Abnormal Macdonald

I’ll be honest, I still miss Norm Macdonald tremendously. It’s easy, for me at least, in the immediate aftermath of a favorite celebrity or guiding light’s death to experience a series of grieving aftershocks where it feels like nothing will ever be the same, but I’ve found that after a number of months it usually settles out and things do go back to feeling the same way they did before. But there are some exceptions to that rule, and Norm is very much in the small mix of folks I’ll probably miss for the rest of my life.

That list, at least for the purposes of this exercise, looks like this: Chris Farley, Norm Macdonald, Robin Williams, Bob Saget, and Anthony Bourdain. All of them outrageous and hilarious people, and all of them tortured in various ways I resonate with in one way or another. Maybe there’s a better word for it than tortured, but I don’t really care because I don’t think I can put it any more plainly than this: I do not like living in a world that isn’t shared with them in direct and tangible ways. Maybe when we die we all get poured back into the soup bowl we came from, but in the meantime having to navigate the banal idiocies of modern life’s minutiae is much more difficult without them live on my television or phone or computer screen goofing the goofy things to death or pointing to the beautiful moments scattered amongst the industrial terrain.

Which brings me to earlier today, when I was in need of a yell laugh so badly I could hear the seams of my submarine creaking. And when that’s the case, there is often no better place to set course for than the Youtube archives of Norm Macdonald’s greatest moments. This is truly maybe the funniest (and also potentially darkest) unscripted moment of comedy I have ever seen, and if you need a similar pick me up please look no further than the clip below from Norm’s weird talk show.