“People Just Love to Get Outraged”: a Conversation with Jim Norton

Comedy Features Jim Norton
“People Just Love to Get Outraged”: a Conversation with Jim Norton

Jim Norton’s new stand-up special Mouthful of Shame was released on Netflix last month. It is his seventh special and his first with Netflix. The New York-based comedian and actor, known for his pugnacity and his facility with foul subject matter, is riding high: He says the response to Mouthful of Shame is the best he’s received yet, which is no small feat for a former Opie and Anthony co-host—who currently hosts Jim Norton and Sam Roberts on Sirius XM—with a vociferous—and quick to anger—online following.

I recently spoke with Norton about the special and his thoughts about comedy more broadly. For those who haven’t seen the special, I should briefly explain two topics of discussion, which are also spoilers. The first is that the special opens with a brief sketch in which Norton solicits a series of celebrities to introduce him: Ricky Gervais, Louis CK and Robert De Niro, who ends up spanking him. The second is the special’s final joke, in which Norton details a conversation he had with a woman on Tinder. Things were going great, he tells us, until he asked for her number and she went silent for several days. When he messaged her again, she said that she Googled him and saw a routine about him sending dick pics to a woman; it was, well, a turn-off. Norton tells us he didn’t know what to say, so he just said—well, that’ll become clear below.

Following is the transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.


Paste: Congrats on the special! What kind of feedback are you getting?

Jim Norton: You know, man, my fans are brutal and honest, and it’s literally the best feedback I’ve ever gotten on anything in my career. I’m overwhelmed by the amount of good things that’ve been said by the fans. I don’t know how anybody else feels about it but on Twitter, at least, I’ve never, never experienced this kind of positivity. I don’t know how to handle it. I’m used to arguing with people!

Paste: Hah—what kind of brutality are you used to?

Norton: Well if something sucks, they’ll be happy to tell you. They’re more than happy to let you know when something isn’t funny, or when something is a waste of time, or they want their hour back. They’re really comfortable letting you know when something stinks. So when they like it, you know they like it.

Paste: Great. So, that intro video—which of those guys was best to work with?

Norton: I mean, De Niro, obviously. There’s no one better than De Niro spanking your bare ass. I’m never gonna top that in show business. Louis I’ve worked with a hundred times over the years. Although Louis was the hardest one to book! It was so funny—De Niro was the easiest one. Gervais said he would do it and he did it. Louis was impossible to pin down, I thought he was blowing me off. But De Niro we just shot in his office, and I don’t know if you saw, but he spanks my bare ass and I kept that out of the script on purpose .I was afraid I’d freak him out, so I kind of kept the spanking to myself until we got there that day. I had my director buy a hairbrush and I said, “I’m gonna want you to spank me, but we got a hairbrush in case you don’t want to touch my bare ass.” And he’s like, “Ah, I don’t care.” That was how I let him know I was gonna be pulling my pants down in his office. He was really awesome.

Paste: Damn. Team player.

Norton: He really was.

Paste: So this is your seventh special. How have you felt yourself grow over the last twelve years of making comedy specials?

Norton: You just get more comfortable with who you are, being honest about who you are and what you like. This was a more personal one, I think. I mean, they all have personal stuff in them, but this one was really personal and it was really honest. So I think you just become more comfortable, that’s all. You stop worrying—I didn’t feel like I hadto talk about Trump. We shot it after the election and I had a Trump bit, but I cut it out because I tripped on the punchline. So I didn’t feel the need to try to force it back in or make it happen without the punchline. I let it go. He’ll be here for a while—make fun of him next time.

I didn’t feel pressure to do anything in particular other than make it funny and be happy with it. And that’s from doing it a long time. All I have to do is like it.

Paste: I saw you’re trying to get some TV projects going this year. Can you tell me anything about those?

Norton: In all honesty, I just want to pitch a talk show or something or something else. I would love it to be on Netflix. I don’t have anything, really—I’m trying to come up with something I can pitch. I have a show I wrote years ago, which I pitched to a couple places but it was too dirty for most networks. It was about me as a radio host and a pervert. And I do think there’s something very very funny there, so I want to try to bring that in to them. But I’m never an optimist when it comes to pitching. I suck at pitching, I suck.

Paste: I talk to a lot of comics and I gather it’s not the easiest thing.

Norton: Because typically we deconstruct everything, so what you want to do is go everything and say “Look, here’s the show,” and then point out the weaknesses in it. That’s all you want to do, is tell the network why they shouldn’t pick it up. My instinct is to be honest and make fun of things. So I’m not good at going in there and prostituting—but not out of integrity, just because it’s my job and I’ve trained myself to be really honest about what I hate.

Paste: That seems like a good enough quality to have.

