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Norm Macdonald Performed A Hilarious Coronavirus Standup Set
By
Ben Yakas
Published Mar 19, 2020
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Mar 19, 2020
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It may be a very long time until you're able to go down to a comedy club and enjoy a standup set, so you're going to have to mostly rely on your Slack channels, your group texts, and the occasional quarantined late night host to try to wring some laughs out of our current situation. But last Friday at the Hollywood Improv, just as things were starting to get real for most Americans, Norm Macdonald gifted us with our first truly great coronavirus-themed set to enjoy.
"Since I may never do stand-up again, here is some more from my final set, speaking on Tom Hanks Disease (THD), that which very well may be my undoing," Macdonald tweeted along with links to the set.
As Vulture wrote, Macdonald's set "isn’t crammed with clever wordplay, nor is it punctuated with precise act-outs honed in front of hundreds of audiences"—it's great because he unloads all-new material for the first time on a topic that isn't inherently amusing, and is able to pinpoint "his anxieties in a terrifying moment and shares them with the crowd."
“I feel like I’m in the fucking middle of a Stephen King novel,” he says at one point, nailing the mood of the nation. He goes on to discuss how Big Pharma is having a real moment, how maddening it is reminding oneself not to touch your own face, hand washing (“Remember the good old days when washing your hands didn’t take three hours!?”), his reluctance to talk about the virus in the first place, the audience's decision to go to a public place in the middle of a pandemic, and... cocaine.
Watch it all below.
In a less amusing piece of comedy news, UCB has laid off its entire theater staff and some training center employees.
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Standup
norm macdonald
comedy
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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