The truly great Norm Macdonald, one of the world’s few interesting people, is dead. Some notes on Norm’s strange life for devoted fans:
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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
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His memory was prodigious: on Tom Green’s podcast he once recited Shel Silverstein’s The Devil and Billy Markham at high speed from memory while barely missing a word:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h3DmCG_eV4 …
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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?”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Which raises the question, which I think about a lot: can a person, if properly isolated at an early age, exist outside of their generation?
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Okay, that was worth 5 minutes. Hey
@exjon, can you signal boost this clip? Amazing! - End of conversation
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