Ukraine faces decisive months ahead as key allies gear up for crunch elections. While early presidential campaigning in the US and a looming general election in Poland will grab the international headlines, a snap election in Slovakia on 30 September may prove every bit as consequential. 

With Robert Fico — Slovakia’s former prime minister and one of the West’s most outspoken critics of the Ukrainian war effort — poised to win the vote, a change of government in Bratislava could have a profound effect on EU policymaking. Fico has promised that if his party makes it into government “we will not send a single bullet to Ukraine,” proudly proclaiming that “I allow myself to have a different opinion to that of the United States” on the war.  

Fico has also claimed on the campaign trail that “war always comes from the West and peace from the East,” and that “what is happening today is unnecessary killing, it is the emptying of warehouses to force countries to buy more American weapons.” Such statements have resulted in him being blacklisted by Kyiv as a spreader of Russian propaganda.  

Yet the former prime minister spearheads a new brand of Left-wing, anti-American populism that has become a powerful force in Central Europe since the war began. Perceptions that “the Americans occupy us” — as one MP in Fico’s Smer party evocatively put it — are shared with a similar groundswell of anti-Western opinion in the neighbouring Czech Republic.  

Yet Smer has been handed a chance to gain power thanks to the chaos which has engulfed Slovakia’s pro-EU, pro-Western forces. Personal grievances coupled with serious policy errors tore apart a four-party coalition formed after elections in 2020, leaving Fico to capitalise on heightened mistrust in establishment politics. Smer is expected to become the nation’s largest party after this month’s election, with an anticipated 20% of the vote.  

Whatever the specific makeup of the new government, if Smer is the largest party it will likely pursue a foreign policy similar to that of Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary. A halt to until-now generous Slovak arms shipments to Ukraine is Fico’s central electoral pledge, while the arrival on the scene of another Orbán-style government prepared to obstruct EU aid efforts for Ukraine would create a serious headache. That is particularly the case as Brussels struggles to win support for both short and long-term war funding commitments. 

Victory for Fico would also amplify Orbán’s scepticism about the overall Western narrative on Ukraine — a scepticism which the Hungarian Prime Minister recently conveyed to Western conservatives during an interview with Tucker Carlson. Orbán portrayed Ukraine’s attempts to win back the territories taken by Russia as ultimately hopeless and claimed that Donald Trump’s promise to end the war quickly makes him “the man who can save the Western world”. 

Like Trump in America and Orbán in Europe, Fico is hated with a passion by establishment forces. But in Slovakia, the pro-Western establishment itself has become so mistrusted that power may soon pass to a man intent on shattering what’s left of European unity on Ukraine. 

The new Norm Macdonald documentary, Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald, directed by Judd Apatow, is excellent. That is partly because Macdonald, the Canadian comedian and actor, was such an extraordinary talent: a man with a distinctly novelistic personality, full of hidden depths, profundity, moral courage, pathos and wit. But also because the Nineties and early 2000s, when he was culturally prominent, were simply richer than today’s America. They were more fun, less paranoid, freer and, somehow, more human.

The world of LA comedy clubs in the late Eighties, for instance, when Macdonald was first noticed by a promoter for Johnny Carson, seems totally lost. As Macdonald himself says towards the end of the documentary, comedians would push their audiences to their limits before retreating. Political correctness wasn’t assumed or necessary. Not everything had to be filmed or analyzed. (In one sad and bizarre moment, Macdonald in 2018 was more or less forced to apologize for asking people on Twitter to consider that Louis CK and Roseanne Barr were human amid their social liquidation.)

Norm, like its subject, seems out of step with our current cultural drift. It is slow and non-linear, like a Macdonald joke, and formally structured around archival footage, personal photographs and home videos. You have to pay attention, or turn it off, trusting that the payoff will come. The revelation of Macdonald’s leukemia and death is held back until near the end. But of course, we know Macdonald is dead. The trick is to make us believe, for two hours, that he’s back.

Macdonald was a Christian humanist, a true believer with a strong lifelong existential obsession with death and melancholy appreciation for the brevity of life. It’s not hard to see why this internal disposition made Macdonald an outsider in Hollywood and why he, according to Conan O’Brien, was fired from almost every job.

In the modern world, comedy increasingly exists for the feed and the clip. The immediate audience and the people in the room, matter less than the potential audience online. Everything becomes subservient to the click and the like. Every mode of comedy is productized, from transgression to confession, and even the comedian’s language comes under pressure to be universally legible: legible to the person scrolling past, who will move on after five seconds if they don’t understand.

There may also simply be too much comedy. Virality is doing the buying, but the intended meaning appears to be that comedians are effectively gambling on their careers. Early on, Macdonald describes living cheaply in Ottawa and being able to make $20 or $40 a night at a comedy club, which was more than he was making doing manual labor. Back then, it was enough to live on and keep working.

Across the West, it may simply be the case that comedians, like any other kind of artist or performer, have to buy these lottery tickets now. That’s because there is no real way to live cheaply and under the radar for a long time, developing craft and insight. Make or break is implied from the beginning.

And while the culture of comedy clubs is still set by old heads and caustic Gen Xers, institutional capture will happen, and does happen, as with any other live event, including sports. The real thing is made subservient to the clip.

Norm is the rare Netflix product that contributes to culture, and should be talked about and shared. The obvious irony is that it probably won’t be, and will, like Macdonald’s own career, attract a small audience of reverent fans. It’s a viewing experience that will appeal to book readers, nostalgics, depressives, to the ruminative among us. We are a lucky few.

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Matthew Gasda is a playwright, author, and columnist for UnHerd, based in New York City.

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