Norton: Well you don’t want to pitch it that way. You want to spin the positive when you pitch. When I was a kid—my first attempt at a job, we had to go door to door selling [newspaper] subscriptions and I couldn’t sell any. You get a dollar for every subscription you sold, and—this is true—my sales pitch was, “You don’t want a new newspaper, do you?” I don’t know how they do it! I don’t know how to sell. I wish I did.

Louis is an amazing pitcher. ‘Cause he’s a great storyteller, so he knows how to get you psyched about something. He’s great at describing something, and that’s why he has so many successful projects. It’s incredible how good he is at pitching stuff.

Paste: Was that [difficulty pitching yourself] tough when you were just starting out as a comic? You gotta go up at open mics, on shows with people who don’t care about you.

Norton: I mean, they didn’t care about any of us. You go up there and the audience doesn’t shit about any of you. Half the times I go on at the Comedy Cellar now they give a shit about me. So it’s one of those things I’ve gotten used to.

It’s actually a really good training process because it’s honest. If they all know you and they all like you, they’re predisposed to laugh. But when none of them know you or care about you, you really have to earn it. So it makes you stronger when you’re going up like that, in front of really awful bar crowds in New Jersey.

Paste: Was there ever any moment when you thought, “Oh, hey, I know what I’m doing now”?

Norton: No… when you’re doing it for a while you start thinking, “Okay, I guess it’s going well.” But I never particularly feel like I know what I’m doing. Me and Michael Che were just [talking about this]. I was like, “I swear to you, I feel like I suck.” Like I go on sometimes and it’s like, “You’re incompetent!” And then I kill and I’m like, “That was comfortable, I’m comfortable performing.”

But I’ve never felt like I’ve gotten it. I feel like now I can go on and I can write good jokes and I can express myself, but I’m never overconfident and like, “I’ve got this.” I’ve never gotten to that point.

Paste: You just mentioned Michael Che—is there anyone else you go to when you’re not sure about a joke or a pitch? Who are your sounding boards?

Norton: I would talk to Colin Quinn, probably, first. Because he’s such a great joke writer. If I write something shitty, he’ll tell me. He’s not afraid to let you know if something stinks, and I’d rather hear it from him than a room full of people. So Colin might be the best one to go to for that.

Paste: There was a piece on you in Splitsider today, praising your self-deprecating style and arguing that the filthier bits in your material ought to be viewed through the lens of—

Norton: I didn’t read the article, is it a good article?

Paste: Yeah, it’s a good one!

Norton: Okay.

Paste: The question I’m cumbersomely building up to is: How has your relationship with that “filth” in your material grown? I know you had that debate [on Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell] with Lindy West a few years ago. Has your thinking evolved since?

Norton: You know, it’s funny, ‘cause I don’t even look at it that way. Lindy and I were debating—it wasn’t even in my material, it was about rape jokes as a—I didn’t have any at the time, it was about someone else’s joke. But as far as filth is concerned, I don’t think about it. To me there’s no valor in being filthy or in being clean, as long as you’re being truthful and you’re trying to be original.

I mean, look at one of the biggest shows on television, Breaking Bad. It’s about making meth. It’s about drug addiction and drug sales and murder. And then once you’re talking about fucking lifting a skirt and sucking a dick, people think you’re outrageous. No, it’s not outrageous! I mean, compared to what we’re all watching? I don’t understand why people think that stand-up has to follow a different set of rules than the rest of entertainment. We’re obsessed with crime figures. We’re obsessed with the mafia. We’re obsessed with serial killers in this country. And then you say the word “cunt” onstage, or “fuck,” and all of a sudden you’re branded dirty. It’s just silly to me.

So my relationship with it is the same as it’s always been. I don’t try to be too filthy. I can’t curse on certain TV. But if you look at it, TV in general has not gotten cleaner since cable. The series that are popular—it’s gotten darker, more realistic, the violence has gotten more graphic. Look at The Walking Dead. It’s literally people blowing dead bodies apart. And that’s probably the biggest show on network television. [Ed. note: I think he meant cable.]

Paste: It gets a fair amount of critical flack, though.

Norton: Oh, it does, I’m sure. But the critics, I think, sometimes think they have to give flack because they think giving things flack makes them seem smarter. And sometimes they’re right. But a lot of times they’ll like something that they think the public doesn’t like. A lot of times the mainstream public loves something, critics will hate it and then they’ll think the public is stupid and they’re above the public. And if you write for a prestigious magazine, it’s kind of hard to like everything the public likes—they’re just a bunch of dopes! And it’s not always that way, but I’ve noticed certain critiques—[a brief unintelligible phrase]—where that was just great.

Paste: I’m not trying to take a side here, I just want to give you something to talk about—

Norton: Not at all. You’re right, they do give it [The Walking Dead] a lot of flack.

