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muteKi

Geno Cidecity
This clip might be the closest to really capturing the utter messiness of Norm, at once both being just Some Guy and also the second coming of Andy Kaufman

 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Wow, "never been any accusations against Bill Cosby" is not a line that aged well, but that one's hardly his fault.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
At this point, I basically assume any popular male comedian probably has a history of sexual assault.
 

Ghost from Spelunker

BAG
(They/Him)
I felt conflicted about Norm for years. I loved his Bob Dole and David Letterman impressions on SNL (and then a few minutes he would be on Weekend Update calling women the b-word), but then I saw him live in 2005 telling crappy jokes about how gays can't have pride in themselves.
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Absolutely true, just both are part of an all-too-common culture in stand-up that disrespects women in general.
 

madhair60

Video games
his act is so dependent on his persona that i feel as though it is irrevocably damaged. As I have said elsewhere I think I will always find his comedy funny, but it's tainted; the little glances after his shock humour gags, the looks that I now know are coming from a man with power, who also exploits said power. i'm very much pro-freedom of speech in the context of comedy, but now his shock humour isn't "just a joke", anymore. Does that even make sense, idk. Like Louis CK's lines about his shocking depravity that used to make me double over with laughter. It's funny because, you know, it's not real. But it was, and I can't ever go back.
 

Sprite

(He/Him/His)
He definitely was emblematic of the post-South Park era, where people got so high about what they could say that they didn’t really think through whether they should say it. We’re only just starting to come out of that, as well as recognize how some men used it as a shield to mistreat women, with a wink and a nudge. I’ll always find that stuff funny, but yeesh.

My personal ethic of comedy is that any joke you make must be funny enough to be worth the pain it causes. I still find Norm funny, but definitely think his calculations were off in that regard. He consistently punched down.
 

Patrick

Magic-User
(He/Him)
I loved Norm's comedy, but I never felt that he was a good guy. He would joke about horrible things and he had pretty conservative views. But, I felt that most of what he said in public, his persona, was all to serve comedy. He seemed to have no ulterior motive in media except to find the best possible joke. I don't feel that any new revelations change my opinion of him, though I completely support anyone who does feel that way.
 

Alixsar

The Shogun of Harlem
(He/him)
I was about to bring this up but looks like madhair beat me to it. None of this is new by the way, people have talked about it for years and it is super not surprising given his general attitude/demeanor. Norm was a comedian through and through. This is not a compliment. There absolutely is a "class" of people out there (who coincedentally mostly seem to be white guys) who think that just because they're comedians they can say and do whatever they want and not face any consequences because eyyy it's a joke eyyyyyy cancel culture boooo eyyyyyyy, and this inevitably always leads to them being huge assholes on the regular at best, routine sexual assaulters at worst. Norm was also fairly conservative in his routines too; someone here said earlier about how he was your "good" conservative friend, and this is your daily reminder that in 2021 there is no such thing as a good conservative, they are all either blind fools or callous assholes with no middle ground inbetween. The secret truth is that there never WAS a good conservative either (at the very least, in any of our lifetimes), so when he was punching down in 1995, he wasn't a good dude then either.

Cancer is a fucking nightmare and sucks, so this whole thing sucks. I'm sorry for his family and his friends' loss. I saw someone retweet a joke of his and I laughed out loud...but also he was also just actively bad? Sure he told funny jokes sometimes, but also, he was sorta a cesspoll too. So I dunno. He was a complicated person, to say the least. I'm not gonna dance on his grave, but the sooner the old school boy's club "comic" thing goes away, the better.
 

muteKi

Geno Cidecity
Daily Beast is reporting that some clubs knew about this (he would regularly grope waitresses)
 
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