Norm Macdonald’s ‘Gossip & Trickery’ Lies In Revealing The Jokes Right In Front Of Us

Toward the end of his first Netflix hour, Norm Macdonald downplays his importance, comparing himself instead to “some cheap magician” and invoking the subtitle for the comedy special. “Nothing I have said, really, is of substance,” Macdonald says, to big laughs from the crowd at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston. “I find, and it’s not just me. Like, most of my act is just, you know, gossip and trickery.”

But Macdonald’s always contains much more than the simple sleight-of-mouth illusions that define most other stand-up comedians. His misdirection, in sharp contrasts, often contains no sharp turn at all. While others zig, Macdonald doesn’t zag, but instead chooses to plow straight ahead. His observational comedy can focus so narrowly on the target that it strikes the true bull’s eye of the premise.

Or, as in his celebrated turn at the Comedy Central Roast of Bob Saget in 2008, catch his audience so off guard that otherwise banal jokes elicit uproarious laughs.

And so, upon inviting us into Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery after he’s already told a joke, his opening gambit about pork chops deconstructs how differently we all behave in a restaurant than if we had cooked dinner in our own home. Though the end result isn’t something he could tell on network television, you can gather why and how Macdonald and David Letterman would have an affinity for each other. Letterman chose Macdonald as his final stand-up guest on The Late Show in 2015.

Macdonald’s wide-eyed amazement and Letterman’s side-eyed sarcasm both view contemporary society from the skepticism of an elder. Both dry. Both deadpan. Macdonald, at 57, perhaps a little less cynical, though, than the 70-year-old Letterman. One of Macdonald’s jokes that he told on The Late Show in 2015 and for Netflix in 2017, is simple and true.

“Nobody knows nothing,” Macdonald jokes at one point, which may be why, he revealed earlier, that he seeks out that one person at a party who seems as smart as he is, as his safe conversational haven.

The truth is, however, that Macdonald finds much of his humor in what is true or what we’ve commonly decided upon as true. Whether that’s deconstructing what really happens after someone dies, or what we really mean when we quote the tourism slogan of Las Vegas, or the changing nature of fame as illustrated by how we now view the dozen men who have walked on the moon.

When he does play with form, he does so by interrupting a simple deadpan with a lengthy shaggy dog story. So a joke about suicide (which, if you had watched Louis CK go for the metaphorical jugular in 2017 or Chris Gethard open up more vulnerably in Career Suicide) takes a tangent into a story about his dad, or someone’s father, and how everything you remember about someone might be overwhelmed by the memory about his or her death. Or a reflection about writing his own memoir might find Macdonald feeling as though his own life isn’t up to the task, which leads him to exploring the truth about metaphors instead, or how sarcasm can disguise the ugly truth.

Either way, you’re in for a treat. No trickery necessary.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Norm MacDonald: Hitler's Dog, Gossip & Trickery on Netflix