norm actually thinking sex is a shameful, base human activity would not surprise me.

His love of classic Russian Lit. and the fact that he brings up God a lot (in the more abstract, non-dogmatic sense) is interesting to me. If only because I went through that too when I read those books and discovered Tarkovsky and Bresson movies and stuff. Still with me and I get it.

Norm strikes me as the kind of guy who will just about fuck with anyone well past the point of embarrassment to get to helpless laughter at the other end, but genuinely doesn't want to cause anyone any other kind of pain. He was very near tears on the View (compare that visit and his last Letterman appearance with any other live appearance). I'll drop him like a hot potato if stories of abusive *actions* ever come out, but I'm not going to stop watching the comedy of a bullshit artist for saying bullshit. (Yes, I am drawing a line between words and actions and yes I know that words can be abuse or the largest part of a course of abusive action. This isn't that.)

Yeah I p much agree with that. I mean unless the words are deliberately advocating virulent racism or something along those lines. I don't want to live in a world where we just drop people for a boneheaded joke where the irony wasn't well-considered. And I do feel like there's a bit of an outrage industry in the clickbait and twitter world now, with people jumping at the chance to condemn these things more loudly than the next, and Norm looking genuinely dismayed on the View and saying stuff like "I don't want my friend to kill herself" is a good reminder of how inhuman it starts to become.

where yall been the past decade or why norm so special vs literally anyone else ever

I got constant shit and nearly got banned permanently from this here site when I used to rail against dumb destructive absolutist application of progressive ideas, as you know. Norm's kind of special and almost brought me out of "THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOUR METAPHORIC AGONY AND REAL AGONY" retirement because he is an artist who works in bullshit. He's loved by dumb misogynist racist dudes into "trolling", but he's quite open about trying to do a certain kind of comedy better or differently than anyone has before and part of it is constantly playing with the ideas of smart v. dumb, real v. fake. He genuinely says dumb stuff about politics and culture a fair amount, but it's a tiny part of what makes him funny and worth watching for me.

Judge Judy interview was super beautiful