Norm Macdonald’s death was a joke — and his life too.
“Norm Macdonald was a comedian and actor who was known from… Mr. Macdonald was found dead in an Edmonton hotel room from an overdose of morphine.” Or was it a long lasting battle with cancer, which he ultimately lost? It certainly is sad that the last thing a man does in his life is to lose a battle — especially a long and worn out one, full of ups and downs, like an unusually long winded joke. And at the end what do we get? It seems the moth only came in because the light was on. Norm’s battle with cancer ended like his jokes did: abruptly, with a silly punchline… and then nothing. Or something?
Towards the end of his career, probably with his deathly battle against cancer already under way, Norm began to express the opinion that he wanted to get more than laughs from his audience: he wanted to leave them with a smile. A laugh is visceral, like a fart. It’s there, you lol (laugh out loud) and that’s all there is to it. But when you hear a joke and smile, that means the joke doesn’t show all it’s funniness at once: unlike the laugh, the smile stays, lingering there in your mind. If the laugh is visceral, the smile is abstract, like a concept, like a mischievously tense upper lip, like a raised eyebrow and a look of make-believe confusion. A laugh is an opioid to let you forget, a smile is the mystery of this sick and hellish facade we call life, casually suggested in a bad joke.
Andy Richter, the Swedish German, says Norm’s comedy is “like somebody says ‘I gotta show you something’ and they take you on a 4 mile hike to show you a dog turd”. But when Norm began his career as a stand-up, and later in the Weekend Update at SNL, his jokes were actually very short and punny. He would even try to make the punchline and the premise of the joke as close as possible, as in this one:
“Julia Roberts told reporters this week that her marriage to Lyle Lovett has been over for some time. The key moment, she said, came when she realized that she was Julia Roberts and that he was Lyle Lovett.”
This is already smile comedy, as far as I’m concerned, but people then called it dry. I guess a lot of people still do. I do too, what am I saying? Anyway, by making the premise of the joke the joke itself, Norm pointed to the comic in life. By having jokes with no punchline, he made his audience smile at the fact that they expected one. The comedy there is not in the content of the joke as much as it is in life itself, in our attitudes. Similarly, by making the joke unnecessarily long, Norm made us smile at our own discomfort, at our longing, almost craving for a punchline to relieve the tension, our craving for a moment where we know what to do: “Ok, I can laugh now.”
As Conan O’Brien says, “brevity is the soul of wit, that is the rule”. It is precisely because they break the rule — that is, precisely because in some sense, they are not funny — that Norm’s jokes are funny. It’s meta… comedy. Comedy about comedy. But what the hell is comedy? Henri Bergson said that the essence of the comic is the exposure of the mechanical in life. Whenever our artificial, mechanical tendencies are revealed to us, we are before something comic. Honest to God, I like that definition. I’m not going to explain it too much — if you want to know about it, go read his book. But going from this, we can see the comedian, then, as someone who exposes the mechanical in life.
The difference, like the Devil (and most likely like God too), lies in the details. What kind of mechanical are we talking? Is it idiotic prejudices we and people like us hold against another race, or the opposite sex? Or worse, is it the concrete case of something that happened in Kevin Hart’s household? Or are we talking about the mechanical in the fact that we are bulshiting ourselves all the time? The mechanical in that every moment of our day goes pretty much on auto-pilot, that we might as well live our lives reading what to do from cue cards like the Weekend Update jokes. That even when we enjoy facing the mechanical in life on purpose — that is, even in comedy — we are being mechanical ourselves.
By making fun of comedy in this way, the comedian negates comedy: he’s being funny for not being funny. This negation is what makes irony: the figure of speech in which “something contrary to what is said is to be understood”, as Quintillian said a long, long time ago. This means, then, that for the irony to be successful, the audience must understand the opposite of what is said. Therefore, deceit is incompatible with irony. The most irony can do is to riddle: leave you in a daze as to what is really happening.
The ironist refuses to be understood right away, prefering to hide behind a mask, a riddle or a joke. This position is, in a way, a mirror image of what life can be to us: we wonder about the real purpose of things, of why some things happen in this world, like Solomon and Job did and many have done for millenia, and no answer seems to settle anything. Reality leaves the ironist in a daze, so he acts the same way, hiding his true meaning in a world of masks. But seeing our masks is inevitable for anyone who introspects, someone who faces inward instead of simply closing the eyes. The comedy in our hypocrisy is there to be smiled at. Then why don’t we?
Just as laughing is always close to crying, smiling is close to melancholy. We deceive ourselves from our bulshit because facing it can lead to grave disillusion if we are not sufficiently detached from it to be able to find the comedy there. The emotional distance is what separates smile from frown, laughter from tears, comedy from tragedy. A simpler type of irony might be associated exclusively with detachment, but the irony I see at work in Norm transcends that. It is akin to the irony of the master ironist himself: Socrates. Some say his whole existence was ironic. For my purposes, to say that his irony transcended irony — that is, to say that he created meta-irony — is enough.
