[The following was written but never published 5 years ago. Hence the belated obit aspect.]
Many
years ago now already, sitting with friend who's a classically trained
pianist, the subject of genius came about. He said that the word was
overused in the extreme. There were no geniuses, in that regard, and, as
if to delineate for the specific purpose of definitional purity,
Mozart, he said, was a genius, evidenced by his ability to compose with
such complexity at such a young age. A genius, that is, regardless of
whether one has found his work uninspiring, or even thinks, like the
comedi-cised Count, that there are too many notes. Genius! No. Just an
observation.
Of
what are these observations representative? I recall some politico
stressing the importance of taking the time and effort to write to one's
political representative in that it was common adage in their circle
that the posted letter would represent a larger number of constituents
than, say, a phone call, which, somehow in direct relation to the lower
difficulty of its undertaking, carried less weight and thereby
represented fewer voters. Of course there would be, what I would assume,
the jamming Congress' phone banks kind of action, which in old
school parlance involved literally many more people getting involved.
Still, less representative apparently. Or maybe it's the fact that a
parliamentarian can stand in the well and hold up a letter, as if to
demonstrate representative democracy at its finest.
And
this was all before a further in/deflation of terms. My pianist friend may have foreseen the exponential onset of our
new era, in which everybody's a genius, because it's so easy to say so, and perhaps proportionally
recognizable by the brevity of phonetic identification. Kinsky? Genius!
Hitch? We need another word!
But
that's just YooToob talk. Even so, keep in mind that it's the
comments that really represent. The "likes" are by contrast an indication
of the amount of energy it takes for the average right index finger to
depress a mouse button with a cursor over the symbol of a tiny thumbs
up [still not mobile after all these years]. The YooToob money masters funnel more to the creator who inspires
the former level of engagement. If that's not proof of the politico's
posted letter theory, I don't know what is!
I
notice that YooToob comments seem driven by a certain kind of energy.
That observation's being mine is by definition just an observation of
one, but what if it's a projection? Is it thereby merely a
representation of one? Fuck! Do you have any idea how much effort goes
into this logorrhea?
Where was I? Oh, yeah. I'm no genius, I can tell you that much. But I have a greater chance of being one on The Internet
because it affords me the opportunity to inspire someone somewhere to
take the time and effort to get to the end of this entry and look for my
contact information and write me an email to tell me what a genius I
am. But that would take such an effort. If I just activated the comments, then I'd get called all kinds of things.
Unfortunately I'm way way down on the list of geniuses even with my
name, because mine has three syllables. Who's tops? Don't be daft. Why,
of course, it's Dave! But that ain't Dave saying that. Just a bunch of randos who oughta get out more.
__
In tribute to his posthumourousness, I have written a best last joke at Norm Macdonald's expense: Judging by the reaction, his best career move was getting cancer.
If
you know his voice and transpose that to the first person, I do believe
it'd sound about right. Still, the joke as written should suffice as
tribute. But if you're more of the "butthurt" kind, you may just
"entirely miss the point".
I loathe to risk falling into the "same guys who" fallacy,
but as post-Rotten John put it regarding anger: it's an energy. So
while there may not be an individual group of people whose appreciation
of a joke depends not on the art with which it is told, but solely on
its teller, there is, for want of a more nuanced way to put it, a
certain energy common to the approval or disapproval of the same kind of
joke depending on its origin.
To
be more clear, I'd like to eliminate the socio-political concept of
punching up or down for a moment and stick primarily to how a joke that
inspires gut-busting guffaws can suddenly seem vicariously cruel if
delivered in the opposite direction by positing the hypothetical premise
that if I were to go onto any one of the many, by the dint of his
death, algorithmically enhanced online videos featuring the wit and
wisdom of one Norm Macdonald and type that best last joke into the
comments section, it would garner an overabundance of energy that might
otherwise describe itself as "butthurt". But there'd probably be a few
kudos, as well. And at least one that said the comic himself would have
found it funny, and so there.
I
hasten to amend that Macdonald was born out of the asshole of the
boomer designation, but at the beginning of his rise to fame his peers
and fan base largely extended to slightly younger X-ers. My first
memories of him are from the end of the 80s' heyday of stand-up comedy
on cable television when I observed him to be, approximately, someone of
my age. I note now that then the teevee added years of the
perception of status, which had accurately enough turned out to've been a
few. I say all this to place his origins in a proximity, but a
proximity which would in ensuing years take on a greater aspect of the
generational gap, i.e. his skewing to an older conservative viewpoint.
