Norm Macdonald is one of Twitter’s weirder delights. Similar to his modus operandi for hosting Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, he makes up his own rules on Twitter, and so if you follow him you might suddenly notice he’s doing play-by-plays of whatever sporting event has captured his attention on TV, or delivering epic stories about comedy legends over a series of dozens and dozens of posts.
This is the kind of Twitter etiquette that would cause you to hit unfollow as quickly as possible if it was anyone else, but you don’t because his wild disregard for how the social media platform properly works seems guided by something steadfast and honorable. Recent highlights include his touching remembrance of Robin Williams or his bold, unique take on the finale of Breaking Bad last year.
Last night, for example, @Normmacdonald was in fine form. The comedian spooled out a surreal story about the time he met songwriting legend Bob Dylan and then promptly deleted it from his Twitter. It was confusing, funny, and enlightening, and people spent the rest of the night either bragging they had read it before he took it down, or lamenting that they never got the chance.
Lucky for them, we recognized the story’s historic value immediately and preserved the tweets for review here. So give your head a shake and take in this story. Who is the stenographer, er, I mean writer, who Dylan convinced Macdonald was deceiving his readers? What’s the best instance of Dylan verbifying something? Why was Macdonald summoned to visit Dylan? We’ll never know, perhaps, but we can certainly spend the rest of the day conjecturing on Twitter about it.
