Dirty Work and Beyond: Norm MacDonald on Film

During his introduction at the recent Los Angeles premiere of the new restoration of the 1998 comedy Dirty Work, co-writer Frank Sebastiano acknowledged one of the reasons it flopped during its original release: the filmmakers were trying to make an R-rated comedy for a PG-13 audience. 

I was exactly 13 years old in 1998, so I can attest to this. I remember my matinee screening of the film being mostly empty. And while several of my friends came to love the film (probably because I forced them to watch my VHS copy of it), it enjoyed nowhere near the popularity of other adolescent comedies of its day—not just the Adam Sandler smash hits, but inferior titles like Deuce Bigelow: Male GIgolo and Joe Dirt.

It wasn’t that Dirty Work—which stars the late Norm MacDonald as Mitch Weaver, a slacker who, along with his half-brother Sam (Artie Lang), start a revenge-for-hire business in order to raise $50,000 for a life-saving heart transplant for their ailing father (Jack Warden)—was more sophisticated than most Happy Madison fare; it is as proudly juvenile as any of them, if a fair share raunchier. It is much weirder, darker, and more subversive, but not on a surface level; those elements were easily lost, at least amongst its target audience at the time, within its breezy, brightly-lit surface (courtesy of director Bob Saget), bouncy alt-pop soundtrack (featuring Third Eye Blind, Chumbawamba, and Better than Ezra), and rote slob vs. snobs story beats.

What makes Dirty Work stand out from the pack, what ensured its status as a cult classic even as it was bombing at the box office, was the singular comedic stylings of its star and co-writer. 

If it was lonely being a middle-school Dirty Work fan, it was even lonelier being a middle-school Norm fan. Of that group of Saturday Night Live alumni—Sandler, Chris Farley, David Spade, Chris Rock, Rob Schnieder—Norm’s sensibility, a mix of Canadian niceness and smirking sociopathy delivered via high-pitched deadpan with an old-timey, 1930s cadence, was obviously the hardest sell amongst the adolescent male demographic they were all playing to. But good lord, did I eat it up, recording each new SNL so that I could obsessively rewatch his Weekend Updates, as well as his sporadic, but always excellent, sketch appearances. Needless to say, I was exceptionally angry over his controversial exit from the series in early ‘98.

Still, when Dirty Work came out later that same year, I was convinced he was on the path to full-on movie stardom. On paper, it certainly looked that way. A year prior, he had turned in a brief but hilarious supporting role in Adam Sandler’s breakout Billy Madison, as well as a dramatic cameo in the critically-acclaimed drama The People vs. Larry Flint. For the latter, he’d been handpicked by director Milos Foreman, who saw potential in Norm that Norm himself didn’t. As he recounted to Howard Stern years later, Foreman initially wanted him for a much larger role, and had to be talked down by Norm, who did not consider himself a good actor. 

When Dirty Work premiered, I made sure to catch the first screening the weekend it opened. The film exceeded my expectations. Despite sharing the screenwriting duties with two others—Sebastiano and Fred Wolf, both of whom were writers on SNL during his time there and each of whom were responsible for some of the film’s funniest and most memorable scenes and jokes—the result was pure Norm, every scene rife with his politically incorrect comic obsessions: prostitution, gambling, child molestation, prostitution, prison rape, incest, prostitution, gay panic, and especially prostitution. 

But it wasn’t just or even mostly juvenile transgression that makes this all so funny. Even if Dirty Work had premiered sometime in the next three years—when pop culture was given entirely over to hormonal miscreants by way of Attitude-era WWE, South Park, Nu Metal, and those aforementioned Schnieder/Spade hits—it still would have bombed, because again, the humor all comes down to Norm’s delivery. It certainly did not help that Don Ohlmeyer, the same NBC executive who canned Norm from Update, wouldn’t allow the network to air advertisements for the film (nor did the near universal critical pans), but talk to devotees of Dirty Work, or sit in on a rep screening of it, and you’ll find that small throwaway lines (“Hello, real police?”, “Okay, settle down, prostitutes”, “Well, see, the thing is this…”) brook as much if not more raucous laughter than the much broader bits of slapstick and scatalogy.

