Norm Macdonald once ripped the term ‘battling cancer’
When Norm Macdonald died Tuesday, many obituaries had headlines or sentences that stated that his death came after a long and “private battle with cancer.”
But as the comedian revealed in a 2011 standup performance, he looked askance at the common war terminology used in contemporary discussions about cancer, death and dying, The Decider reported.
“In the old days, a man could just get sick and die. Now, they have to wage a battle,” Macdonald began his Comedy Central special, “Me Doing Stand Up.”
The former “Saturday Night Live” star died at age 61. Deadline reported that he was diagnosed with cancer about nine years ago, so it’s not clear if and how his private health issues overlapped with his jokes about death in his Comedy Central routine.
Macdonald made his argument against the “battle” imagery by talking about his Uncle Bert and whether he was “waging a courageous battle” when he was in the hospital dying.
Macdonald talked about how he saw the “battle” up close, “because I go and visit him.” He said, “This is the battle: he’s lying in a hospital bed with a thing in his arm, watching Matlock on the TV.”
Macdonald continued: “It’s not his fault, what the (expletive is) he supposed to do? It’s just a black thing in his bowel.”
Macdonald then got to why he’s perturbed by the idea of people being “brave” or “strong” in the face of a cancer “battle.”
“The reason I don’t like it is because in the old days, they’d go: ‘Hey, that old man died.’ Now, they go: ‘He lost his battle.’
“That’s no way to end your life: ‘What a loser that guy was! Last thing he did was lose,’” Macdonald said. “He was waging a brave battle, but at the end, he got kind of cowardly with what happened. Then, the bowel cancer, it got brave. You’ve got to give it to the bowel cancer, they were in a battle.”
Macdonald then raised another challenge to this particular way of imagining cancer. He pointed out the cancer necessarily dies when a person’s body dies.
“That, to me, is not a loss. That’s a draw,” Macdonald joked. He added that “Cancer” isn’t going to be able to “jump up” and say “I won fair and square” and then make moves on Bert’s wife, or take over Bert’s job.”
Macdonald then applied his argument to how he would one day face death. “Ah, man, I wouldn’t have no brave battle when I’m … dying, I’ll tell you this, because I’m not brave,” MacDonald concluded.
Macdonald was known for courting controversy by speaking his mind on sensitive topics that could trigger his increasingly woke critic. That includes challenging the way people talk about death.
More recently, when Macdonald would already have been diagnosed with cancer, he offered some clue as to why he kept his “battle” private. He explained how he was put off by how other performers sometimes discussed their cancer.
“I’ve heard people go on stage and talk about cancer or some (explective) and I go, ‘Isn’t this what happens to everybody?’” he said in an interview with Vulture in 2018. “They seem to think they’re singular in their story when their story is the most common story that could possibly be, which is suffering and pain.”
In a statement announcing his death, his longtime producing partner and friend, Lori Jo Hoekstra, confirmed that these were the reasons Macdonald never went public with his diagnosis. “He was most proud of his comedy. He never wanted the diagnosis to affect the way the audience or any of his loved ones saw him. Norm was a pure comic. He once wrote that ‘a joke should catch someone by surprise, it should never pander.’ He certainly never pandered. Norm will be missed terribly.”