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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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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Wtf are you talking about? Norm didn't do drugs or anything. He was a chain smoker.
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This style of comedy & his lazy, relaxed way of speaking and acting indicate the stress tolerance-brachycephaly relation you posited, him having a fairly wide head
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