That’s all it is.” For him, comedy that wore personal experience as a badge or was motivated by expressions of personal identity, politics or emotions were all symptoms of the disease of conceit. “Nothing can be easier,” Macdonald said during one of our several interviews. And that can be summed up in a single word: confessional.

Those obfuscating qualities mean it’s probably easiest to define his comedy by defining what it wasn’t. Norm Macdonald was a complicated, often inscrutable guy, one who (mostly) adhered to now quaintly old-fashioned codes of privacy and propriety, a rascally self-mythologizer and a levels-deep ironist. What made the comedy of Norm Macdonald so different from so many successful contemporary comedians, and what placed him profoundly at odds with our culture’s demands for how truth and authenticity are conveyed, was how tantalizingly little it gave away of its creator. But the whole joy of it was to go along.” That’s because the subterfuge was the point. But it was more fun to go: ‘Really? I didn’t know you had a farm, Norm.’ And he’d go, ‘Yeah, I got a farm for my three daughters.’ And again I’d be thinking, No, you don’t have three daughters. “And he’d sit down and I’d say, ‘What’s going on, Norm?’ And he’d say, ‘Well, Conan, I bought myself a farm.’” O’Brien laughed at the memory of a familiar Macdonald gambit. “He’d come out with this twinkle in his eye,” says Conan O’Brien about the comedian Norm Macdonald, who was a favorite guest on his various talk shows over the years.

He became a comedian’s comedian by bucking the conventions of our confessional age.

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