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Looking back, what you notice about his quilt-like oeuvre is that almost every minute of it bears Macdonald’s stamp — the ceaseless quest for comic spareness; the sense that the ultimate joke would be a plain fact stated in a few words. He has rarely taken any job that involved merely reading someone else’s writing. He insisted on a form of creative control even when he was guesting on talk shows, refusing to rehearse his material with David Letterman and Conan O’Brien’s booking agents in pre-interviews.

His latest experiment is what he describes as a comic novel — or, rather, what he now describes as a comic novel after titling it Based on a True Story: A Memoir and allowing it to be promoted as non-fiction for some years. This Andy Kaufman-like leg-pull has had the effect of snapping Norm Macdonald into focus a little more clearly: he is still keeping the joke in the air among duller interviewers, while simultaneously chatting with The New Yorker about his love for Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver. Every interlocutor gets a subtly different Macdonald, and I am not certain there is any level of erudition he is unable to meet.

(He is not strictly working class, but any working-class kid has had acquaintances like Macdonald: unobtrusive, unkempt guys without formal education who do low-status jobs — it would still shock us if a member of the Royal Family married a stand-up comic — but who turn out to have mastered Ovid or celestial navigation in their spare time.)