Norm MacDonald was getting his hair and makeup done for The Tonight Show when the comedian was told by Jimmy Fallon, the show’s host, that he wouldn’t be going on.
It wasn’t the first time that NBC had booted Norm.
During the Saturday Night Live era, he had been fired from the show for repeatedly calling O.J. Simpson a murderer to the displeasure of NBC brass who had an extensive relationship with the murderer. Last time around, NBC had shoved Norm out the door for assuming O.J. was guilty. (After the verdict, he had famously joked, “It’s finally official: Murder is legal in the state of California.”) But this time, Norm was shoved out for questioning the #MeToo lynch mob and its ‘verdict first, trial second’ lynch mob.
“I’m happy the #MeToo movement has slowed down a little bit. It used to be, ‘One hundred women can’t be lying.’ And then it became, ‘One woman can’t lie,’” Norm Macdonald had joked. “And that became, ‘I believe all women.’ And then you’re like, ‘What?’”
Then he expressed sympathy for Roseanne Barr, who had given him his first writing job, and Louis C.K.
‘What’ is now several apologies, a canceled appearance on The Tonight Show, and pressure on Netflix to cancel Norm MacDonald Has a Show, his latest series.
The outrage machine is going through its usual paces. And the target this time isn’t a comedian who did anything wrong, but who questioned the credibility and tactics of the outrage machine.
“I have so much pressure from so many people,” Jimmy Fallon told MacDonald. “Senior producers are crying.”
Fallon would know all about pressure. The knives had come out for him after a lighthearted interview with Trump early on. The left attacked Fallon for not attacking Trump. Like Norm, Fallon became a casualty of collateral outrage. His crime was not joining in with the lynch mob.
And it’s understandable that he didn’t want to be seen making the same mistake twice.
It’s no coincidence that many of the lynch mob’s targets have been comedians. There’s nothing fanatics hate more than being laughed at. And so the left is replacing comedy with the tyranny of the unfunny.
Take Netflix’s ‘Nanette’ special, please.
“The most radical thing Hannah Gadsby does in ‘Nanette’ is simple: She stops being funny,” The Atlantic raved. You’re not supposed to laugh at Gadsby, but cry and be outraged at her life of oppression.
Laughing at her identity politics tirades is a hate crime.
The leftist tyranny of unfunny turns comedy into a tirade. You don’t laugh at it; you applaud its hostility to all the wrong people and then cheer its courageously daring recitations of leftist tropes. Like a noose, ideology first weaponized comedy into a tribal tantrum and is slowly choking off the funny part. The distinction between making jokes about Trump and ranting about Trump has long since been eroded.
The politicization of comedy pioneered by trolls like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert didn’t just reduce the quintessential art of dealing with the existential problems of humanity to a political rant; it assumed that all comedy was political. If you were making a joke, it had better have the right message. Or else.
There was no such thing as an apolitical joke. Humor was a tribal test. One that Norm MacDonald failed.
The old role of the comedian as a court jester, shocking and amusing for its own sake, was replaced by the new role of the comedian as an anchorman, delivering the same talking points with more jokes.
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Read the full story from Front Page Mag
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