Notable figures of the online right did the very same thing, some of them claiming Norm Macdonald as one of their own. While they may have overstated their case, it can nonetheless be difficult to square appreciation for Macdonald’s comedy with his ambiguously conservative politics.
In an era when right-wing comedians claim to be “truth tellers” smashing liberal taboos to get laughs, Norm Macdonald considered himself no such thing. “I guess there came a time, and I missed it, when revealing everything started to be considered art,” he said in 2018. “But I’d always learned that concealing everything was art.” Macdonald didn’t enjoy political comedy and on stage spared his audience his personal opinions on political matters: “Let’s not get into this shit, man,” he told Marc Maron in 2011 when the topic of politics was broached, “I can see people not laughing now.”
Macdonald’s concealment was a smart call by a canny performer, but it was also a deference to his audience and their enjoyment, and perhaps we should see that as a kind of generosity. And without understanding the extent of this self-concealment — something many of the obituaries missed — we don’t fully appreciate Macdonald’s life, art, and politics.
no he wasn’t. or at least there isn’t any evidence of that.
he was a private person and was exactly as conservative as he let on publicly.
norm occasionally publicly talked about his politics, and also how he didn’t like to talk about politics in general.
that article is about how he was anti-political and didn’t like to disclose personal beliefs, not about how he was a secret conservative.
it’s a little gossipy, but it’s pop-culture spin on a few off-hand public comments over his entire lifetime of public appearances, not private, new information that changes anything already known to the general public.
He was more conservative than he let on.
https://jacobin.com/2021/10/norm-macdonald-anti-politics-anti-comedy-snl-subversion-stand-up
“He was more conservative than he let on.”
no he wasn’t. or at least there isn’t any evidence of that.
he was a private person and was exactly as conservative as he let on publicly.
norm occasionally publicly talked about his politics, and also how he didn’t like to talk about politics in general.
that article is about how he was anti-political and didn’t like to disclose personal beliefs, not about how he was a secret conservative.
it’s a little gossipy, but it’s pop-culture spin on a few off-hand public comments over his entire lifetime of public appearances, not private, new information that changes anything already known to the general public.