That’s my goal in life: not to die.
- Norm Macdonald, Me Doing Stand-Up (2011)
Norm Macdonald was in the room when my mom died nearly 20 years ago.
It was January and she was in the hospital bed that she'd been in for months, in the living room at home. And one day at school, I all of a sudden violently threw up in math class and so went home. I had a wild stomach bug. Like, couldn't keep an ice chip down, kind of stomach bug. So I stayed home from school for a few days.
And on one of those days, my Dad and I were sitting by her and we had the TV on. A Saturday Night Live rerun was playing on Comedy Central which, for a long time, constituted like 50% of its programming, but it was good because it was all 80's and 90's golden years stuff. But anyways, it was "Weekend Update." Norm Macdonald was giving his usual wry takes on the news, probably. Commenting on some Very Nineteen-Nineties stuff.
And then that was it. Her heart finally stopped beating. Cancer, which she had fought valiantly against for almost my whole life, did what cancer often does. It took her life.
I don't look back at that moment—with Norm Macdonald yukking it up on TV—and feel some kind of kinship that one does when, say, they obsess over a band that got them through a breakup. Or towards an actor that plays the lead role in all of their comfort movies, there when they always need them.
But Norm was one of my family’s favorite comedians before that moment and up to this day. (Well, actually, ironically I'm not actually sure how my mom felt but it would be pretty funny if she hated him.) I get a kick out of how many people equate the Browns with Norm.
All of the clips that people have been sharing—all of them are as good as they're saying. It's the moth joke. It's his roast of Bob Saget. It's the Dirty Johnny joke. His stand-up specials. Weekend Update. It's his bit in Billy Madison or lead role in Dirty Work where the whole thing wasn't so much an acting job as Norm playing a bit where he's Norm (that makes sense, right).
That commitment to the bit is a defining quality and what made him god-tier in the eyes of so many.
There's no better way to kill humor than to explain it, but here goes. His bits weren't the tightest, necessarily, but they were special. He could kill with two audiences at once, because he would occasionally smirk or chuckle or pause in the middle of a bit and so you, as audience member, knew he was up to something. If you got the bit, then great. You were already hooked. But if you didn't get it, you got to laugh when he broke character for two seconds or maybe it clued you in to what humor he was actually conveying.
I think back to liking him as a kid, and wonder how I understood his humor. And I may not have understood all of it, in full, but he let me know that his jokes were funny when he cracked a smile or had to look away for a second to keep from cracking himself up. He let me know that they were worth laughing at. Not many comedians can be funny because they laugh at their own jokes.
After news of his passing broke this week and the tributes started coming in, a lot of people shared his jokes and bits on death and cancer. I didn't realize how often, especially later in his career, he focused on death and cancer and how he was dealing with his own mortality in classic Norm fashion, even pre-cancer. (But also maybe dying without the public knowing you're really dying was his ultimate bit. He was dying inside but played it straight on the outside. Pretty wild.)
He has a good one where he rails against the concept of "battling" or losing to cancer.
But I like this part:
If you die, the cancer also dies at exactly the same time. So that to me, is not a loss; it's a draw.
So, Norm had a tough week. He and cancer tied. And unbeknownst to him, he saw my mom and cancer duke it out twenty years before and, well, she tied, too. A split-decision. I dunno. That's kind of fun.
It's a bummer that he's gone but I guess I'll take away this: try to commit to the bit. Give the audience the occasional smirk or chuckle and let people in; you never know who's going to be watching. And when it all comes down to it—at worst—we’re all going to tie.
My Mom, Cancer, and Norm Macdonald [No. 093]