At the Fonda Theatre, a block down from the Walk of Stars from Hollywood and Vine, the marquee read: “Celebrating Norm.” On the two windows adjacent the entrance, N-O-R-M was spelled out vertically in black letters.
It has been eight months since Norm Macdonald quietly left us. He chose to die privately, his cancer undisclosed to all but a tiny family circle. In an era when people write soul-baring essays about a torn rotator cuff, he kept his condition a secret from just about everyone – from his friends, from his million-plus Twitter followers, from the vast audience of fans who to this day spend the wee hours surfing his talk show appearances on YouTube.
The audience was arranged as Norm would have wanted. Family members sat up front. Three rows back sat the gravitationally famous and somewhat sad-looking Bill Murray. At the table next to him the woman who tended bar at a Vegas golf club Norm liked.
Conan O’Brien told the origin story of one of Norm’s famous comedic moments. Forced to do a last-minute second segment during a late-night gig on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, Norm took a fifteen-second joke about a moth visiting a psychiatrist he’d heard from Colin Quinn and stretched it into a five-minute essay on existential dread. The joke went down in comedy history.
Downey, like most of the other speakers, talked about Norm’s fearlessness. That was a popular theme. Norm’s fearless skewering of OJ. Norm fearlessly roasting the very concept of a roast by telling corny fifties jokes from an old book of gags during a roast of Bob Saget, who back then grinned in delight as the audience sat in confused silence.
One year ago, Norm was still with us. So was Gilbert Gottfried. So was Bob Saget. So was Louie Anderson.
KMo387
oh love it... Norm was so cool when I ran Yuk's
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