The odd truths of Norm Macdonald
Or, the joke as fact
Wordplay, innuendo, puns, double entendres, cleverness, and ambiguity: The late Norm Macdonald said he hated it all.
His platonic ideal of a joke, the shining joke on a hill, the joke as zen koan, was simple: The setup should be exactly the same as the punchline.
As he told Marc Maron in 2011, he achieved this level of perfection back in 1995 as anchor of Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live. It went like this:
“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 she was married to Lyle Lovett.”
With no cathartic release other than the surprise of no surprise, it’s just a restatement of an odd truth.
Macdonald would build on this fact-based format with repetition, a time-tested way to make just about any phrase funny. (Here’s an eight-minute supercut of his three years of Weekend Update callbacks.)
Most notably, he’d share a random statistic about how popular the male star of Baywatch was in Germany and then land on:
Which once again proves my old theory: Germans love David Hasselhoff.
Which was true, odd, expected, and funny — a nearly impossible combination.
Though Norm Macdonald was known as an unreliable narrator of his own life, I do want to believe that his white whale was a joke so simple it’s a fact. But he could and did excel at other formats, the best of which were striking for how complex they were.
In his famous Moth Joke — perhaps the modern apogee of The Shaggy Dog story — he makes an unexpected swerve into poetic language, inexplicably touched by Tolstoy, and that’s what makes it work:
Similarly, his infamous roast of Bob Saget is all the more devastating for being conventional. The man who had pared comedy down to almost nothing did an impressively long routine of straightforward, family friendly, utterly prosaic jokes. A genius of odd truths told normal lies. Take that, Danny Tanner:
In the Maron interview, Macdonald makes passing reference to his asceticism. He had a gambling addiction that scratched that itch: If you have $450,000 and gamble away $400,000, he says, that last $50K is just a reminder of all the money you used to have. Might as well get rid of that, too.
George Bernard Shaw said the truth was the funniest joke in the world, but no one laughs at his plays. It’s easy to say but exceptionally hard to do. Norm Macdonald came very close when he stripped away the irritant of the complex format to find an austere ideal: An odd truth that makes you laugh.
Quick quips; lightning
“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”
—George Bernard Shaw
“If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.”
— Albert Einstein
“The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.”
— Clifton Fadiman
That was Get Wit Quick No. 115 — or so the Germans would have us believe. If mawkish social media tributes are the worst part of how we grieve celebrities, YouTube rabbit holes may be the best. Kudos to Better Than Ezra for saluting this joke. Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting continues to enjoy Frank Stallone levels of success. If you’ve got any gum, tap the❤️ below.