Norm is dead & a lot of sentimental stuff has been written about him in appreciation of his dry, mordant wit. It’s of course funny that a comic should be sent to his reward with all the piety Americans put into showing that they really love & therefore know people whom they hardly think about & do not honor. It is also a sober reminder of the limits of comedy—you get nowhere without fame, but you pay a terrible price for it. Any fool who tries to tell people what he’s noticed is wrong with them deserves his fate, I think—I’ve always thought. But back to us—we must also pretend these false witnesses of comedy have learned many important lessons about life, although we dearly wish they wouldn’t try to impart them to us, on the understanding that their self-flattery is also part of the piety with which we celebrate someone’s death; death is a great chance for us to discover how great people are, especially ourselves, we should be far more excited about it, indeed, learn from our writers, who, proceed then to smuggle in their frivolous interest in their own childhood or adolescence as some kind of moral justification for never growing up… This, too, we must bear as part of the great competition to find out which of us can be most self-obsessive in the guise of gratitude—Norm would want us to, after all.
A comic is a man who knows he’s in business for life; people will never not be laughable; the job of work is getting yourself to be liked; then the second the news tells you he’s dead, people start acting like the job is what counted, because that’s the part they liked. Everyone has memories, apparently to prove that they’ve learned nothing. Norm famously acted stupid, to fit in; so people found it very funny, proving mankind are innocents…
Norm was as American as it gets, he supposedly wasted fortunes on gambling. Life’s too short to save until you’re dead or old; he didn’t even make it to old… Comedy has a lot to do with gambling—you can win, but it’s almost impossible to make the case that you deserve to. You can get lucky, but you can’t stay lucky. Once, Norm had the chance to become a really big deal in show business, but he got fired instead, like my friend Pete the Greek says:
The good news for Norm was that he had more than twenty years to realize America sucked & he should plan accordingly. Maybe he did, although he never made much of a career, but he’s dead & my friend Pete’s still around to suffer when America kicks him around. Norm acted stupid because in a way he was: He didn’t know whether it was good to be famous, or even alive. There’s a lot to be said for seeing what people are like, which you can only do around celebrity, but is it worth getting cancer & dying?
America in the 90s somehow got into the business of selling souls to the devil, one incident after another, involving media elites, as you may imagine, or remember—wickedness turned into crime, got on TV, & became big business. TV turned into Reality-TV, glamour into scandal. Norm was against it & he ruined his career by letting his liberal audience know what he thought of their self-righteous cowardice.
This is Norm, the guy who mocked OJ, the guy who mocked Michael Jackson:
He also mocked the Clintons, who ran the Democratic party for the better part of a generation:
I don’t know why Norm thought he could get away with mockery of liberalism’s reliance on celebrity to avoid considerations of right & wrong. Maybe it’s what you hear from people contemplating his mortality these days—he was so funny. People always said that to his face in interviews, which makes me think, the young Norm believed it & that’s why he was imprudent. He didn’t realize funny is an ambiguous word & the celebrities he made uncomfortable were nowhere near as beautiful as they looked… Well, he got fired, like I said, & all his very famous comedian friends didn’t bother to make a public protest on their shows, in the newspapers, buy ads, or do anything drastic, because they all knew what the job was—except their friend Norm. Later, he tried his hand at sit-coms, made a few comedy albums, & wrote a novel I recommend. He didn’t get back to yapping the mouth about the things we call political. Even the way he told jokes changed—he stopped acting like a brash youth, he got away from the insolence, staring into the camera, daring the audience to be silent or boo him. As he got older, he got folksier & rantier, jumping over America’s entire TV era, let’s say, simply embracing the fact that his idea of comedy would sound like madness & that in our time mad people could be public attractions. America replaced circus freaks with the other variety that incites compassion, the victims. Norm was a victim in his act. We call it self-deprecating humor, but it’s not merely an act. America is a strange place, cruel at least to the people with old-timey ideas. The kind of joke that ran through his entire career depended on the rustic’s simple, if rude statements—the things sophisticated people pretend not to notice. Laughter is the revenge of conservatism on liberalism, of common sense on Enlightenment. It depends on a political judgment, that most people may be ashamed of being inferior to liberal elites, to celebrities, but still do not embrace their opinions. Norm mocked teachers, too:
My friend Alex the Greek had a point to make about Norm—if he ever said anything interesting, you can’t remember it, it’s not anywhere you can find it, almost a goddamned secret:
The vast majority of writers are as intolerable an offense against wit as the vast majority of comedians, so I will ignore them; I’ll mock my friends instead: If you want to see intelligent men turn sentimental, read Greg McBrayer, Ben Sixsmith, Sonny Bunch, Jon Gabriel.