Paste: Yeah. I guess sort of the conversation there, at least, is there are a lot of writers who think it’s not great that television glorifies violence for the sake of violence, and that below the violence on The Walking Dead is this fascist element—the message of the show is that it’s kill or be killed, you either have to look out for yourself or die.

Norton: But that is true, though. It’s an ugly truth. And that’s a much more exaggerated and dramatic way of showing the ugly truth, but that really is what life is. It’s just surviving and getting ahead and making sure people don’t take your stuff. It shows what we are at our basest.

Paste: But that kind of black-and-white tribalism is why an authoritarian buffoon is in the White House right now, don’t you think? He campaigned on people taking our jobs, taking our money—that sort of thought is encouraged in shows like The Walking Dead.

Norton: I don’t know if it’s encouraged by The Walking Dead or if The Walking Dead is an honest reflection of who we are. It’s really the old question: Does art inspire life or does life inspire art? Maybe it’s a combination of both. But Trump represented something. He didn’t create what we are. He comes from what we are. And he’s a representative of what we are, whether we like it or not. He’s just not our better nature.

And as far as being dirty is concerned—I haven’t heard any critics trash my special, maybe they have, but it’s very very self-revealing. If anybody trashed it for being dirty, I would challenge them in their work to reveal as much about themselves as I do.

But if they think it’s not funny, that’s a fair thing to say. If somebody said about me, “I don’t think his jokes are good, I don’t think he’s a good comedian,” I don’t like to read that but that’s a fair thing to say.

Paste: Cool. Do you mind poking around this subject matter a little more? Is this boring?

Norton: Whatever you want.

Paste: So suppose there’s someone in your audience who hears the joke in which you call a woman on Tinder a “cunt,” and thinks: “Okay, that’s a fair way to interact with people who don’t want to sleep with me.” Do you think your work is just reflecting something inside that person? Is it encouraging or normalizing that?

Norton: Well, it’s reflecting what’s there. And it’s also making fun of my own irrational reaction. It’s poking fun. The reality is I didn’t write that, I’m assuming people know I didn’t write that. It’s, “I googled you,” and my reaction is irrational to her fair point. A lot of times a joke has an exaggeration in it. You have to assume that as a bunch of adults, people know a guy doesn’t really fly around with a red cape. It makes you understand that when you’re doing humor, some of it’s true, some of it’s an exaggeration of the truth. Like when someone says, “Man, I fucked this chick, she was 600 pounds,” no one thinks you really slept with a 600-pound woman. They know that she was just fat and you were exaggerating.

As far as comedy encouraging [our dark sides], I’m 48 years old and I give people full credit for behaving like adults. I truly believe in free thought. So if anybody’s out there doing something ridiculous because of what a comedian said, that person was a weak-minded idiot to begin with. Anybody that would behave against their better moral judgment based on something they laughed at in a joke is a fool, and I will never take responsibility for the behavior of a fool. I don’t think anybody should.

Paste: A writer got fired from SNL in November for tweeting a joke about Barron Trump. Do you see any connection between [the outrage about] that and, say, hordes going after Amy Schumer? Are those the same kinds of foolishness?

Norton: The bottom line is that the rules keep changing. When you’re trying to be funny, you’re walking into a minefield and someone’s standing in front of you dropping landmines. They’re not stationary, they’re continually getting dropped. SNL has said it’s perfectly acceptable to bash Trump and not only bash Trump but sing “To Sir, With Love” about Obama. And then she thinks, “Hey, everything’s fair game with this family,” and tweets that, and then all of a sudden that’s the off-limits part. And then they go, like, “You should’ve known that.” The people who fire you always think that you should’ve known, but there’s no clear set of rules.

Look, in fairness, if another writer had tweeted that about Malia Obama or Sasha Obama, they may have gotten fired too. People usually think the kids are off-limits. So maybe they had to fire her. Did she get fired or did she get suspended? I didn’t know she got fired.

Paste: She got suspended, she hasn’t been back on the show since. So it seems—

Norton: I would love to know if the same people who defended her—I’m glad they defended her—would they have defended another writer who was a more conservative guy attacking Obama’s kids? Probably not. That’s what I mean. We’re all split down the middle. Nobody has a fucking moral code. It’s all based on their politics and it drives me crazy. I didn’t want to see her get in trouble. If you’re trying to be funny, even if you miss the mark, I don’t think you should be fired.

Look, once in a while in life you say you’re sorry. When it involves a kid—even The Onion said they were sorry. They tweeted a brutal joke about [Quvenzhané Wallis] and it was a funny joke. I got what they were doing. But she was a nine-year-old, they had to say they were sorry. Once in a while we all fuck up, it’s a part of being funny and public life. But I don’t want to see anyone get fired when they’re trying to be funny.

