“Comedy has a specific thing about it. I don’t really like satire. I think it’s very minor; I think parody is very major comedy. Like, Nabokov to me is the highest form of parody. But that stupid Jonathan Swift thing that everybody talks about — I read that. It sucked.”
The speaker is Norm Macdonald, the comedian who died this week at age sixty-one. That anyone reads
worthwhile books and talks about them without guilt or grandstanding is always
a surprise and a pleasure. That Macdonald seems to understand the distinction between satire
and parody is flabbergasting. Cervantes, Fielding, Austen, Melville and
Beerbohm practiced parody with varying degrees of success. In the wrong hands
it can come off as heavy-handed or self-preeningly cute. Nabokov excelled at it
and made it the foundation of his greatest book, Lolita. Parody ought to
be a minor, occasion-driven genre, and in most cases it is. Nabokov made it
sublime
Macdonald may even have known what Nabokov told an interviewer in 1966: “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” I agree with Macdonald on satire but disagree with what he says about Swift. Satire tends to disappoint when it is most didactic. It scolds and presumes to tell us how we ought to think. It wants to teach us something, without earning the right to do so. I love Swift not for his lessons but for the clarity and concision of his prose and verse, his fearlessness and his gift for reliably amusing me.
Until his final years,
Swift was the sanest of men, though always difficult and unclubbable. He
reminds us that mental health has a social dimension. His charm was
intellectual. A biographer who understands this is Victoria Glendinning in Jonathan
Swift (1998):
“It is a truism that those
who make us laugh most are frequently prey to melancholy. Turning everything to
wit or humour is a strategy for survival and a redeeming route to acceptance
and popularity. Swift’s wit is often shocking. It has a lash. He challenges the
hypocrisies and received opinions which enable people to rub along together.”
I’ve seen little of Norm
Macdonald’s work. He strikes me as funnier, subtler and more intelligent than
most comics. I like his approach: “You just want little drops of subversion.”
From the commentary and eulogistic fragments I've seen, it appears I may have missed out on MacDonald. I had grown weary of Saturday Night by the time he came along, and, in the few times I saw it in that era, thought him more amusing than most of his cohort, nothing more. But given his admiration for Nabokov; what I've seen about his dismissal of those who thought themselves brave when merely bad-mouthing the usual suspects; and his hints at a spiritual journey while not publicizing his illness -- he seems to have been a man of more depth than most entertainers. Eternal rest grant unto him O Lord...
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