The Two Sides of Norm Macdonald

When Norm Macdonald shocked the world recently by dying of Cancer there were two articles about him on this website. The more popular of the two was a loving appreciation of Macdonald’s legendary performance on the Bob Saget roast. 

This article proved surprisingly popular and enduring, in the sense that it was a solid hit for me no less than three times. It was huge when I first posted it. It did just as well when I re-posted it and was a ratings blockbuster a third and final time when I re-published it after the cult comedian’s death. 

The article’s popularity did not surprise me because people fucking love Norm Macdonald. He was a divisive cult iconoclast despite being famous primarily for holding down one of the most mainstream, establishment positions in all of comedy: Weekend Update anchor during one of the frattiest, broiest eras of Saturday Night Live.

When a famous person dies the public response sometimes feels wildly disproportionate to the celebrity’s popularity at the time of their death. There can be a performative aspect to grieving, particularly on social media but the outpouring of grief and love that followed in the wake of Macdonald’s death felt genuine and organic because it was rooted in no small part in nostalgia for Saturday Night Live, a comic institution whose influence is hard to overstate.

Norm Macdonald was the Weekend Update anchor when I was eighteen years old, the most important year in everyone’s life because that’s the age when you officially become an adult. Macdonald was the man in the chair the year I became a man. Even if I didn’t think Macdonald was a genius he’d still occupy a place of prominence in my memory because of that.

The other article was less popular and less positive. It’s a blog post from 2018 expressing disappointment but not surprise when Macdonald defended his friends Louis CK and Roseanne, infamously reasoning, “There are very few people that have gone through what (CK and Roseanne) have, losing everything in a day…Of course, people will go, ‘What about the victims?’ But you know what? The victims didn’t have to go through that.”

Together these posts do a pretty good job of expressing how I feel about Macdonald, or how I felt. I think he’s a comic genius who created some of my favorite comedy of all time and there’s a lot about him as a person that I find deeply upsetting. 

I was going to write a blog post about how enough time had passed that we can look back on Macdonald’s regrettable comments about CK and Roseanne and see them as part of Macdonald’s legacy and not the entirety. 

Then something unfortunate but also not terribly surprising happened. In the awful, lingering shadow of death, two very different portraits of Macdonald emerged. In one Macdonald was a comedy angel, an utter original who made a deep, positive impact on people’s lives, primarily men, either through his idiosyncratic, iconoclastic example or through words of support and encouragement. In the other, Macdonald was more of a demonic figure, a proud misogynist who hurt countless women in countless ways, whether through groping or cruel words or through blatant objectification. 

A number of women came forward with similar stories that depicted Macdonald as a man whose sexism was not casual or half-hearted but at the very center of his being. 

The internet being a fetid, toxic cess pool of hatred and virulent misogyny, women who came forward with anecdotes about being sexually harassed or humiliated were angrily confronted by fanboys accusing them of being lying attention whores trying to get famous by besmirching the legacy of a great man who can no longer defend himself. 

I’ve never understood this line of thinking. If you genuinely want attention, fame or money, saying unpopular things about a beloved dead performer would be a very strange, counter-intuitive way of going about it, as it’s much more likely you’ll be harassed and doxxed and called any number of unspeakable names. 

Macdonald had a reputation for being a heavy drinker, if not an alcoholic, but in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter he claimed that he never actually drank, and merely pretended to be drunk as an excuse to grope women, bragging, in print and on the record, “I’d (pretend to be drunk) to get girls! I’d be in a bar and for some reason when you’re drunk, girls will put up with it if you try to grope them or whatever. (In a high-pitched voice🙂 “What are you doing? Haha!” If you’re sober, they’re like, “Hey! Just what do you think you‘re doing?” So I’d just garble my words. I have used being a drunk to my advantage many times.”

Is this an exceedingly dark joke? I have no idea but if it is a joke, it’s a tasteless and unfunny one and if it is not a joke then it is a frank admission of sexual misconduct and harassment. 

These unsurprising revelations cast even tributes in a much darker light. David Cross once again stuck his foot in his mouth when he said that when the world thought he was a racist piece of shit, Norm Macdonald was the very first person to call him up and tell him that wasn’t the case. 

Despite what Cross might like to think, it was not Norm Macdonald’s place as a straight white man notorious for transphobia and sexism to judge Cross as innocent of racism or sexism. 

I had planned to re-watch Dirty Work in honor of Macdonald’s passing but in light of these ugly revelations I would have a hard time writing glowingly about a man who apparently hurt a lot of women through the decades. 

In the grand scheme of things, not being able to enjoy Dirty Work the way I did before makes me, at most, minor collateral damage. The real victims of Macdonald’s posthumous fall from grace are the women he victimized in a number of different ways, not former fanboys like me who revere Macdonald as a comic mind but are horrified and saddened by him as a person.  

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