Norm MacDonald is a zombie. Not in the sense that he looks like a corpse — actually, at his weekend two-night stand in Toronto, a spate of gray hair was his only notable sign of aging. (That, and his obsessive focus on disease and death.) But the expat Canuck’s resemblance to Hollywood’s favourite brand of monster was more in his tendency to lurch into view every time you turn your back.
Remember him as a steely-eyed comic with the cheery demeanour of the Grim Reaper? Don’t look now; he’s the voice of an animated beaver in a series of Bell commercials. You thought he was done when Dirty Work, and later, The Norm Show, failed to jump-start his acting career? There he is on the Bob Saget roast, brilliantly skewering the other comics' tedious gross-out jokes by doing milquetoast lines that would get you thrown out of a Friar’s Club. Wait, you thought he really had lost it when you saw the Saget roast? Oh Jesus, here he comes doing a stand-up tour. And make no mistake, he slayed Saturday night’s crowd like the crown prince of the undead.
Presumably every standup recycles a few classic bits, and MacDonald trotted out some gems of his own, notably his notoriously dark routine about a bowel-cancer patient and an alcoholic comparing symptoms: “'Well, I bleed out of my bowel, it’s just a lot of pain in my bowel. What about you?' 'Me, I get happy… Sometimes I’ll meet a woman who has the same disease as me, and I’ll end up fucking her.'” His bit about the relative usefulness of large penises pretty much declares the topic closed: "[They say] it's not the size that counts, but what you do with it? It's not like the guy with the giant cock doesn't know what to do with it... 'God, I wish it were smaller, and easier to manoeuver!'" But MacDonald laid a wealth of unrecorded material on us, including a savagely dark bit about the stupid things people say to the recently bereaved: “He’s in a better place? Before, he was alive and in the bed, and now he’s lying dead on the floor?”
It was exceptionally dark, and other than a brief sojourn into Billy Bob Thornton territory, he avoided doing the Canada vs. America material you’d expect from a prodigal son in favour of less hoary comedic subject like immortality, pedophilia and crib death. Frankly, if you can make crib death funny, you either deserve some sort of medal, or a straitjacket. Some people doubted MacDonald’s mental fitness in the wake of the Saget roast, but anyone who saw this show knows that MacDonald won’t be anywhere near a rubber room any time soon. Here’s hoping his rumoured reality show comes to fruition, because the more we can observe the workings of this odd but exceptional mind, the better.