We were never supposed to see the posthumous Norm Macdonald special that landed on Netflix this Memorial Day, eight months after the comedian’s premature death from a very private bout with cancer.
In Nothing Special, which was filmed without an audience in the summer of 2020, Macdonald looks more gaunt than he had in recent years. He’s wearing headphones and holding a handheld mic in a nondescript room as he delivers his unfinished material in one long take.
The jokes are punctuated by occasional yaps from an off-screen dog. When his cell phone rings mid-bit, he picks it up. “I’ve got to call you back on account of I’m doing a special,” he says into the phone with a sly smirk on his face.
Behind the camera is Macdonald’s longtime producing partner Lori Jo Hoekstra, who was among the very few people in his life who knew he was dying.
“Norm worked so hard on a new hour of material and wanted it to be seen,” Hoekstra said in a statement about the project. “While this version of Nothing Special was not originally meant to be the final product, COVID restrictions prevented him from filming in front of an audience. We want to make sure his fans see this very funny hour. He left this gift for all of us.”
The hour is very funny at times, and also far less polished than it would have been had Macdonald gotten the chance to fully work it out in front of audiences and then tape it in a proper venue. But the unusual format gives us a glimpse into both his process as a comedian and the state of his mind toward the end of his life.
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There is some unexpectedly progressive material about reparations for Native Americans and even the #MeToo movement—especially given the allegations that surfaced following his passing—and long digressions about topics like cannibalism that few other comics could pull off. But there is also a section very early on that mocks the idea of being trans and is sure to alienate some fans in the same way Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais have sparked controversy on Netflix in recent months.
That joke, a version of which was also in Macdonald’s set when I saw him perform at the New York Comedy Festival in the fall of 2019, centers on how his father’s outdated views on gender would be perceived today. He sarcastically says he’s only trying to show how “hateful we were back then.” Noting that his dad did “good stuff” like fighting Hitler in World War II, he says he also had an “evil side,” which he describes as “this crazy idea he had that having a cock had something to do with being a boy.”
“Nowadays, we can’t even wrap our heads around that kind of thinking,” he deadpans. “But people used to actually think that way. Isn’t that something?”
From his early days as “Weekend Update” anchor on Saturday Night Live, Macdonald has always been more interested in shocking viewers with his unexpected punchlines on topical issues than he was sharing intimate details about himself, to the point that he wrote an entire “memoir” called Based on a True Story made up of fake anecdotes about his life. Here, he includes jokes about an imaginary wife named “Ruth” and tackles hot-button topics like “systematic racism,” as he puts it, while at the same time mocking the very idea that anyone should be looking to comedians for political opinions.
“When you’re a comedian, they expect you to know things,” he says, a relatively recent phenomenon that he experienced when interviewers—like this one—started asking him to weigh in on politics during the Trump era. He explains that he prefers not to pay close attention to politics “on account of you only get one life.”
Macdonald does, however, start to confront his own mortality when he says he stopped “painting” his hair black because he doesn’t want to “die and be surprised.” He…
Read More: Norm Macdonald Faces Death as Only He Can in Posthumous Netflix Special