Based on a True Story

Norm Macdonald on impostor syndrome: “They looked at me the way real vampires look at Count Chocula.” 

When Norm Macdonald died last year, I realized that I hadn’t thought about him for many years. I remember watching him on "Saturday Night Live" in the mid-90s, delivering "Weekend Update" jokes with his gleeful smirk. I thought he was hilarious, but I didn’t see any of his post-SNL work, so I suppose I can’t say that I was a particular fan. But I was very sad when he died, partly in the way that people my age are sad when prominent figures of our generation begin to die, but partly for his own sake. Norm Macdonald could make people laugh about anything. 

Not long after he died, I read his book, Based on a True Story, an almost completely made-up autobiography. I started this book with little idea of what to expect. He begins with stories of his childhood on a Canadian farm (I don’t think he even lived on a farm), listening to his father’s friends telling war stories. Macdonald writes about a trusted family friend who lures the 8-year-old Norm into a shack with the promise that he’ll see a trained squirrel. And then “he turned his gaze on me, and his eyes flashed black like the wing of a crow…and the inside of the shed went black. Then I heard the bolt. I forget what happened next.” 

I mean, holy shit. Holy shit. 

I did some cursory internet research, to see if Norm Macdonald had ever talked about anything like the horrendous trauma that he hints at in this incendiary device of a chapter ending, but I found nothing. Was he joking? Was he suggesting that this kind of thing happens to boys all the time, and then they just grow up and move on and get over it by living chaotic picaresque novel lives filled with blackout drinking, high-stakes gambling, and maritime adventure? I don’t know, but if I were to write a serious novel that included a sexual assault against a child (and I wouldn’t because I couldn’t), this is how I would write it; the child utterly blanking out the trauma and the reader left shocked and horrified and not sure if she has the stomach to keep reading, but ultimately compelled to do so. 

Feeling compelled, I kept reading, thinking the whole time, "only Norm Macdonald." Only Norm Macdonald could make up a fake ghostwritten autobiography filled with ridiculous and entirely untrue stories about seal hunting and amyl poppers and morphine cocktails and gambling addiction and prison rapes, and make almost all of it funny. Yes, including the prison rape part. Actually, especially the prison rape part. The part when he hints at child sexual assault was shocking and horrifying and not funny at all, but the prison rape part made me laugh so hard that I had to put the book down for a while and try to figure out just what the hell is wrong with me that I was doubled over laughing, laughing so hard that I started crying, over a prison rape story. Yes, it was a fake prison rape story, and I knew it was fake; but still, what is wrong with me? 

This is what everyone thinks, I guess, when we laugh at something humor-inappropriate like death or violence or illness or tragedy. What is wrong with me? That joke crossed the line, we think, and I’m still laughing. That was Norm Macdonald’s particular genius. He could cross the line, move the line a little bit further out, cross it again, and then move it right back where it belongs and bring you back with him to the other side, before you even knew what happened. 

After I finished the book, I watched a few minutes of his Netflix comedy special; just Norm Macdonald standing on a stage, beautiful and human in his ill- fitting suit and running shoes, tugging at his collar and wiping the sweat from his forehead and laughing his silly head off at his own jokes. There was something in the delivery, something in the gleeful smirk as he’s about to deliver a completely unexpected punchline, that reminded me of another favorite comedian, Dave Chappelle. About Dave Chappelle, I have a great deal to say, and I’ll do that another time. Here’s a preview: I finally watched “The Closer” months after Netflix released it, months of the usual complaints that Chappelle’s comedy constitutes violence against gay and transgender people. And having watched the show, I have to assume that the online outrage industrial complex hasn’t actually seen it because there’s no way that anyone could see it and still think that Dave Chappelle hates trans people or gay people or anyone else. 

*****

Dave Chappelle on suffering: "I'm not making fun of anyone's suffering. I know it's hard to be everybody." 2021 was a hard year. Almost everyone I know was managing some kind of crisis, some kind of trauma or grief or sadness. In 2021, it was hard to be everybody. 

Comedians have to understand pain and suffering and grief and everything else that isn’t really funny. Great comedians can see the truth better than everyone else around them, and they can always find something ridiculous to make fun of, no matter how serious life gets. When they are also brave enough to actually make the joke, to say the inappropriate, just-over-the-line offensive punchline that gets to the truth of our shared humanity, then they become almost transcendent.

It’s hard to be everybody. This is the reality of a fallen, imperfect world. It’s hard to be everybody, but Norm Macdonald knew that the pain of being everybody is also hilarious. RIP, Norm.