Jim Norton says his Macklemore joke was a joke
The follow-up post doubles as a tour announcement.
Jim Norton has gone back to the timeline to confirm that his post about Macklemore and Ed Sheeran was a bit. He wrote that the amount of people who took it seriously is stunning. In the same post he announced that a late show has been added in Sacramento on Wed, Nov 4.
That is the whole clarification. No walk-back, no apology, no follow-up thread explaining the mechanics of the joke. Just a comedian noting that his replies read a punchline as a press release, then moving straight into selling tickets.
What it follows
The original post went around earlier this week and was widely read at face value. Norton is now on the record that it was never a real announcement.
The tell, in hindsight, is the structure. A sincere statement of principle does not usually arrive in the same breath as a date and a venue. Norton put the correction and the Sacramento late show in a single post, which is its own small comment on how seriously anybody should have taken the first one.
The real story
A joke that reads as a real statement is a joke doing its job, right up until the point where the comedian has to spend a second post explaining it. Norton is not annoyed enough to delete anything. He is annoyed enough to say the word stunning.
And the correction still carries a tour date, which is the part that will outlive the confusion. If you missed the original and only caught the outrage, the net result is that Jim Norton added a show. That is a fairly efficient week.
For anyone still parsing it, the ruling is simple. The Macklemore and Ed Sheeran post was a bit, per Norton himself. The Sacramento late show on Wed, Nov 4 is the real one.
I posted a joke about the Macklemore and Ed Sheeran situation, the amount of people who took it seriously is stunning.