in 2010, stand-up comic and radio host Jim Norton told me that he was nicer than people thought but admitted he was “a sex addict with anger problems.” In 2014, he said he was still a “complete dirtbag.”
Now at age 53, he said he has mellowed considerably and that may be reflected at the Punchline Comedy Club this weekend from Oct. 7 through 9. (He has fond memories of the original Punchline in Sandy Springs and has yet to set eyes on the Landmark Diner version which opened in 2015.)
“I’m not nearly as angry anymore,” said Norton in a recent phone interview with The Atlanta Journal -Constitution. “Anger is mostly depression. The sex addiction never goes away, but I haven’t been acting out much at all in years. You get older. You look for change. You want change. I’m just not as depressed as I used to be.”
He said he has seen a lot of peers die, including Greg Giraldo, Patrice O’Neal and, most recently, Norm MacDonald. “It helped my mental state in a way,” he said. “Man, you better cut this [expletive] and enjoy yourself while you’re here. You start to realize what a waste of energy it is to be angry all the time.”
Norton also marveled over the way MacDonald chose not to tell any of his comedy friends that he had cancer.
“He had so much fortitude and strength,” Norton said. “He didn’t want cancer to affect the way people saw him. If I had cancer, I’d tell everybody. I wouldn’t have the strength to keep quiet. It’d be my excuse to not go anywhere.”
Norton has never been married, but he said he thinks he’s a better boyfriend than he used to be.
“I’m less argumentative when I date now,” he said. “I would always expect people were cheating on me because I was cheating on them! I would get defensive and angry. I was a [expletive] partner. Now I don’t feel that way.”
He said he is actually dating someone now. He is not as insecure about himself like in the past when “I’d fall in love and she’d realize I have side fat and man breasts. I’d keep a shirt on while having sex the first eight months. I’d get out of the shower and put the towel around my armpits, not my waist.”
Norton isn’t into dating on apps anymore. He’s mostly met women through friends or Instagram.
“Instagram isn’t like a dating app,” he said. “You can assess someone’s life. You know this is a real person, not a fake account.”
Oddly, he said he gets a lot of people impersonating him on social media. “People would send me screen grabs of people pretending to be me,” he said. “It’s kind of funny: ‘Why would you want to be me?’ It seems like people will do it to anybody with the blue [verified] check mark.”
The pandemic cut off his ability to do stand-up for more than a year, but unlike many of his peers, he was able to generate income via two regular COVID-friendly jobs: a UFC podcast with Matt Sera and a Sirius XM morning show with Sam Roberts.
He and Roberts, after working remotely for 16 months, got back in studio together in August and are doing in-person interviews again. “There’s such a different energy doing a show in the studio,” Norton said. “There’s something about split-second comedic timing that gets lost on Zoom where you have these delays and people are stepping on each other. It’s so much better in person.”
Norton said Sirius has been very good to him, providing him work first with the Opie & Anthony show, then with Roberts. His show provides an alternative to Howard Stern though he knows he’ll never reach that level of fame or fortune.
“We do really well,” he said. “And I’m glad Stern is with us. He’s good for the company. And I know even if he retires, they won’t hand me his money and that’s fine.”
Norton is also back to shaking hands again as the pandemic wanes, though he actually prefers to hug. “It’s cleaner,” he said.
Still, unlike Stern, he is no germaphobe: “If I were a germaphobe, I’m a bad one. I literally haven’t put on a condom since 1990!”
IF YOU GO
Jim Norton
8 p.m. Oct. 7; 8 and 10 p.m. Oct. 8-9. $35. The Punchline, 3652 Roswell Road NE, Atlanta. punchline.com.
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