ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

In an age in which most comics avoid disturbing our civic pieties--or avoid comedy all together--Norm soldiered forth. Norm made jokes about rape, pedophilia, and autoerotic asphyxiation; he made jokes about Hitler, 9/11, and death--he transgressed almost every norm. His deadpan delivery killed audiences, and news of his unexpected death was delivered in the same deadpan fashion. One can imagine him grinning impishly at the long-delayed delivery of the punchline. [...]

It's not just that Norm was funny; it's that, in addition to being funny, he was also thoughtful, philosophic. He was widely read in literature, especially Russian literature, and it often seemed he was trying to channel both the dark comedy and tragic sensibility of a Tolstoy--but not Dostoevsky! His joke about suicide as an appropriate response to modern life conveys a similar message to The Death of Ivan Ilyich. He joked about people who battle cancer while himself dying of the affliction. These jokes now appear in a new light. Instead of an irreverent gibe at the sick, we now see Norm's jokes about death were his own comic attempt to make sense of the universal fate of mankind. He prodded you to consider your own mortality, but with the pleasant palliative of jest. In his recent memoir--a fake memoir, by the way--he noted that the occasion of watching his beloved cat kill a mouse led him to "that hardscrabble truth" that "there is a difference between what a thing is and what it appears to be." And this reflection led him to attempt, unsuccessfully, to see a picture as merely paint:

"I stared at the thing long and hard, trying to only see the paint. But it was no use. All my eyes would allow me to see was the lie. In fact, the longer I gazed at the paint, the more false detail I began to imagine. The boy was crying, as if afraid, and the woman was weaker than I had first believed. I finally gave up. I understood then that it takes a powerful imagination to see a thing for what it really is."

The chapter that follows is quite tragic in the distinctions it draws between appearances and reality. Perhaps we need to reread his "memoir" and see it for what it really is. Of course, he also reflected seriously on comedy.

It is no secret that Norm was also deeply pious, a quality almost entirely lacking among our comedians (and a fact notably absent from his Wikipedia page). Norm was a Christian who spoke respectfully and openly of his own faith, who respected the faith of others, and who had little patience for ignorant disrespect of religious belief. Even in the midst of the bawdiest joke, the bluest topic, or the rudest insult, Norm always affirmed his belief when prodded by a guest or host. He looked at the world with wonder and awe, and he saw in it evidence for God. As he tweeted a few years back: "Scripture. Faith. Grace. Christ, Glory of God. Smart man says nothing is a miracle. I say everything is."

Despite coming across as a sort of conservative, and perhaps in part because of it, Norm also eschewed being "political" or "relevant" or "edgy" and looked down upon comedians who thought their task was to speak to the political issues of the day and to lecture their audience. He recognized that what was often praised for bravery was usually nothing but the dominant political views expressed to an entirely sympathetic audience. Comedy, he would wryly observe, is supposed to be funny, not important. He preferred laughter to applause, recognizing that human laughter is a sudden, involuntary response, a kind of relief brought about by the supposed restoration of order in the world which a joke had momentarily called into question. Applause, by contrast, was the polite, intentional response an audience offers to comics of which it consciously approves. He scorned mere approval.

Yet, Norm's comedy was funny. He made audiences laugh, though he never pandered to them. He didn't look to flatter them, and that meant he was comfortable when his jokes were met with silence, hisses, or even boos. If a joke didn't work, that didn't mean it wasn't funny--it meant the audience didn't get it. His jokes, of course, were laugh-out-loud funny. Once you realized what he was doing, you were incapable of restraining your laughter, whether he was roasting a fellow comedian, trolling humorless, dour moralists, or ridiculing powerful television executives, Hollywood types, politicians, and public figures.

Tweet   @brothersjudd