Denis Villeneuve’s 2009 thriller Polytechnique is one of those unforgettable, visceral films that leave you a blubbering mess by the end. It is based on the real-life massacre of 14 young women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique, by a troubled young gunman who said he wanted to “fight feminism”. The incident led to major reforms in Canadian gun control laws, and also led to a wave of anti-misogyny measures. The film and its underlying themes were very much on my mind as I watched None Too Pleased, comedian and podcaster Mark Normand’s new 54-minute stand-up special on Netflix. Across the special, Normand has many jokes and extended routines involving gun control, but the first one (in the show’s 22^nd minute) really connects the dots between gun violence and the rage of the repressed.

Here’s how Normand sets up the routine: “How come sex movies make you jerk off and not wanna have sex but shooting movies make you shoot people? I think it’s because in America it’s a lot easier to get a gun than it is to get laid. Ladies, you have a much harder background check than a gun store.” He then goes to an even funnier place by suggesting that gun stores ought to ask potential customers for the phone numbers of two ex-girlfriends — before they’re allowed to purchase a gun, that is. No girlfriends ever? No deadly weapons for you, I’m afraid. I really liked this routine. It takes something tragic and monstrous, and reduces its terrible power through the power of ridicule. It’s like the climax of the horror film IT, where the protagonists defeat the clown-monster by making relentless fun of it.

Normand is a longtime podcaster and has made several appearances on Joe Rogan’s show, in addition to co-hosting two other long-term podcasts with fellow comedians. He basically has two modes across None Too Pleased. In the first one, he’s trying too hard to cater to his Rogan-adjacent audience, moaning about how liberals destroyed free speech, how “both sides are annoying” and so on. This mode comes with a never-ending flow of ethnic stereotype jokes—some funny, most of them not so much. Jamaicans are homophobes, the Irish are incorrigible drunkards, Indians and Pakistanis all have diarrhoea, nobody can tell Koreans and Japanese apart…. you get the drift. In the first fifteen minutes of the show, he also describes the city of Boulder, Colorado as the result of “Texas raping Portland”, compares a part of the female anatomy to the Gaza Strip, and says a bunch of slurs for good measure.

None Too Pleased is fifty percent shock jock happy hour, fifty percent thoughtful, observational comedy.

The problem is, Normand doesn’t really invest any thought into using these slurs or stereotypes in the service of a larger point. He just rattles them off, one by one, like a sponsor-mandated ad break in the middle of vastly better routines. In one joke he says that his friend’s daughter has gone from being promiscuous to being a devout Muslim. “Hey, slut to Muslim, that’s not bad, now she’s going down on her knees five times a day for a different reason. And she can write a book called ‘From Blowjobs to Hijabs’!” Sorry, Mark, that really was terrible, even if the American tongue contorts “hijab” until it rhymes with “blowjob”. It’s not offensive, or at least I don’t see it that way — it’s just awfully hacky. 

Same with the female anatomy jokes or the one involving rape — there are well-documented ways to use shock value to craft something unique (see Sarah Silverman’s campus rape joke, or Dave Chappelle’s ‘Black white supremacist’ routine, for example) But for the most part, the comedian is uninterested in such an endeavour.   

The other mode in None Too Pleased, the one that I found much more effective, is when Normand plays armchair sociologist and does the “I can’t believe this is happening” routine to highlight the sheer absurdity of a situation. Like how he expertly eviscerates people’s hypocrisy when it comes to babies and pregnant women on planes.

“When you’re pregnant, you’re treated like a celebrity. People are like, ‘You’re beautiful, you’re gorgeous, take my seat, how about an upgrade on that flight?’ And once you have the kid, you walk on to that flight and people are like, ‘Look at this fucking bitch right here, huh? Thanks for ruining it for everybody, whore.’ See, everybody likes a kid when he’s in that soundproof booth. But once he’s out he’s like a Puerto Rican on a bus with a boom box.”

This Normand is so much better than the Rogan-adjacent, lovable-meathead Normand. He’s still using stereotypes to make his point, as that Puerto Rico punch line shows us. But he’s doing it intelligently, he’s using it as a small part of a well-crafted routine. The joke reminded me of George Carlin’s famous joke about pro-lifers hating babies (“They’ll do anything for the unborn, but once you’re born you’re on your own!”) that he used to perform with his middle finger raised at the punch line. The thoughtful Normand peaks at about minute 37 of this show, when he imagines a dialogue with the first Black family that was allowed into a white-owned restaurant. He imagines them entering the place with much fanfare, only to realise that everything on the menu is horribly bland, leaving them with an extreme case of buyer’s remorse (“MLK died for coleslaw and raisins?”).

None Too Pleased is fifty percent shock jock happy hour, fifty percent thoughtful, observational comedy. I wish Normand had taken the liberty to go full comedy nerd instead of dumbing down half his act, but in the year of our lord 2026, when Presidents call for comedians to be fired, we’ll take what we can get.