Instead of saying something and meaning the opposite, Socrates would often say things that on the surface were clearly false, leading his audience to believe he meant the opposite, but also in another sense these things were true, and he meant them in earnest. The classic case is that he said he knew nothing and wanted to learn from everyone, while proceeding to get the better end of every discussion he got into. He knew nothing but was the wisest man in Athens, he was considered a sophist despite being their biggest adversary. He said teaching was impossible but was sentenced to death for teaching his students about new gods. He thought his mission was divine, but died happily and without protest.
If you went for Socrates expecting answers, you left with many, many questions. But these questions, it turns out, filled you up much more than the answers you were looking for. If you go to Norm expecting laughs and indulgence, you will leave with a cheeky smile, a sense of the frustration of expectation that so pervades our life. The process they teach us is to always lift the mask and look behind it, instead of going along laughing the unexamined life, living the unexamined laugh. How pretentious is this? Jesus Christ.
To be ironic, to smile at ourselves, is to be conscious. Irony is the Shakespearean aside, when we realize we are just following a script and break from it. To be able to smile in this way is to begin to have a personal life, an inward world, where we confront the masks and shadows of our existence. In irony we are free by negation: as Kierkegaard said, it is not truth, but the way to it. After peeling all the layers of deceit in us, irony lets us see what’s behind.
A man went to a doctor and said “Doc, I’m feeling really down.” The doctor said, with great excitement: “Go to see Pagliacci, The Clown! He’ll get your spirits up. I’ve had dozens of patients who told me the same, and after seeing Pagliacci they came back all smiles, without fail. He’ll get your spirits up, I guarantee it!”. The man wore a truly forlorn countenance, sighed and said “But Doc, I’m Pagliacci.”
There is irony in the tears of the clown, because in them we see his private life, his inward world. The world existing in opposition to the external, public world — the world of deceit, the pretend game, the eternal carnival of masquerades. This world that irony shows us is the true one. But when our clown Pagliacci cries for this, the irony is lost on him: in his case especially, his life is literally a joke. And what about yours truly, trying so hard not to have the irony lost on him? What about this self aware exposition on meta-irony, what about that? What about this little man trying hard to be one step behind the masks, hiding himself in a game of self awareness when the only way to save the irony lost everywhere else is to be genuinely earnest…
To realize this of life is to confront irony with itself, to be ironic about it — to realize this is to be able to smile at our own tears, the same way Norm smiled at his cancer and kept it in his private world, not letting the outside world see his tears — making everyone say his punchline after he died: “I didn’t even know he was sick!”. Irony lets us see behind, but we also have to use this irony to look behind it. This way we turn the cold, cold world of detached irony into the real world, where we try and fail to simply love.
To see that things are not what they seem, a lesson Norm learned between the ages of six and eight years old, as he says in his memoir, is to understand that the truth is in our internal world, not in the public game of deceit. God is inside us and all things, after all — not outside them. This first lesson is what Norm meant when he said that in his book he skipped facts and went for truth. What we say doesn’t matter half as much as what we mean. None of his jokes contained factual truth in them, so far as I know — and if some did, it doesn’t really matter. In that sense, the jokes weren’t really about him, they were made up.
But in another sense, they were profoundly about him. This is the turning of irony upon itself. The stories were made up, but they all pointed at things he thought endlessly about: death, human nature, answering machines. What is masterful in Norm is that he understands not only that the external world is pretending and the internal world is truth, but also that he is pretending internally as well. The masks he wears are his masks, and part of who he is. Understanding that to live is to pretend, we get closer to an all encompassing view of life as some kind of sick joke. We understand what it means to get no answers, to look behind the veil and see another veil, and behind that one, only a hole.
We understand the moth that felt trapped in a spider’s web, waiting to be killed, then managed to fly away from the web only to realize there was still a thread of the web attached to her, with the spider on the other side coming to eat her alive. Then after shaking herself from this last thread, the moth feels empty and thinks that maybe that thread with the spider at the end is life itself. Trying to run from it is to chase after the wind.
As a negative process, irony is truly humbling, if we don’t have it lost on us somewhere along the way, thinking we got the world fooled. In irony we accept death, as Socrates and Norm did so beautifully. If no man is truly happy until he dies, we can tell Socrates was truly a happy man. While most tragic heroes from Greek Mythology died in grief, Socrates took the cup most cheerfully and drained it very easily, in good humor. As for Mr. Macfonald, I guess he realized that his deathly battle against his cancer would have to end badly for him, but not as a loss: the cancer died with him, so it was a draw, after all. Like most things in life, his battle had no winner.
Thank you, Norm, for showing me the way!