Paste: Solid. Okay, I guess this has been pretty comprehensive. Anything else you want to say about the special?

Norton: I’m just really really happy with it. And I’m pretty honest in it and it feels really good. Again, when you discuss certain things in a joke, but everyone knows you’re telling the truth, you never know what the reaction is truly gonna be. And it’s been absolutely great so far. I’m honestly really happy.

Paste: Hang on. I’m not trying to back you into a corner here, I just want to know your thinking around this. You just said it wasn’t true that you called that woman a cunt, but you’re also expecting people to take your comedy as truth. How do you reconcile those two things?

Norton: Because I give credit to people for being able to tell when you’re doing a punchline, and when they’ve listened to you for many years talking about transgender girls and dating them, and they can tell when you’re sitting there, and you’re doing a moment when you’re chatting with the audience for a second between punchlines—I think people will understand that. And as a person you have to think that people intuitively understand context when you’re talking to them. They’re not idiots. It’s almost like, how do people know the difference when someone says “I’m gonna kill the president” and “hey, I hope the Giants kill the Jets.” People just know by the context what you’re saying.

I’m also going by the thing—I probably should’ve prefaced this—people have been listening to me for years talking about that. Even if I did write “cunt,” it would be a stupid thing to write. Who cares if somebody writes a jerk thing on Tinder? I wouldn’t, because I wasn’t mad at her, I just felt bad about myself. But I’m never concerned that I’m gonna inspire someone to go out and do something—”Oh my god, I wrote ‘cunt’ on Twitter just like Jim Norton.” Well then you’re a blithering idiot.

Paste: The criticism of stuff like that isn’t that it makes people go and do things, but that it encourages a way of thinking—say, that women are bad if they don’t want to sleep with you.

Norton: Well that’s the literal implication, sure. But it’s funny, how come when we look at the Three Stooges we don’t think it’s okay to hit someone with a wrench across the forehead? We all understand exaggeration in comedy.

What happens is people will take jokes, and they know that you’re kidding, but they object to the content. So they have to find a reason why the content isn’t good. And they can’t come out and just go, “Hey, I don’t like that content,” because that’s a little too self-serving. So they say things like, “Well, that normalizes sexual abuse.” But meanwhile, how come nobody’s coming out and criticizing Hollywood? Why is nobody criticizing the fact that—let’s say you show a rapist accurately in a movie. Who cares what point you’re trying to make? That’s a more traumatic thing. Because you’re paying a guy to behave like a rapist towards a woman. You’re paying her to behave like a rape victim. How is that acceptable? It’s almost like—

Paste: There is criticism of that, though.

Norton: Yes, there is. But it’s almost like the line for artists and the line for—like, all these fucking phony artists going after the Emmett Till—the painter who painted the picture? And these fucking black artists are saying,”Hey, that’s not your subject,” because it was a white artist. Can you imagine if a bunch of white people told a black person they couldn’t paint something? The outrage would be front-page news. And other artists would be speaking up. But other artists aren’t saying shit to defend this artist—not that I’ve read, I could be wrong.

I think people are split down ideological lines. Who we defend and what we deem inappropriate is all based on that. As opposed to “Hey look, if I can say it then you should be able to say it, if this is okay then that should be okay.” I don’t mean to ramble about it.

Paste: No no. I think it’s pretty recent that comedy is taken seriously as an art form and there’s a lot of uncertainty about how to talk about it in the way that one might talk about other art forms.

Norton: I think people just love to get outraged. I think people love to go after either. Comedians are just a place for people to convince themselves that they’re angry. It’s nonsense. And comedians shouldn’t buckle to it. It’s utter shit. Why don’t you come after Stephen King for murdering children in a book? It’s funny how they’re making It a movie. That has children being murdered. But that’s acceptable. It’s funny how no one has an issue with that, but if a comedian says “This woman’s a cunt,” all of a sudden—you know what I’m saying? And I don’t mean you, you’re actually representing what people say. You were correct to ask that. But are we really normalizing people being killed by clowns? Why do we know that that’s a performance?

Paste: I don’t know the answers either.

Norton: It’s tough, dude. And some people say that they’re kidding when you know they’re not. That’s also something—people hide behind humor when they really are trying to be vicious. There really is no definitive answer to it.

Paste: And I guess the thing with comedy is that a lot of people are coming into it by listening to podcasts and they feel like they’re friends with the artists—they have a really deep understanding of your work. So they come to a special with a completely different understanding of the comic than someone who’s flipping through Netflix.

Norton: I hope they know—I hope they know I’m sticking up for trans people, I hope they understand that.

Paste: I hope so too.


Mouthful of Shame is now streaming on Netflix.

Seth Simons is Paste’s assistant comedy editor. Follow him on Twitter.

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