I do have a couple of videos in mind in which His Brilliancy is lauded. In one, the title suggests that he schools an ignorant anti-Christian comic. The clip is from a show called Last Comic Standing,
which is one of those shows with judges who pick winners and losers. In
it the comedian Harrison Greenbaum uses an ironic juxtaposition of the
Bible and Harry Potter that, in fairness to the critic, you can see
coming from so far away that it's devoid of the element of the
unexpected that causes laughter. Nevertheless, Judge Roseanne believes
he's "real brave" for taking on such subject matter. Judge Macdonald
didn't see it that way:
"I
disagree. I don't think the Bible joke was, uh, brave at all. I, uh, I
think if you're gonna take on an entire religion, you should maybe know
what you're talking about. J.K. Rowling is a Christian, and J.K. Rowling
famously said that, uh, if you're familiar with the scriptures, you
could easily guess the ending of her book."
Yeah,
I dunno. I mean, I agree that ripping religion can be tired, low
hanging fruit. But the part about knowing what you're talking about is rich coming from Macdonald. Anyway, there's a default formula sought in
the casting of such programs, on down to and including Judge Roseanne's reaction to Judge Macdonald's comment (which functions as well to
contrast apparent competing intellectual abilities as much as it does a
disagreement over content). The show reveals itself as not for me: All
of it, from the stand-up routine to both reactions to it are asinine.
If
he'd said that he didn't find it brave, but also found it unfunny and
left it at that, that'd be fine. But for someone who felt it was better
to play the dumb guy, rather than a smug and smart one, he often enough
revealed the ignorance of that shrewdly framed inner smart ass that I
don't think was the intended effect.
The
umbrella to this phenomenon is in how he declared himself to be an
apolitical comedian, while so much of his shtick depended on poking at
political sensitivities. He never seemed to mind if he offended anyone
in the process. Now I can hear the comments section in my head telling
me I am missing the point, but I suspect Macdonald missed relevant
points often.
For example, when he said in relation to the latest pandemic that "It's funny how big pharma's so evil... 'til now!" I could be reading too much into this, but my suspicion is that anyone who found it funny isn't really critical of big pharma, or doesn't really understand that
it's always the public dime that funds the research, and the private
concern that profits from it, often enough to the detriment of public health.
It's
an otherwise pretty funny five minutes, especially for the crowd at the
time, I would think, in the classic cathartic sense for which humor is
sometimes the only medicine. But I have seen that one line as rather a
comment on how unrealistic it is to view big pharma as being a bad
thing. On the other hand, it could be I am missing the point, and he was
saying big pharma is, in fact, evil, but we who are in on this joke are
willing to look past that for a cure, craven as we are.
Nevertheless,
my reading comes by way of an expectation based on politically charged
precedents set by the comic in spite of what he had often enough said
about his finding political humor unfunny. The truth is, I think, rather
that political humor rubs him the wrong way only when it would seem to advocate politics he does not agree with. Or something that makes him uncomfortable.
Take for example his riff on gay pride,
wherein he reduces the concept of parents' pride in a gay son to being
proud of his loving cock. Now, I think there is a lot of potentially
humorous and thought provoking territory here, none of which he manages
to arrive at.
Pride
parades, for example, feature so prominently the sexual aspect of what
it means to be a homosexual, that one who does not know what they are
talking about might believe that's the only thing it's about. In
fairness, for many, it probably is just an occasion to celebrate the
flamboyancy of it all unfettered.
So a comparison of a pride parade with that of the celebration of the
Apollo astronauts made to Macdonald's mind the pride parade less worthy.
In a longer version of the bit, he contrasted the silly "pride of
being" with the pride of the achievement of military service, and it was
really just a throwaway as if the latter was so self-evident.
He
cared enough about making some kind of real
point that there's an evolution of the material evident in subsequent
tellings that reveal concern in its contextualization. But he was
destined to miss that point as long as he remained blind to the
deception of pride itself, which is excessive self-satisfaction, too
often the result of combatting shame.
[Enter here my own yet to be crafted joke about a father who feels almost unbearable shame as his son reveals how he murdered a family in cold blood - and how the father immediately swells with pride when his son says he was following orders.]
It's
been said he just simply did not give a fuck, as in what people think
of him, and indeed you can feel that in much of his work. The
homosexual was a frequent target in his material. To my knowledge he
never publicly revealed why that might have been, even if he did make
jokes about being in the closet. He was familiar with the scriptures,
though.
Macdonald. Norm. Well played, Internet in my head.
