There was a time I thought he was pretty funny. I didn't listen to Opie and Anthony live, but I'd listen to clips on Youtube, even the earliest days of Youtube, I'd listen to them. Jim was very quick-witted and his degenerate lifestyle meant there was plenty of fodder to draw from for the show.
But in recent years I've thought about how he, by being an accepted member of the show, mostly listened to by blue-collar people with typical, probably more right leaning values, he helped introduce even in small ways, troon acceptance into a demographic that otherwise wouldn't be hit with this issue until at least a decade later.
Yes his troon loving ways was played for laughs as a freakshow, but Jim Norton was still respected as a talented comedian and third host of the show.
And in his time there, questions we now recogonize as subversive, get asked like "Is Jim gay? Does liking what "appears to be feminine" make him gay just because the troon has a penis?"
We rightly recognize these framings as something gender studies lunatics try to push forward to get it into acceptance nowadays and subvert truth, but here it was being done for the truckers and the middle-Americans of the world over a decade before it would be done for normies in mainstream culture because it was done with huge spoonful's of ribbing, ball-busting and an unserious and unacademic approach.
I really think Jim Norton deserves some right leaning thinkers on Youtube and other places to sort of call him out and highlight him for what he did to the culture.
I think he played a not-insignificant role in boiling the frog for a demographic way earlier and in a more palatable way than how it would later go on to be presented.
Now to be clear, I don't think this was some Machiavellian orchestrated plan. I think this was just Jim Norton being a degenerate which he fully admits to, and talking about this made for "interesting" radio. I don't think it's any more conspiratorial than that. But he is to blame for talking about it regardless of his motivations. Throughout entertainment history there's been plenty of entertainers with degenerate sexual proclivities who, for the most part, try to keep what they do out of the public eye.
Regardless of the motivation, Jim Norton is to blame for choosing not to keep those things out of the public eye, but actually make it a big aspect of his on-air personality.
Thinking a bit too much. If you look at queer theory and rich people, you get the core of the matter:
Normal is low class. Unusual, spiteful, contraditctory, but above all novelty, is high-class and that all goes for degeneracy as well. You got a chuckle out of the tranny fucking reprobate, but if you think he had shame, you're not seeing the game. Hell, he probably was getting extra brownie points at dinner parties for being so 'open' with the poors.
Sounds like something you’d read in an Emperor’s Children novel.
I've never watched ONA but I did watch a lot of standup and, unless he was highly liked within his little bubble, he was a very bad standup that relied on being loud and gross to get shock laughs.
Also if we are going to start assigning blame like this, then ONA and even Howard Stern deserve it well before Norton. Shock jocks in general normalized degeneracy way more than one little freak and Stern himself managed to do so to a lot of current middle aged Lefties, and I'd put them as a much bigger reason for the cultural shift than a handful of blue collars who might have been swayed by a z-list comedian.
Norton has been a working comedian for 30 years. Calling him z-list isn't exactly true. He has been in television and movies. And for awhile he was on The Tonight Show on a regular basis. I won't claim he's a household name but he's not a bum. Shane Gillis is worth around 8 million according to Google, Norton has a net worth around 3 million. It's not a perfect one to one analogy, considering their age differences and time in comedy but it shows Norton has been successful in his field.
Yes, ONA and Howard Stern are the obvious targets and everyone knows about how they pushed the culture for the worse, even though I like Anthony Cumia and respect his opinion as a conservative.
Jim Norton was a huge part of the O and A show. Once he came on, it really became the Anthony and Jimmy show, which is one of the reasons the bitterness from Opie started reaching critical mass. So his role in the show as a voice is hard to understate.
Way more people heard him on the radio than watched his stand up acts, and he's better at having quick witty responses to people than he is at doing the whole standup format. I too would watch his standup and it sucked and was gross.
He still had that element in a big way on the radio, but he would also talk seriously about things, dive into the philosophy of things, and he had the comedic playing off of people that you don't get with standup. Him ribbing with others like Patrice O'neal endeared him in a way that standup wouldn't.
Yeah Stern and O&A were big obvious degenerate pushers, but his role is one that doesn't get brought up and is pushing that specific "intersectional niche" in a "palatable way" which is why I'm bringing it up.
Typically if, like a troon were to come on to Howard Stern for the shock factor, it would be as a one and done guest. Listeners would forget and move on as soon as the next crazy drama happened the next day.
With Jim Norton being a permanent host, it allowed this to be a lingering persistent idea put into people's heads.
I'm not defending Stern, O and A or any other shock jocks. I wish they never happened. I would like an America like the 1950s.
I'm just pointing out a specific role Jim Norton played.
I'll take your word for it as I never listened to the show and based my opinion entirely on seeing him outside of it. And calling him "talented" based on that devalues everything.
I don't know how much effect Jim had on normal-ish suburban men. O&A were shock jocks after all, and even after they switched to a hang-out show, he was still thought of as a liberal New Yorker. I think most of the listeners thought of him as a degenerate Yankee who'd they laugh at but not take seriously.