a lot of words about being really pleasantly surprised by jim norton and why as a person who goes to college i now feel the need to explain it

on the first day of the greatest class that i ever took in college we read this short story by Grace Paley, a real short one only four pages, where the narrator mentions that a comment from her ex-husband made her feel like a set of pipes choking on a plumbing snake. it was a beautiful metaphor. it still is a beautiful metaphor. but my professor mentioned that its beauty was clever, that the abundance of poetics is purposefully used to distract from one emotion and center on another. play with the reader's sympathies, basically.

this is why jim norton may be one of the smartest comedians working today.

now, his set at the somerville theater that i decided to see on a literal coin flip whim had some material in his act that would make ann coulter on a pink triangle, but as he himself said in his act, but that isn't why i'm, as he would say, "BLOGBLOGLBOLGOBLOBLOG"ging right now. maybe i'm givin this a terrible english major overintellectualization treatment (and i already am i mean come on i'm comparing him to GRACE FUCKING PALEY) but 90% of that man's set wasn't just absolutely hilarious, it was so funny that I did not even notice the kind of jokes I was laughing at, and then after I did realize, I kept laughing because I realized how incredibly clever he constructed his set to basically nullify any bad faith that would come from them.

i am gonna spoil the act and its jokes a little bit for a mo' (this set will eventually become a TV special, I think) so if you're real sensitive about having jokes ruined for you then stop reading.

okay now i just did something that jim norton would never do. throughout the act, that man basically set no limits. he spoke everything and whatever he himself perceived within the world to be truth. a lot of this was political (about 5 minutes consisted of an almost jokeless rant against the mainstream media) and a lot was provocative (some needlessly, others... well this is what i'm writing about so bear with me) and if i were at home half-listening to similar routines on youtube then i as a person i-would-like-to-think-pretty-aware of the nuance of identity politics and trauma and shit would have been like “eh…. Not my cup of tea.”

And for the first few minutes i wasn’t really all too that entranced, also because the opener didn’t really do a good job and had me thinking about maria bamford’s “loud girl comic” routine the entire time. But after a little while some stuff began happening so subtly that i didn’t notice. Jim norton was weaving a web that trapped me in it. And that web was made of extremely elaborate, hilarious, beautiful language.

Norton is the absolute master image-heavy comedy, which coincidentally makes him the master of both the dick joke and self-deprecation. He would open with a more provocative statement to get the audience’s attention (“oh a drunk girl… BONER!!!” e.g.) before going into these extremely detailed pictures of some sort of sexual observance, fantasy, or gripe, usually self-deprecating (“but always with girls i turn into a creep…”) . And without fail he would ascribe unto these utterly crass topics jaw-droppingly good analogies (“…crouched in the corner, blinking like a fucking screensaver”). He would run with the image for maybe a solid minute, elaborating every nook and cranny, every possible outcome. He would milk the fucking joke for all the laughs it’s worth. Very ***asterixlyimportantly**** he would go as extreme as possible, not just with his subject matter and his provocation, but in the trope and the delivery as well. Like paley, his heightened language was used to alter the sympathies of the audience, though norton’s goal is singular in doing this: to scorch all the sympathies. Scorch them all. As a provocateur he wants to offend, and yes people would be offended, and most provocateurs (tosh, clay) don’t really get complex or clever enough like say louis ck to accept the joke despite its gross roots (and i am completely excepting people who truly don’t mind the offensiveness at all of which the base level of enjoyment for the show is already much higher and not something that sort of needs to be overcome). Well add norton to the list, then, of comics who get shit done comedically because, like paley, his stories and jokes are so well-phrased and constructed that, on a second level, it completely detaches from its provocative origins 99% of the time.

Suddenly, another layer of it all, on top of these plain, hilarious, beautiful joke constructions, becomes evident. It’s all a big exaggeration, an inescapable atmosphere of what’s basically anti-bragging, the extreme comedian’s holy grail. Dank, shitty observances snowball into a glorious dick-shaped monolith of cobwebs, like a canadian trailer park louis ck (oh shit is he the alice munro of comedians now too???), or a modern diogenes of sinope. This is a short, out of shape man saying terrible things not just to provoke you, but because at the same time we are constantly reminded that A) his subliminal is compensating and B) his liminal is telling the supertruth. He manages the incredibly difficult balance of crafting a stage persona equal parts ridiculous (that you can’t take him seriously) and earnest (that you sympathize with him).

