A Sublime Deviation From the Norm

The trailer for a new documentary by Judd Apatow, “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald,” dubs the subject under consideration “an unknowable man.” An entertainer’s public persona is, if not necessarily at odds with his private self, then substantially different. A telling marker of this divide was Macdonald’s performance of the final stand-up comedy set on “Late Show with David Letterman.” After a run of jokes typical of the comedian’s laconic style, he began to choke-up when recounting a Letterman routine he had heard at age 13. Whereupon Macdonald averred his love of both stand-up and the famously prickly talk-show host. You can watch it on YouTube. Even if you’re not familiar with the players, the moment is moving.The Letterman segment is featured in Mr. Apatow’s Netflix film, a not quite run-of-the-mill documentary. “Norm” puts the viewer at the forefront of an intensive internet search, a keyboard-based venture that is referred to in the press materials not as “rabbit-holing,” as might be expected, but worm-holing. Macdonald may well have enjoyed this turn of phrase given how it touches upon the highflown (the space-time continuum) and the mundane (worms). Some of his best jokes were plays on language that were no less revelatory for being as concise as a fortune cookie or as plain as the nose on your face. His riff on the word “identification” — I won’t spoil it here — is a case in point. It’s a joke that had long been hiding in plain sight.Macdonald died of cancer at age 61 on September 14 2021. He had lived with the disease for close to a decade, but kept the information tightly under wraps, not wanting a diagnosis to affect his craft or how audiences perceived him. During Mr. Apatow’s film, we hear Macdonald tell of his admiration for Richard Farnsworth, an actor who kept mum about being significantly ill while playing an equally ill man in David Lynch’s “The Straight Story” (1999). So it went with Macdonald: Friends, fans and the media were stunned by his passing. He had mooted the subject of mortality in a 2016 best-seller, “Based On A True Story; Not A Memoir”: “Death is a funny thing,” he wrote, “Not funny haha, like a Woody Allen movie, but funny strange, like a Woody Allen marriage.” Norm Macdonald, Courtney Thorne-Smith, and Conan O’Brien on NBC’s ‘Late Night with Conan O’Brien,’ on May 15 1997. Wikimedia CommonsThe book’s subtitle is indicative of Macdonald’s knack for quiet subversions, of weaving deftly in and around expectations and pretenses. He was a consummate craftsman with an impish streak and a working man’s sense of humility. One of three children born to Anglophone teachers in Quebec City, Macdonald never shook off a proud provincialism in either his life or his comedy. Then again, we are on surer ground with the latter because Macdonald had a habit of playing fast and loose with the facts. Macdonald wasn’t shy in fudging his age, his education, his alcohol intake, and other biographical markers. Throughout “Norm,” Mr. Apatow provides graphics when discrepancies are particularly marked. Did he really date Elle MacPherson or was Macdonald, as he winkingly claimed, a deeply closeted gay man?Macdonald doesn’t truly get known during the run of “Norm.” Mr. Apatow employs video clips from home movies and television appearances, as well as Macdonald’s audio book read-through of “Based On A True Story.” The film respects a comedian who held the cards of his personal life close to the vest, particularly concerning his one-and-only marriage. We meet his mother Ferne and son Dylan, and fleetingly learn about a long-standing friendship with producer and writer Lori Jo Hoekstra. Mostly we are provided an overview of a bumpy career: Running afoul of an NBC executive because of his unceasing jokes about O.J. Simpson on “Saturday Night Live” or suffering the slings-and-arrows of online vilification after he came to the defense of fellow comedians Roseanne Barr and Louis C.K.Hindsight is 20/20, but many of the later clips betray a man who is overweight, unkempt, and clearly suffering from some or other malady. His love for Russian literature is mentioned — Macdonald tweeted that Leo Tolstoy was “the best writer who ever lived” — as is his Christianity. Shame on Mr. Apatow for not mentioning Macdonald’s love of country music, a genre whose use of metaphor and entendre found a correlative in his comedy. Otherwise, a raft of funny people are seen extolling Macdonald’s comedy, few being as funny as the man himself — which is, as David Spade admits, pretty much how his comrades felt. We should all be commemorated with an homage as deeply felt and thorough as “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald.”

A Sublime Deviation From the Norm

A Sublime Deviation From the Norm

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