Jim Norton: Mouthful of Shame

"I'm an actor. I'm not a fucking magician."

Robert De Niro says that to Jim Norton in the cold open of Mouthful of Shame, after Norton has already been waved off by Ricky Gervais and Louis C.K. IMDb logged the line. The credits list all three as uncredited. Shannon Hartman directed. Art & Industry produced. Netflix put the hour up on 14 March 2017, latestnetflix.com contends, 61 minutes, TV-MA.

The spanking was not in the one-page script Norton emailed De Niro's assistant. The Interrobang printed the reply. "Bob would love to do this with you." They had already spent hours together on reshoots for The Comedian. Norton left the ass out of the page on purpose. He brought a hairbrush in case De Niro refused to touch him. De Niro did not refuse. Most takes were Norton bent over a bare leg until, Norton said, "I think he got tired of feeling my hard-on." De Niro suggested a standing take. That is the one in the special. Norton had written "ugly little worm." De Niro switched it to slug. Gervais, on his own, called him a peeled turtle with AIDS. De Niro had warned he might not want to be that mean. Then he was. Hollywood Reporter got the same hairbrush story a month later, plus Norton's tweet that it was one of the better moments of his life. Next lateral move, he joked, would be Al Pacino nude in a hot tub.

The hour around the stunt is the rest of his act, not Chip Chipperson. Interrobang called it his seventh special, taped over two New York shows, knockoff Yeezys, no signature characters. Wikipedia files a 31-date Mouthful of Shame theatre tour through 2016, then the Netflix tape in New York. He had already done Please Be Offended, American Degenerate, and Contextually Inadequate for Epix, with Ozzy Osbourne on a toilet for the first of those. Decider, on drop day, called this his fourth televised standup hour and first for Netflix, and quoted him mid-set. "Because I've talked about myself so much publicly, people know so many things about me, and none of it's a secret." He left in crowd work, including a woman who had walked in on her parents. He told Interrobang he did not know if that would hold on tape. It became a favorite. He also tripped on a Trump punchline and could not salvage it in the edit.

Netflix, he told THR, did not care about exact length. "We don't give a shit. You know, like around an hour, whatever, do it." He signed with WME to pitch a series. He called the platform the best creative experience he had had, the same line he gave Interrobang. The trailer still sells fedoras, mom's underpants, and puppy love. End credits, IMDb notes, include behind-the-scenes of that opening. The gossip is not a secret he told. It is a two-time Oscar winner who agreed to slap a radio comic's bare ass in an office, then improved the insult.