'Applause is voluntary, laughter is involuntary'

October 17, 2026

Netflix’s two-hour documentary about the mesmerically brilliant Norm MacDonald needs to be lauded to the rooftops. “Applause is voluntary, laughter is involuntary,” he says. He explains that jokes had to be stripped of all cleverness, all wordplay, all innuendo, and strive above all else for the unexpected. He said the unsayable. He encapsulated what we were all really thinking. 

We are shown clips of his Weekend Update segment on Saturday Night Live. “Lisa Marie Presley has filed for divorce from Michael Jackson. According to friends, the two were never a good match. She’s more of a stay-at-home type, and he’s more of a homosexual paedophile.” The rhythm, the delivery is perfect.

Famously, he joked brilliantly about O.J. Simpson nearly every week, and it eventually got him the sack, but he was a bit miffed in later years to think that his entire career had been reduced to a few years in the Saturday night spotlight. 

He got over a gambling addiction and in the last decade of his life seemed to become addicted to classic literature, tweeting about the genius of Tolstoy. He said he saw himself primarily as a writer, and he was capable of delivering very poetic lines, all as limpidly spare as his jokes. “As long as the red dice are in the air, the gambler has hope, and hope is a wonderful thing to be addicted to.”

Every career must flirt with cancellation in these miserably pharisaical times, and Norm is castigated and eventually forced to apologise after sticking up for his ostracised friends, Roseanne Barr and Louis CK.

After he died, no one knew he’d had been “battling” cancer for nine years. He has a great routine about the lexicon of life-ending disease. His dying uncle wasn’t “waging a battle”: he was sitting in front of the TV with a tube in his arm watching Matlock. And if you die, you don’t lose to cancer. The cancer doesn’t get up in triumph and fuck your wife. The cancer dies too, so if anything its a draw. 

MacDonald’s appearance on Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee is referenced here, but his best line is curiously overlooked, even though it embodies everything that is brilliant about him: not only his commitment to deadpan radical truth, whatever the consequences, but also his determination that if your profession is comedian, the gag should always be the priority, whatever the subject.  

NORM: Now do you think Cosby’s legacy will be hurt? 

JERRY: Yeah.

NORM: You do eh? The comedian Paton Oswald told me, I think the worst part of the Cosby thing was the hypocrisy. And I disagree. 

JERRY: You disagree with that? 

NORM: I thought it was the raping.