Review: Based on a True Story

Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Norm MacDonald has a line in here – and I paraphrase – about the mixed blessing of having a cult following. It’s a good thing, he says, if you have a cult following and you are a cult leader. Then you get all the money, and you can sleep with whomever you want. It’s not so good if you’re a comedian, though, because a handful of people really like your work while everyone else doesn’t get it.

Every so often, I do get MacDonald’s work. He can be razor sharp with some of the work he did on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update. He shares some of his best lines from that show in this book, and many hold up. His perfect joke may have been, “Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts are having marital problems. Insiders report the trouble developed from the fact that they are Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts.” As he observes of his own joke, what makes it effective is that the punch line is so close to the set-up. The space between ordinary and funny is razor-thin, but it’s there.

You might call that dry humor. You might call it deconstructed humor, as MacDonald suggests at one point. And you might call it humor with a punk aesthetic, as MacDonald quotes others saying. In any case, it works, but it works in small, concentrated doses. It works best in that Weekend Update format, with a guy reading cue cards – as MacDonald repeatedly describes it – and grinning into the camera to show he’s in on the joke.

But members of the cult that enjoys MacDonald’s humor insist there’s more to it than that. He’s not merely a sophisticated gag writer, they say, but he’s also challenging the very nature of comedy. He’s mocking the premise that we are supposed to take it seriously that someone is about to make us laugh.

The result is often a calculated sloppiness. There may never have been a less competent actor or impersonator in the history of SNL. He couldn’t deliver a line without a self-aware smirk, couldn’t inhabit any identity but his own. The only character I remember him having any success with was his Burt Reynolds, and that worked only because it was so transparently bad, because Burt Reynolds was a more or less has-been by that point, and it was funny to see his diminished sex appeal yoked to MacDonald’s disinterest.

I’ve never watched MacDonald’s TV shows, but that’s only because I’ve never been tempted. I get that people like his good friend and long-time supporter Adam Sandler trumpet his successes – and laugh at what feels like a sustained inside joke built around the dare to see just how much he can deconstruct the premises of conventional comedy – but it often feels to me like a self-defined group of cool kids laughing at the simple fact that the rest of us don’t get the joke.

Anyway, most of this book is of that kind of humor. On the one hand, I admire its audacity. This is less a memoir than an anti-memoir. Near the start, MacDonald reflects on the notion that memory is always flawed, that nothing can ever be entirely true, so his story will be Based on a True Story. From that fairly thoughtful premise, he spins a story of how he and his sidekick, Adam Eget, proceed on a cross-country trek to win or lose a million dollars in Vegas. And then there’s a thread about a disgruntled ghost writer who interrupts the narrative with his frustrations about working with MacDonald.

On the other hand, very little of this is funny.

I can see MacDonald hoping for laughs, and I can see him – or one of his supporters – pointing out that the joke is that it’s funny precisely because it isn’t funny. But there’s a persistent sloppiness and a persistent changing of premises that ultimately just tires me out. I did listen through to the end, and I generally found myself interested to see if the ultimate joke would land, but I was almost always disappointed.

And through it all, I found myself questioning the fundamental taste of the project. It’s supposed to be funny that MacDonald pretends to a morphine addiction, and that his ability to supply morphine to Lorne Michaels is what got him the gig with SNL. I believe Michaels himself had an addiction, but we know that John Belushi and Chris Farley, to name just a couple, died of their addictions that were fueled by the show. If this were funny, genuinely funny, I’d forgive it. The Producers and (so the reviews say) Jojo Rabbit make fun of Nazis, but they’re funny enough to get away with it. Bad Nazi comedies are doubly bad. So unfunny stories about addiction at SNL – or about prison rape on a later occasion – are doubly unfunny.

As a bottom line, then, I guess you already know if you’re a MacDonald fan. If you are, you’ll probably enjoy this. If not, well, join me in the majority who finds this a little daring and a lot dragging.


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