Based On a True Story, by
Norm Macdonald (2016, Spiegel & Grau, Penguin Random House)
My one book choice for
February (I don’t count The Obesity Code – a biblia
a biblia – or the two books Kameron gave me back – the classic
science fiction omnibuses). I’ve been watching a lot of Norm Macdonald videos
on YouTube. I can’t say I cared much for him when he was on Saturday Night Live
in the early Nineties; I didn’t hate him either. I didn’t follow his oddly marginal
but persistently praised and even ubiquitous career through the years either,
his movie or sitcom appearances or his talk shows. I was probably most familiar
with his voice work, as Death on Family Guy or Pigeon on Mike
Tyson Mysteries. Lately I was drawn to consider his work more closely by
Michael Knowles’s video tribute to the comedian’s interaction with him.
Anyway, catching up with his
work from over the years, nicely gathered into bundles of clips, I started
developing an appreciation of his rather rambling and discursive style, dry,
mischievous, curmudgeonly (I love a curmudgeon), and when I found that he had
written a book and heard extracts from it, I knew I wanted to read it.
Norman Gene Macdonald (October
17, 1959 – September 14, 2021) was a Canadian stand-up comedian, actor,
and writer whose style was characterized by deadpan delivery,
eccentric understatement, and the use of folksy, old-fashioned turns of phrase.
– Wikipedia. That sums things up pretty well. The book itself is a masterful
combination of memoir and art, using the thread of his life story as a line to
hang routines and insights on.
His philosophy is that
no-one can really tell all the facts about his life (there will always be
omissions and misperceptions, matters of interpretation), that bare facts cannot
tell the truth, but that a subjective, crafted, fictional narrative might get
one closer to the real truth about a life. It strikes me suddenly that this is
the same theme as the movie Big Fish. In other words, not a completely
factual account, but ‘based on a true story.’
The narrative line here is
that Norm is going on a gambling mission to get him out of debt and set him up
for life. He is accompanied by Adam Eget, portrayed here as a combination
friend, stooge, and assistant. If Norm fails, well then, there is always Plan B,
death. Along the way various questions and situations lead him to recount the
story of his life, a story peppered with celebrity appearances and eccentric
side characters. We hear occasionally from a ‘ghost writer’ who is supposed to
be working on a ‘real’ autobiography of the comedian; he acts mainly as a foil and
critic to Norm, perhaps even as an undeveloped shadow-side of Norm himself.
The book arrived on Monday,
and I couldn’t get very far in it that first day, too much business to attend
to. I really got into it yesterday, but still I am only about 2/3 through this 240-page
book. Not sure yet how it turns out or if he will stick the landing, so to
stay. But so far it has been well worth the journey. Norm’s tale seems on its
way to settling into place in my personal pantheon. It’s too bad I didn’t fully
appreciate him while he was alive. Goodbye, Norman Gene.
Norm Reveals Rodney
Dangerfield’s Tragic Secret: Book Excerpt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2olqY_RZtU
Short Michael Knowles Video on Norm (3:49)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_dGRSsQwGs
Longer(13:03) Michael
Knowles Video on Norm (Including Clips)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y19wgPzSFv0
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