Again, it all comes down to that peculiar, inimitable Norm sensibility, which not only led to Dirty Work bombing, but also the frustrating arc of his career over the next decade. His excellent self-titled sitcom of that same year (originally The Norm Show, later re-titled, simply, Norm), which eventually brought on Lang to once again play his half-brother, started off a ratings hit, before screwy scheduling led to its cancellation after season 3. His sitcom of two years later, the subtly experimental A Minute with Stan Hooper, only lasted one season. 

He would continue to pop up in small film roles, mostly in his Happy Madison buddies’ films (such as the aforementioned Deuce Bigalow and its sequel) or providing voice work (including in the hit Dr. Doolittle series). Two notable exceptions during this time are his second dramatic cameo in Milos Foreman’s next movie, the 1999 Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon, in which he plays Michael Richards, and his sole other feature lead performance: Screwed (2000).

The directorial debut of screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who penned both The People vs. Larry Flint and Man on the Moon, Screwed is a black comedy of errors in which MacDonald’s hapless butler teams up with his best friend (Dave Chappelle) in a bungled kidnapping and ransom scheme. Screwed is an entertaining film with its own small cult of admirers, but it’s no Dirty Work. Whereas MacDonald is basically playing himself in the former, in Screwed he’s attempting to play more of a standard everyman character, a role to which he’s not very well suited (his performance can best be described as ‘yippy’). Even more than Dirty Work—which had to be slightly reworked in order to achieve the desired PG-13, but which never comes across as compromised—Screwed definitely feels like a butchered film, and hopefully one day it can get a similar re-edit and restoration, as there is likely a much darker and funnier film in there somewhere.

While his acting became more sporadic, McDonald’s profile started to rise during the early 2010s. While he remained a big name in stand-up (releasing two acclaimed specials during this period, and two more over the course of the next ten years), it was his appearances on late night talk shows and specials that earned the most attention. He’d moved into a more deadpan, antiquated style by this point, relaying long, meandering, corny jokes with bizarre and anti-climatic punchlines (most infamously during the Comedy Central Roast of his Dirty Work director Saget). They left audiences baffled, but turned him into a hero of the burgeoning alt-comedy scene, which was quickly becoming more and more mainstream.

Over the next decade, he firmly established himself as one of the most exciting and prolific comic minds of our day, hosting a popular video podcast (Norm MacDonald Live) that allowed him to go as weird and dark as he’d always wanted to; publishing a fictionalized memoir in 2016 (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir) that is by far the most ambitious and literary of any book written by a comic (Norm was a voracious reader of serious literature); and getting his own talk show (his second) on Netflix. 

Norm died of leukemia in 2021 (he’d been battling cancer privately since 2013), but was able to record a final standup special, Norm MacDonald: Nothing Special, which he knew would be his last. Shot by himself, with no audience, it was released posthumously on Netflix.

In the years following his death, Norm has been fully canonized as the comic genius he always was and is arguably more popular than ever, with clips from his various TV appearances, podcasts, and specials cycling non-stop across social media. Dirty Work, meanwhile, has moved from box office dud and critical pariah to one of the most feverishly beloved comedies of its day. Unlike most of its ilk, it not only holds up, but gets better with age, constantly revealing new jokes and gags (only after reading the booklet for Vinegar Syndrome’s deluxe new 4K/Blu release did I realize that the leads’ wardrobe is intentionally swapped, so that the beanpole MacDonald is drowning in extra fabric while the heavyset Lang is bursting out of his). 

The new ‘Dirtier Cut’ isn’t a revelation by any means, but it’s another example of how Norm MacDonald’s cinematic legacy, much like his larger legacy as the funniest person of his generation, will only continue to grow.

“Dirty Work (The Dirtier Cut) is available on 4K and Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome.