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Comment by arketyp | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I missed the punchline.

I'll go forward and offer my own interpretation: highly creative people experience the process of creation as something that comes _through_ them, not _from_ them, that's why Bob Dylan calls them "stenographers". I think most people have experienced some glimpse of this when you lose yourself in flow, wether you are dancing, coding, or writing. Norm doesn't understand that calling the author of his favorite passage a stenographer is actually praise, because he means it comes from a higher source than the ego. One week later he understands the koan and tells Dylan, who laughs.

"Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story..."

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense.

It's not intended as humor (I assume - I would never claim anything about Norm Macdonald with 100% confidence).

I believe it is intended as humor -- the whole joke is that the story is fabricated, and he himself is deceiving you with fiction as a typist himself.

Of course, like you, I'm not 100% sure I'm right as with many of Norm's gags.

>the whole joke is that the story is fabricated, and he himself is deceiving you with fiction as a typist himself.

That would be a pretty lousy joke by Norm's standards.

Some of Norm's jokes are intentionally very long with a lousy punchline, making them funnier... which I could see in this case because the story was told with every sentence in its own tweet, making it painful to read chronologically (and possibly adding another element to the "typist" bit).

But in the other cases usually the joke is much more obvious, so again, I'm not sure.

Norm was pretty big into literature, especially the Russians. I wouldn't be surprised if he had aspirations to be a writer and the style of this piece is for aesthetic and not humorous purposes.

Norm was a good writer, and you'd probably enjoy this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01B0K989W/

It's a parable to today's startup/SV atmosphere.

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