Norm Macdonald's brilliant anti-comedy
I watched the Comedy Central Roast of Roseanne earlier tonight. I had been strangely looking forward to it after seeing all the ads for it. I think it's a great tradition and a nice way of giving celebrities a kind of lifetime achievement award. The actual jokes are sometimes cringers, of course. Even though in a way it's all just a spectacle of mutual self-congratulation (there's a less polite term for it, combining a common geometric shape with a popular Jamaican seasoning), I like the spirit behind it. Since I haven't seen many of the recent years' roasts, I decided to look them up and read about them, and possibly seek out some of them to watch later. Something caught my eye in the account I read of the 2008 Bob Saget roast. Apparently it's best remembered for Norm Macdonald's set, which deconstructed the crudeness and mean-spiritedness of many modern roasts by resurrecting the style of gentler, cleaner roasts from decades past. Here's the post I wrote on Facebook about Norm's roast of Bob Saget, and the best links I could find for the video. (It seems strangely difficult to find one full video clip of the whole thing, about six or seven minutes.)
"I enjoy celebrity roasts even though they're pretty tacky. Part of the fun for me is trying to see if I can guess the punchlines while the jokes are still being set up. A lot of them have the predictability of bad rhyming poetry. However, I was looking up the history of the recent Comedy Central roasts (I've only seen a couple others) and was intrigued to hear about Norm Macdonald, one of my longtime favorites, doing a legendary roast of Bob Saget in 2008. It's purposely cheesy clean humor taken from a book his dad once gave him, with jokes meant for roasting retirees decades ago. He even reads from cue cards. It's really just screwing with the whole raunchy, over-the-top modern roast tradition, and it's brilliant. It seems impossible to find it as one full video, but I found it split in three parts."
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/b6b82a06aa/outtakes-from-bob-saget-roast-1-from-normmacdonaldfan
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/f441b7c7db/outtakes-from-bob-saget-roast-2-from-normmacdonaldfan?rel=by_user
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/30bcef733e/outtakes-from-bob-saget-roast-3-from-normmacdonaldfan?rel=by_user
I found it somewhere else where it's just the uncut audio, and still images of Norm and others from the set. It might be more complete that way, but it makes it a lot funnier to see him looking at the cue cards, and his classic facial expressions. Too bad even the Comedy Central site only has one minute of it up!
"I enjoy celebrity roasts even though they're pretty tacky. Part of the fun for me is trying to see if I can guess the punchlines while the jokes are still being set up. A lot of them have the predictability of bad rhyming poetry. However, I was looking up the history of the recent Comedy Central roasts (I've only seen a couple others) and was intrigued to hear about Norm Macdonald, one of my longtime favorites, doing a legendary roast of Bob Saget in 2008. It's purposely cheesy clean humor taken from a book his dad once gave him, with jokes meant for roasting retirees decades ago. He even reads from cue cards. It's really just screwing with the whole raunchy, over-the-top modern roast tradition, and it's brilliant. It seems impossible to find it as one full video, but I found it split in three parts."
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/b6b82a06aa/outtakes-from-bob-saget-roast-1-from-normmacdonaldfan
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/f441b7c7db/outtakes-from-bob-saget-roast-2-from-normmacdonaldfan?rel=by_user
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/30bcef733e/outtakes-from-bob-saget-roast-3-from-normmacdonaldfan?rel=by_user
I found it somewhere else where it's just the uncut audio, and still images of Norm and others from the set. It might be more complete that way, but it makes it a lot funnier to see him looking at the cue cards, and his classic facial expressions. Too bad even the Comedy Central site only has one minute of it up!