we can’t all be beavis & butthead do america

One of my faves. I usually tell it with three sisters with distinct personalities (eldest is kind, middle is selfish, youngest is a wildcard) instead of three guys to mix things up, so it’s like:

3 guys are hiking through the woods when they find a lamp

Huh, I had no idea! That's wonderful, the joke makes me think of him and now I know why.

Norm himself has told this joke, only the guy had a giant pumpkin-head. I think it was on Howard Stern.

Thanks! I heard a version of it in high school (so it can at least be traced to the DC Area in the mid 2000's) but I stretched it the heck out to suit my love of longwinded jokes.

“You can’t hear laughter through a TV screen.”

Ya dirty dog!

“Norm Macdonald didn’t present himself like the tortured artist who bore his soul to the audience. He wasn’t a soothsayer or a martyr, a free-speech crusader or a social justice warrior. He was simply a comedian, one who knew how to make people laugh with the slightest nudge, the mere suggestion of a pause.”

One thing I came to admire about Norm Macdonald was the way he handled talk show host interruptions to some of his longer-form jokes. Not only did he not seem fazed by it, he dealt with them in a good natured way, even tending to respond with additional off-the-cuff jokes before seamlessly resuming the original joke.

His wife's a real battle ax, I hear

Norm never did get to come out the closet. Because as everybody knows, he was a deeply closeted homosexual man. He wasn’t gay, that needs to be said, he was just incredibly deeply closeted.

So a bartender is opening up at like 4PM, so the whole place is dead, and a guy walks in. He’s got a suit that could feed a family of four for a decade, and it’s on a body that would put Michael Phelps to shame, and he’s also got a red balloon for a head.

That reminds me that I once read that Walter Matthau started a rumours that his middle name was Foghorn, and that his real surname was about six syllables long.

Norm also is shrouded in mystery. He claimed he never drank once, and just naturally slurred and pretended to be drunk to add to his act and get with women. He claimed to be Polish despite his name, and was offended when someone assumed he was Polish because he ordered a Polish sausage. But it was because he was in a…

I doubt that Andy Kaufman would’ve liked to be called an “anti-comic”. He was simply an innovator, seeking to entertain in ways that were entirely original and hadn’t been done before.

The Albert Fish joke wouldn’t even work if Norm hadn’t been so amazing at constructing sentences and choosing his words. The intelligence intersects with some childish/banal stuff to make the joke, which is not an easy feat at all to pull off. I doubt any other comedian could do it, because you also need to employ that…

Reading all this stuff about Norm’s style, I’m reminded of how George Carlin eventually reached a point where all he had to do was name a certain group of people and then say “Fuck ‘em!”, and it killed because everyone knew he could brutally tear them down if he wanted. And that’s good company to be in.