{"id":1393,"date":"2017-06-09T10:14:05","date_gmt":"2017-06-09T15:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/?p=1393"},"modified":"2017-06-06T15:21:26","modified_gmt":"2017-06-06T20:21:26","slug":"whoa-i-am-blown-away-by-this-norm-macdonald-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2017\/06\/whoa-i-am-blown-away-by-this-norm-macdonald-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Whoa! I am blown away by this Norm MacDonald interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know that makes me sound like a dick, but for context: I was a teen in the 1990s, and so Norm MacDonald is sorta fixed in my head as a half-funny smirk standing off center in a scene framed around David Spade abusing Chris Farley.\u00a0 <\/span>It isn’t that I wrote him off\u2014upon reflection, I just realized I never even evaluated<\/i> what the dude was doing; the director, camera man, SNL<\/em> staff, and guys I sat with at lunch wrote Norm\u00a0off, and I took their word for it.<\/span><\/p>\n

All that aside, this is a really, really fascinating interview<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/span>Neat stuff about craft in here\u2014which I’m always down for<\/a>\u2014but also a really nuanced view of art as a product of human interaction and actualization.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

I was gonna write a book about how to be a stand-up without being funny, but I thought it would be too cynical. I really think I could write it though.<\/span><\/p>\n

A manual for how to perform an impression of a stand-up comedian?<\/span>
\n<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s exactly right. It was mostly about crowd control. If you\u2019re not very good you have to deal with the audience a lot, so it was a lot about how to do that. Like, you can pick on one person in the audience, and then the rest of the audience gets on your side because they\u2019re afraid of being picked on. It\u2019s all the psychology of mobs. You can learn it. I\u2019ll go to a club and suddenly the guy who was the bouncer last time I was there is a stand-up, because he\u2019s been there, watching how it works. Even jokes, you can do them mathematically without having any inspiration.<\/span><\/p>\n

How\u2019s that work?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

You just take a premise and instead of following it to its logical conclusion you follow it to its illogical conclusion by having a faulty premise to begin with.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s surprising that you ultimately decided against writing a book that would\u2019ve suggested that your vocation, the field of your life\u2019s work, can be an empty, soulless shell of an occupation.<\/span>
\n<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Yeah, I also thought it would be too pompous. It\u2019s nobody\u2019s fault<\/i> there aren\u2019t more funny comedians. If I were an awful comedian, I\u2019d probably still be drawn to doing it. I remember when I first came to Los Angeles, Jay Leno was there and at the time he was the king of all stand-ups. And one night, I had to follow him. I was thinking, My god, this is going to be the worst<\/i>. But Jay told me it\u2019s fine to follow a good comedian. You just don\u2019t want to follow a bad comedian. Or a filthy comic. They pull the audience down. It\u2019s hard to go on after a filthy comic with, \u201cWhat about Raisin Bran? Doesn\u2019t everyone know how big a scoop is?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

and<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Are you following the <\/b>Kathy Griffin stuff<\/b><\/span><\/a><\/span> at all?<\/span>
\n<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

What she did was grotesque. Disgusting. It shows how isolated everyone is. I was golfing last week and I told the guy I was golfing with, \u201cIt\u2019s getting pretty crazy. I heard someone say they\u2019re trying to \u2018humanize\u2019 Trump. Well, he is<\/i> human.\u201d And this guy goes, \u201cWell, barely.\u201d Jesus Christ. But Kathy Griffin went about as far as you can go. It\u2019s like she had no sense of the history of that kind of image.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to understand how someone didn\u2019t say to her or the photographer, \u201cMaybe let\u2019s dial this down from an eleven to about a seven.\u201d<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The photographer, her manager, her agent, the person who made the severed head\u2014no one said, eeeh<\/i>. And I hate the immediate apology. Why are you apologizing? You apologize and then everyone just accepts that the apology is genuine.<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s wrong with apologizing?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

If it had gone over good she wouldn\u2019t be apologizing for it. She\u2019s only apologizing for the result and what it might mean for her career. It\u2019s like when a guy like Anthony Weiner says, \u201cI\u2019m sorry. I made a terrible decision.\u201d A decision? You had a pros-and-cons list about texting with that 15-year-old? The action wasn\u2019t the result of a real decision.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Do go and read the whole thing<\/a>. It is worth your time today.<\/span><\/p>\n