The lyrics Norm Macdonald sent his friends before he died: “When Bob Dylan speaks…”
In 2015, six years before his death, comedian and Saturday Night Live alum Norm Macdonald posted a rather incredible anecdote to social media, recounting the time he’d been summoned to hang out at Bob Dylan’s house for two days back in the 1990s.
He deleted the original post shortly after posting it, but nothing on the internet is ever gone for good, of course, and in this case, the story’s preservation is a real gift; an insight into Macdonald as a genuinely deep motherfucker, for lack of a better term.
“When Bob Dylan speaks,” Macdonald wrote, “his words seem chosen long ago, his sentences are spare, and he looks right at you, and his countenance is stone. He spoke to me for many hours over two days. There was no alcohol or drugs consumed. He was interested only in writing… He said most ‘writers’ were what he called ‘stenographers’. He would put a record on his player and have me listen to it. He would have me silently read a passage from a classic book. Then Bob Dylan would explain why this was not writing, why it was stenography.”
There are no punchlines in that Hemingway-esque tale, and it almost feels more like a dream in how he tells it. As many fans have theorised over the years, that’s probably because the whole story was fabricated; more like a thought experiment than a retelling of an actual event. However, some people close to Norm claim that he really was friends with Dylan, creating a sort of hazy blend of fiction and reality that almost reminds one of the general persona and storytelling methods of, well, Bob Dylan himself.
The more you think about it, in fact, there was a lot more of a Dylan influence in Norm Macdonald’s comedy than anyone would have realised during his rise to fame in the ‘90s. Back then, Norm was the king of deadpan, a clean-cut Canadian with a mildly absurdist worldview and a surprisingly dark, rebellious undertone to his work, fearlessly willing to sit in a failed joke for 30 seconds until it magically became funny. He was already a bit like Dylan even back then, the Bob from those mid-60s press conferences: cocky and quippy and sarcastic.
Remember in the documentary Don’t Look Back when Albert Grossman tells Dylan that the press has started calling him an anarchist? “Anarchist, huh?” Dylan replied in a deadpan tone only Norm could match, “Give me a cigarette. Give the anarchist a cigarette. Whew!… Anarchist. A singer such as I!”
Despite being a Baby Boomer and Gen Xer, respectively, Dylan and Macdonald both presented themselves as sort of 1930s or ‘40s characters, dropped into the present day and predictably at odds with their surroundings. Even when embraced by a community, such as Dylan with the folk scene or Norm with SNL, the urge to push against the grain was constant.
“Comedy is surprises,” Macdonald once said, “So if you’re intending to make somebody laugh and they don’t laugh, that’s funny”.
As Macdonald was dying of cancer in 2021, he left most of his friends in the dark about his condition, but as his former SNL co-star Tim Meadows recalled in a 2023 interview with the CBC, Norm did text a series of Bob Dylan lyrics to a group of former colleagues, which looked more significant in retrospect. As Meadows remembered it, they were words from Dylan’s 1965 classic, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’.
“You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last / But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast / Yonder stands your orphan with his gun / Crying like a fire in the sun / Look out the saints are comin’ through / And it’s all over now, Baby Blue”.
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