I love Norm Macdonald

The mystery of the human person

Norm Macdonald is the greatest comedian of all time. When I first stumbled onto his YouTube clips at fifteen (which was somehow seven years ago!), something in me changed forever—my sense of humour, my relationship to others, my attitude towards this life and how I endure its weight. I see it as absolutely no coincidence that my conversion to Christianity followed shortly after.

When I learned that he had died, I left my AP Psychology class and cried alone in the bathroom. By pure coincidence, that same day I uploaded my first video to the telosbound YouTube channel (which, again coincidentally, included a Norm Macdonald clip). The voice that shaped me fell silent just as I tried, awkwardly and uncertainly, to begin speaking in my own.

Norm was living proof of St. Dumitru Staniloae’s “apophatic” definition of the human person, the irreducibility of each one of us to any predicates, determinations or description. A certain “X” always eludes us in the face of the other and this is precisely why our love towards them (and vice-versa) possesses a potentially infinite depth. One of the unique aspects of Fr. Dumitru’s apophaticism is that he grounds the “unknowability” of the person not in the limitations of one’s capacity for knowledge, but in the overabundance of what there is to know. The glory of the “object” (precisely as eluding any objectification), not the lowliness of the “subject.” God is not “unknowable” in His essence as some inaccessible “out there” lying beyond a chasm we can never hope to cross. Rather, in our very “crossing over” we discover that there is no moment when we circumscribe the whole—we can only enter further into it, an epektasis that human nature was created for.

What made Norm Macdonald so funny? Certainly, there were many things: his unparalleled wit, his comedic timing, his humble willingness to lower himself for the sake of the joke, his capacity to subvert expectations—all of these are essential factors, energies of his essence. And yet, none of these answers do justice to the unique comedy of this truly unique man. They all gesture towards the unknowable “X” from which they proceed, one that we encounter in his seemingly epektatic humour. That “X” is simply he himself, the mystery of his personhood.

Norm would’ve hated to see a fan write about him in this way. But there’s not too much he can do about it.