Norm and Dante
Today, a comic genius died, and a fearless one at that.
Norm Macdonald graced us–or more so–God graced us with him, and Norm worked with some seriously divinely inspired humor.
He was undaunted in his pursuit to highlight the painfully obvious so as to make people laugh, because Norm seemed to know that if people are unable to have that cathartic laugh at the absurd-yet-real, well, that would cause real pain.
So no matter how controversial–from O.J. Simpson to the cackling hens on The View–no one escaped his rightly aimed, witty scope. He seems to me to have been a celebrity who hated most celebrities and hated being one, not unlike the best of popes and presidents. They do not smack of false modesty, as they are well equipped for the job, but they detest the networking, the placating, the biting of the tongue–in a word, the inauthenticity that is a requirement.
The Eternal, who exists outside of time yet knows our human appreciation of it, has seen it fit for Norm Macdonald to pass from this life to the next on the same day another genius beyond measure threw off his earthly shackles.
Dante Alighieri died exactly 700 years ago today. Like Macdonald, none of the malevolent of his day escaped Dante’s ire. Popes and prelates, princes and posers ended up in his vision of Inferno–many of them only to be remembered as rightly cast into one of the levels of hell.
Per Anthony Esolen, who is Dante’s modern interpreter, commentator, and translator par excellence, Dante wrote the Divine Comedy while in a spiritual “dark wilderness” only to come out from the other side of his imaginative journey through the cold of Hell, the dream of Purgatory, and the glory of Heaven a much better man.
Was there humor in it though? Certainly there was in all of Dante’s works–at least those in which he intended to deploy it. In Purgatory, for instance, the lustful are busy purging themselves of their temporal vices by playfully and Platonically kissing each other; not for their own pleasure but at the delight of the other. The slothful run around like kids on a pixie-stick high talking excitedly at this or that vision of an angel or the faint sound of the seraphic choir in the distance.
As one commentator on Dante has said: Alighieri knew just the right word, just the right inference and rhetorical nod, with just the perfect timing to be “gently playful, [then] fiercely ironic”. True of the great Norm Macdonald, as well. They knew how to deal crushing blows of humorous subterfuge to the mighty, the haughty, the proud.
We were the beneficiaries. We are the beneficiaries of that glowing, streaming wit and imagination. Can some of that rub off on us today?
May they be laughing together now, no tongues to bite.
Rident in pace.
