Norm MacDonald

The biggest threat to the comedian of yesteryear was penury, but today even the most famous must dodge slaps, tackles and professional ruin. As a result, many have assumed a defensive posture. But on September 15, 2021, the court jesters were more defensive than ever. Norm Macdonald had perished twenty-four hours earlier, defeated by leukemia, and a chorus of his peers donned headsets to reassure the podcast world they’d “had no idea he was sick.” The one who spoke loudest was Conan O’Brien. Three months before O’Brien had wrapped his three-decade run on late night without a peep from the best guest he ever had: the man who gave us the Moth joke, “b-o-r-e-d,” Swedish-German and “that means he had sex with Madonna without a condom.

Norm Macdonald claimed to have coined the phrase ‘fake news’ two decades before Donald Trump brought it into the political lexicon. That’s just one of dozens of examples of how the late Canadian-born comic left a mark on American culture. As host of Saturday Night Live’s long-running ‘Weekend Update’ segment during the mid-1990s, Macdonald often used the term when welcoming audiences. ‘I’m Norm Macdonald,’ he would begin, ‘and now, the fake news.’ What followed, however, almost always jumped the rails of what could reasonably be described as news satire.

Artie Lange has disappeared. His gigs are canceled. His podcast is on hiatus. His social media is hardly being updated. The legendary comedian is apparently ‘sick’ but fans suspect that something else might be going on. You needn’t be Sherlock Holmes to be suspicious about his absence. Lange has been flitting in and out of rehab for the past 25 years.God knows I hope that Lange is sick. The comedian has emerged out of the depths of an addiction so dramatic that his nose imploded like an overripe tomato after years of snorting cocaine and heroin. (According to Lange, the obliteration of his beak was the result of snorting drugs mixed with broken glass.