Originally Posted by
Galen
It doesn't fucking work for me though. I get anti-humor, I'm very much a fan of anti-humor, but the problem with Norm is that none of it really comes out of left field. I don't see any new or interesting perspective on the world with him, he just gives me the impression that "I don't care about being clever or expressing my own positions on anything, rather I'm just gonna sit here and pull on my own dick and see what other people think of it." With anti-humor there's generally some sort of unexpected jolt in the punch line that forces the audience back to reality, but with Norm there's nothing surprising. If his point is to make meta-anti-humor where the joke is that there is no joke about the joke he's telling that has no joke, then he's just gotten too caught up in self-gratification to care about his audience.
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Again there's just nothing unexpected about anything he's bringing to the table. So what that ******'s a bad guy? He doesn't bring to the table anything new about ******, factual or otherwise, that would make anything he says more original than what anybody else has ever said about the guy.
There's another thing in that clip too: he never develops anything. He only ever brings up a simple little thought and talks about it for thirty seconds before completely dumping it for another meandering pointless anecdote. I think about a few of my favorite comedians like Carlin, Dylan Moran, Ron White, and what all of them have that Norm doesn't is that they're all story-tellers. Each of them speaks from their own experiences or unique opinions and talks about their stories in a way that allows them to actively engage the audience with their own lives. This is all what Norm doesn't have, his style of humor seems more want to alienate and distance his audience from himself, and I just can't respect that mindset.