Last night we saw Norm MacDonald at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston. Norm was introduced to the rowdy crowd of mostly 20-30 something white dudes as “the greatest Saturday Night Live Weekend Update anchor ever,” an assertion that I take issue with, although I cannot deny the excellence of his Bob Dole impression (that episode when Bob Dole becomes a member of the Real World is one of my all-time favorites.)
So, what’s Norm MacDonald like these days? Older, predictably. He talks slower, almost slurred, sometimes not in full sentences, a regressed parlance that even native English speakers found incomprehensible at times (let alone the poor French). Sometimes Norm would get lost in his own discourse, hilariously. He cursed quite a bit. “When I was little, my father said that people curse because they don’t know a lot of words, so I started cursing, because it was just easier, easier than reading a dictionary.”
The subject matters of Norm’s act were random, but the prevailing theme seemed to be stupidity: Norm’s stupidity, the media’s stupidity, America’s stupidity. Yet Norm was never angry, just… confused. “Why do we behave differently when we eat in restaurants?” he rambled. “When I’m cooking a pork chop at home, and I’m waiting for it to cook, I never start eating bread… from a basket… with butter.” The audience was in stitches.
Another bit: “My friend’s an alcoholic, and he says he has the disease of alcoholism. Well, I have to say, out of all the diseases that you can get, alcoholism is a pretty good one. It’s the disease that means you’re drunk all the time. It’s better than, like, bowel cancer.”
And another: “Boston is one of the six good cities in this country. Every where else is a shithole [crowd cheers loudly]. You go to some of these places, and you ask, ‘what is there to do here?’ And they say, ‘Well there’s the Galleria.’ I know what’s at the Galleria to the square foot. They’re so proud, ‘Oh we have 4 Gaps.’ So proud! ‘4 Gaps? I’ll alert them back East.'”
And my favorite: “What’s with that word, ‘ID’? The I stands for ‘I’, and the D stands for ‘Dentification.'”
