After two years of closed venues and Zoom comedy gigs, I’m in no hurry to ever again watch standup delivered to absent audiences. But I’ll make an exception for Norm Macdonald, whose Nothing Special, performed to no one, lands on Netflix today. Like the set Maria Bamford performed to her parents alone, it’s one of those specials where the ringing silences are compellingly part of the point. The point being that Macdonald died last year of cancer. He recorded this special in summer 2020, at home, as a precaution before undergoing a medical procedure. He “didn’t want to leave anything on the table,” a pre-show caption tells us, “in case things went south.” The set now has the feel of a last will and testament, and is released with accompanying commentary by a sextet of Macdonald’s illustrious standup pals.
There’s a symmetry at play here, given that the first viral comedy set of the coronavirus era was Macdonald’s, at the Hollywood Improv the day before the US went into lockdown. “It’s funny how we all now know how we’re going to die,” he joked – which sounds particularly bittersweet given that he’d known for years, and (characteristically) concealed it from everyone. And now here we are with another Macdonald video book-ending the Covid years, hopefully the last locked-down standup show we’ll ever have to watch. And it’s worth doing so, for Norm fans interested to see their hero “reconciling his mortality in front of us”, as Dave Chappelle describes it in the post-show chat; and for Norm uninitiates, keen to see what all that fuss was about when Macdonald died in September last year.
