He was so well read, but played the "dumb guy" so well: https://youtu.be/ob3yBb2E-uM

I'd argue that it should be:

He was so well-read that he played the "dumb guy" well.

yeah, not many people know he was a devout Christian, overall a man of depth and complexity

There was a comedian on Last Comic Standing on which Norm was a judge who was making jokes at the expense of his Christian family. Something like "Your favorite book is the Bible, mine's Harry Potter. Big deal."

Norm had a scathing criticism, and it was the most serious I'd ever seen Norm. He said something like: "It's not funny to use Harry Potter to make fun of Christians. J.K. Rowling is a Christian, and she said if you understand the Gospels, you'll know how the Harry Potter series will end."

Now there was a bit on Seinfeld about how someone had converted to Judaism simply to gain the right to tell Jewish jokes. And Jerry was talking to his therapist about this and the therapist said, "So, this offends you as a Jewish person?" And Jerry replied, "No, it offends me as a comedian."

Despite his faith, one inferred from his LCS critique that the Harry Potter joke offended him not as a Christian, but as a comedian. That's how professional a comic he was.

Well that and edgy atheism was extremely played out even by that point.

Same way he refused to do any Trump jokes. Norm didn't want applause, he wanted laughter.

Damn this is a good comment. I know a lot of Norm but I never saw this.

Weird. Am a big fan, but can't imagine anyone dissing the Enlightenment. Maybe a bit crazy after all?

Norm's non-comedy persona (I suspect even when not "performing" he was still performing, at least to himself) was probably not immune to pretense.

I can see the point he is trying to make, although I think it's nonsense

Hardly nonsense and a view espoused by several other cultural commentators and authors (e.g., Ross Douthat, Dostoyevsky, Simone Weil, to name a few).

All I can say is that hankering for moral bedrock by looking back to a surely contrived ideal of Christianity seems trite and somewhat vindictive to me. To use one of my favourite Norm-isms, I don't own a doghouse: am I lying to myself?

To what truth does he refer to? You don't get to pick and choose which bits you like and which you don't, when making this kind of argument.

Isn't your first line projecting onto him something that he's not evidencing? Then the second line... is he picking and choosing? He names Christianity, it's not an ambiguous term.

The entire Romantic era was a diss of the Enlightenment. Norm wasn’t “a bit crazy”, he was educated.

It reads as an appeal to irrationality or the opposite of reason. Educated or not, not particularly useful.

Damn.

Unfortunately, if this is serious, it just makes me lose respect for him. The Enlightenment was the greatest period of human history ever with regards to philosophical and intellectual progress since ancient Greece.

You would never know if it was serious is not. It could have been more of a comment really.

I think it was serious. Norm was very well-read and his favourite literature was deeply religious and suspicious of modernity (Twain, Tolstoy, Proust).

Yes I know since I look askance at modernity too. But he was seldom serious (in a literal sense) about anything except sports. The seriousness was in the inferences, usually. This tweet (since deleted) if serious, was at least out of character.