If I could go hear one stand-up comic, living or dead, it would be Norm Macdonald.
I first saw Norm in the early 90s on Saturday Night Live when he was torching O. J. Simpson during Weekend Update. SNL had Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, David Spade. The cast was loaded with talent. Yet Norm stood out. As a junior high kid, I could not explain why I liked him so much. Years later, while writing A World Without God, I went back to his stand-up and it finally clicked. He said the things everybody thinks but nobody says. That is rare. That is why he still holds up.
The Moth Joke
The “moth joke” he told Conan is Norm at his purest. The setup sounds simple: a moth walks into a podiatrist’s office. You expect a quick punchline. Instead the moth unravels a long story about his miserable life. Dead-end job. Depression. Crushing guilt. Dysfunctional family. Cruel boss. All told with Slavic names that sound like they belong in a Dostoyevsky novel. The whole bit plays like The Brothers Karamazov if the lead character was an insect.
Finally the podiatrist interrupts and says, “You need a psychologist, not me. Why did you come here?” The moth replies, “Because the light was on.”
That is the punchline. It is terrible. It breaks the rule that a joke has to reward the setup. Yet it lands because you have been dragged through despair and absurdity only to get dropped flat.
The point is larger than the laugh. It shows how much we lean on structure and the idea that everything has grand meaning. Then reality disappoints us. Life turns out ordinary and often dull. We end up laughing at ourselves for expecting more.
Not About Clean Answers
This was Norm’s real gift. He tore down the illusion that life offers easy answers. His jokes did not inspire you. They crushed you. They made you squirm. That is exactly why he matters in a culture addicted to therapy slogans and quick fixes.
A few weeks ago, listened to a preacher blame everything on the devil. Hurricanes, cancer, tragedy. All the devil’s fault. And the solution? Revival. I am as Pentecostal as it gets and I believe in revival. But I can admit life refuses neat, vague explanations. Norm knew that. He shredded the flimsy scaffolding we throw around suffering. I like Norm because I do not think faith needs false supports. They get in the way.
Wrestling with the Silence
A World Without God is my attempt to tell that truth in story form. It traces a town’s desperate search for meaning once modernity has declared God dead. the middle of the book a plague breaks out and the first to die is a child. I wrote the scene as directly as I could because if we are going to face reality, let us not look away.
The townspeople react in four ways: protests, numbing, toxic positivity, and philosophy. None of it works. Camus once said that when the plague came, it came not for the revolutionary or the prisoner but for a child. Innocence gave no defense.
The point was to show that no answer, no trope, no system can square that circle. Norm understood this. His jokes never tried to fix life. They showed that life cannot be squared at all. Sometimes it does not even appear to have a shape.
I will not spoil the end of the book, but I can say I did not tie it with a bow. (I did not leave readers hopeless either. Hopelessness is just another easy answer.) What I called for was slowing down, sitting with the void, and asking what that silence means for faith in a world where nihilism keeps exposing the hollowness of cheap solutions.
Why I Like Dark Humor
A friend sent me a meme the other morning and said, “Here you go, Palmer. Some dark humor to start your day.” He knows me well. Why do I like dark humor?
Dark humor tells the truth. It cuts against a culture that promises life will turn out if you eat right, make enough money, exercise, and follow Dale Carnegie to the tee. You can structure life however you want, but the black swan can still show up. The plague can still come. Proverbs offers wisdom, but Ecclesiastes sits right after to remind us that the system glitches. (Yay for reading canonically.)
That is why you need at least one comic in your playlist who talks about the glitches. That is why I wrote A World Without God. On a shelf full of books promising self-improvement, I wanted one that admits life is not a bowl of cherries. The carpet still gets pulled out. But that is not the end of faith. It is the beginning of it.
Thanks, Norm.
I’m sure being a Lions fan has induced a lot of nihilistic despair.
Also, I believe Norm was a Christian? I read somewhere that he really enjoyed Kierkegaard. Miss his stuff a lot. Really good read
There is so much truth here! Looking forward to the book!