He says both of these qualities about his character pretty explicitly in different routines, calling attention to the atmosphere he’s created without dispelling it for anyone in the audience. He provokes us into thinking about ourselves, the topic being joked about, and, most importantly, himself. Even when he sacrifices “politically correct” contexts for the sake of joke delivery, he recreates a whole new context wherein judgment has shifted from the joker to the jokee. He tells a routine about feeling gay because he loved the way the man next to him on a flight smelled, but he delivers it with incredible earnest, all disbelief and no vitriol. It calls attention to how he, already established to have no luck with women, not has bisexual shame under his belt, but it isn’t a panic. It’s basically a celebration. He gets so deep into describing how great this man smelled that i started to fall in love with that odor, tucked away in a cabin too impossible to reach. He finds himself unwittingly feeling homosexually towards another man, and we laugh because we know that his established perverted lust for women would never traditionally make room for men (the extremeness of the womanly lust retroactively casting the exaggeration tonality on it all), but we also laugh because he embraces it so sincerely, and is merely embarrassed because he broached the topic poorly with the man in question. In common parlance, he asked his crush out very awkwardly and was hilariously rejected. All throughout, the clever constructions of the joke and rapid-fire delivery keep the trance unbroken. We are distracted by his sewer snake joke into sympathizing with norton and decrying the homophobia (once the seed of the joke, now just an incidental) that quashed these two mens’s blooming, smelly friendship.

In that one routine, norton has me eating shit out of the palm of his hand. And it tastes absolutely delicious.

One more example, and maybe the most well-constructed routine of the set, was about subtly coercing a handjob from a masseuse. There, at the base, you’ve got sexual coercion, misogyny, and general perversion set up. And the the rug gets fuckin pulled. He details each step to his method of getting happy endings with scientific precision, filling the exaggeration quotient by acting as if he literally wrote the book on convincing people to give him handjobs. But the pulls out earnest consideration by taking a sudden fucking left turn into john travolta territory. In the greatest formalist move of the show, he casts a mirror on himself and the audience by revealing that every move he used to get a handjob was used by travolta when a bunch of male masseuses sued him too. The wrongness of the scenario, what was first gross exaggeration becomes gross realness, gets generalized, superevident, and the judgment is thrown back to us while the norton train keeps a-rollin with earnest exaggeration about all the gay things he would totally do to john travolta. we are free to enjoy the joke for its jokeyness, of which a lot of jokeyness there was indeed.

When the spell broke for a couple minutes, once for the aforementioned political speech (which also included a defense of daniel tosh point oh that was actually about as saliently made as you can get from the camp of tosh defenders) and again near the end when he briefly broke into doing opie and anthony characters, i was able to collect myself for a bit and realize how incredible the whole performance was. This dude sequenced a set like a fucking comedy titan and could make basically any joke land, no matter how outlandish or crude. I could have listened to him talk for hours about a 70 year old man futzing around a men’s locker room slapping powder on his balls. For HOURS. Even when he slags for a little bit every once in two whiles, he is able to dip back in with some of the most graceful and quickest-acting segues ever. A long-running take on the media’s handling of the aurora shooting started to lose steam and become too hokey when suddenly it became about how pornography is better than michael douglas. Like what how did he even? Not every transition was so smooth but it didn’t need to be when the storytelling was so great; when one quality started to falter, the other picked up lightning quick and the set was back on track for a great, hilarious ending that came out of nowhere. I left wanting more, and also his autograph (but all i had on me was a Toni Morrison novel so I went home THE END).

Norton brings highest-common-denominator nuance to lowest-common-denominator material like dicks and butts and vaginas and handicapped jokes and gay jokes and misogyny and basically anything is the seed for these routines, but norton grows a big dick shaped tree out of them, taking them to ridiculous heights all while degrading himself and maintaining that heightened gross-out atmosphere. He accomplishes “now trust me i have TONS of gay friends BUUUUUT” without the painfulness, and in reaction to that seed we hold the attitude in contempt without blaming him because, well, the dirtiness of homophobia and misogyny is still a truth in this world that norton’s exaggerated character reveals to us through his routines, leaving us to cast our own judgments if we feel the need to. I keep comparing him to some sort of plant but goddamn if he doesn’t plant the seeds for shitbushes and come up with goldandwatermelontrees every time.

Most of this don’t make a lick of goddamn sense probably, and that’s because A) describing why someone was funny is a pain in the dick to do in the first place and trying to decode a multilayered context that’s built upon something as unfunny as a rape or handicap joke is harder than an elephants tusk, and B) as i said, a lot of the sustainment of this effect was in momentum and atmosphere. If he were not masterful enough to maintain the layer of exaggerated self-aware self-deprecation, it would have been easier to find his offensive jokes offensive. If he did not betray an earnestness in the handling of his exceptionally provocative numbers, his jokes would have seemed mean-spirited and cruel. If his language did not juxtapose so brilliantly the rawness of his subject matter, then that would be the end of jim norton would have all fallen hard.

Well luckily his set at the somerville theater was the exact opposite of everything i just said. To paraphrase him, if every comedian was clean as a daisy shit would be boring as fuck. Being dirty and fucking around in the muck is hard to do without seeming like you’re hitting easy targets or provoking just for the sake of provoking. Norton, you are the 1% than knocks it out of the park. And aside from a couple lulls and not-far-enoughs that amounted to probably five minutes out of an hour-and-a-half set, i’d say you’re doing pretty good for yourself.

hahaha

so recently i was like "am i making one continuuous mistake again" and well turns out i was so i was like "lol forget that shit" so i diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid *sunglasses fall on face*