Norm Macdonald on silence and why he liked wandering around aimlessly
"I generally have a real strong idea or a strong punchline, and I just try to get to it by rambling around, as I don’t like to memorize words."
Norm Macdonald didn’t like memorizing words and felt he wasn’t a good enough actor to make that sound real anyway. So he intentionally rambled (trying to be funny along the way) with an ace up his sleeve: a strong punchline/idea that he knew would bail him out and make the whole thing work.
I generally have a lot of fucking material, so I probably have like six or seven hours of good stuff, and about three hours of great stuff. I can pick and choose and shit. I generally have a real strong idea or a strong punchline, and I just try to get to it by rambling around, as I don’t like to memorize words. And I can’t be naturalistic enough to make it sound real. So instead, I just wander around aimlessly knowing that I’ll be funny enough with stream of consciousness until I get to the actual explosively funny part.
Of course it helped that Norm was a true master who thrived in awkwardness and knew how to surf silence. (Lots of good Norm clips linked up there too.)
[Norm] made his own rules and mined the awkward spaces most comics run away from. Because silence is thought to be a killer when you’re trying to make someone laugh, but not for Norm. He was fearless, not as a high-minded socio-comedic strategy. More for kicks.
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Doesn’t it seem like fun to pull the thread on someone’s buttoned-up show plan, introducing mayhem and realness in a way that creates the rarest thing in entertainment — a fully unscripted, unanticipated moment?
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Norm was an absolute genius who understood the scourge of self-seriousness and boilerplate entertainment and the fun he could have by steering things off the tracks to a more interesting place while challenging everyone else to keep up and similarly toss out the rule book.
“The only interesting guys are guys that think differently than every other single person.”
-Norm McDonald