Uriah

Norm dropped out of high school when he was 15, then spent 10 years as a semi-criminal drifter, working as a lumberjack, picking tobacco, moving furniture, and stealing typewriters for re-sale on Indian reservations.

Young Norm was a wild, dangerous man. On Adam Carolla’s radio show he told a story about how, when 19, he had anal sex with the wife of one of his friends while the two of them watched her husband mow the lawn.

This may have been related to a fight he mentioned having: he and another man were having sex with the same married woman; Norm got the upper hand, slammed his hand against concrete, saw him go unconscious and them slammed it again. He walked away, unsure if the man was dead.

Norm, half Scottish/Irish, liked to fight recreationally in bars until he came to New York and got in trouble for hitting a “connected” guy; he then decided to restrict his fighting to the SNL offices, where he punched out Ian-Maxtone Graham and wrestled with Wyatt Cenac.

Like many extraordinary creatives Norm had a schizophrenic brother and it’s an open question how close Norm came to being psychotic. On Marc Maron’s podcast they bonded over having had psychotic breaks, upon hearing Marc’s story Norm said “Oh, yours was caused by cocaine?”

It's of note that schizophrenics are overrepresented in the ranks of vagabonds and compulsive gamblers. Norm lost all the money he ever made three times. All of his SNL money went down the drain after he bet on the Falcons in Super Bowl 33

At different times in his life Norm lived in Quebec and Ottawa, but spent much of his early childhood on a poor Ontario farm which also marked him apart in the real world. Once he was confused when a guest used the word “hobbled”, “isn’t that something you do to a horse?”

The essence of Norm’s comedy was his dislike of abstraction, of the way language can be used to distance a person from unpleasant realities. Patton Oswalt thought the worst part of Bill Cosby’s exposure was the hypocrisy, Norm thought it was the raping.

In this way Norm was very old fashioned, in fact he was old fashioned in practically every way. Many people commented that he had “classical” or “1950’s” good looks (like 50’s stars, he also had no muscle), that he could have fit in as an ad executive in Mad Men.

He had this weird rapport with old men: his best friend was Billie Joe Shaver (born 1939), on Norm’s show they reminisced about their childhood outhouses. He looked and talked and thought as though he was born in the Great Depression.