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Based On a True Story: A Memoir by Norm Macdonald

This book isn't life-changing, there aren't any shattering insights here, and your life won't be measurably improved (or unimproved for that matter) by reading it. But it's diverting and even funny in places, and that's something.


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Norm Macdonald has a mournful tone to his humor when he writes, it's not the same as his stand-up. The book is also surreal, it's meta, mostly self-evidently made-up, but you can see the twinkle in Norm's eye as he makes this stuff up for you. And, over the course of the book, you develop a strangely honest impression of his life.

There's a section early in the book where it's clearly implied that he was sexually molested as a kid: again it's sad and mournful, and the reader doesn't want it to be true.

Finally, there are plenty of treats in here for fans of Saturday Night Live. Norm talks about all the people on the show, known and unknown, including minor figures like Lori Jo Hoekstra and Fred Wolf, writers who worked on the "Weekend Update" segment with Norm (who he claims were the real brains behind the operation, while he basically read the cue cards). And then he tells his most infamous story from his SNL days as the exact opposite of the truth, inverting the entire story about how he got fired from the show, telling it as if NBC entertainment head Don Ohlmeyer demanded that he tell more O.J. Simpson jokes. It works.

It'll be interesting to see, in fifty years or so, whether this book remains as funny as it is today, or if it goes the way of The Best of S.J. Perelman.

Extras:
* On the Star Search chapter of Norm's career: you can find on Youtube the set he did for this show, it's a cute lookback into 1980s-era TV and fashion, it looks hilariously anachronistic but also innocent at the same time. Note the comments under the video, where fans make funny references to his book, like "Ed McMahon didn't laugh, unless you consider an angry glare a type of laughter." or "He should have opened with the answering machine bit."

* A good example of some of Norm's meta-humor here: he tells a joke that he told on "Weekend Update" and then makes deadpan humor out of why it's funny. "Steve Lookner had submitted an early joke. 'Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts are getting divorced. Insiders say the trouble began because he was Lyle Lovett and she was Julia Roberts.' I sure loved that joke. I never heard a joke where the premise and the punchline were so close."

* More meta: Norm takes the "my dad caught me smoking" bit, twists it, and builds a new thing entirely out of it. And then he has yet another take on the same joke where it goes surreal.

* Finally, a cautionary article on Norm and his gambling addiction in GQ Magazine. "I did a good show and might lose the $40,000 that I earned. But stand up is easy and I can always make more money."

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