Just as Norm MacDonald kept his cancer diagnosis under wraps until he passed away, a recent release from Netflix revealed that he had an entire secret special filmed as a way to get his final thoughts out and say goodbye.
Although some celebrities will see value in going public when they’re facing a life-threatening illness, others will keep that information hidden from even their closest friends in the business. Such was the case with Gilbert Gottfried, who carried on with his podcast just hours before his death .
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But whether it’s a out of a need for privacy or a desire not to worry others, this phenomenon was particularly extreme in the cases of Norm MacDonald and Chadwick Boseman. After all, both of them spent years battling cancer without even their closest collaborators ever knowing what they were going through .
Yet while Boseman’s attitude towards his mortality can only be known by the few he let in on that secret, MacDonald provided a little more insight into how he looked at life in a special he filmed himself that almost nobody seemed to know existed until now.
As was often the case with Norm MacDonald, it can be hard to tell what about his performance in this final special was off the cuff and what was carefully planned.
As CNN reported, MacDonald’s swan song is simply titled Nothing Special and sees him run through all-new material in a 50-minute spurt that he recorded himself in his living room.
In their promotional trailers for the special, Netflix stated that MacDonald recorded it in the summer of 2020 and decided to do it all in one take .
With that in mind, we’re left to speculate on whether moments that saw him struggle to answer the phone with head phones on or wait while his dog starts barking were just endearing accidents or a calculated part of his mystique.
What we do know is that MacDonald’s trademark unpredictable style of humor shined through as it always does.
Just when it seemed like he was seriously addressing what he knew to be the imminent end of his life, he would veer into how well he’s thought out the hypothetical situations that would see him indulge in cannibalism.
For his fans and friends alike, the results are a hilarious yet bittersweet farewell from one of history’s most unique and beloved comedians.
And the reason why I feel equipped to tell you how his friends felt is that the special is packaged with a round-table discussion by six of his friends and fellow comedians: David Letterman, Dave Chappelle, Conan O’ Brien, Molly Shannon, Adam Sandler, and David Spade.
In the half-hour that these stars speak, they break down both how the special affected them and what they admired about MacDonald both as a comedian and as a person.
In the words of his producing partner Lori Jo Hoekstra, “He left this gift for all of us.”
But as the other comics pointed out, it’s true to his personality that this gift came out after it was impossible for these friends to tell him how they felt about it and about him.
And for O’Brien, it was likely that the worry of his friends treating him differently (whether positively or negatively) kept him from revealing what he was going through.
As O’Brien put it, “He would not have tolerated that. He didn’t want any of us to tell him.”
Sandler and Spade agreed, saying in turn that he’d be “grossed out” by people responding to his diagnosis or laughing harder at his jokes than they normally would.
So while there was obviously much that MacDonald couldn’t control about how life went for him, he was able to get what he wanted in at least this respect.
h/t: CNN
