Dirty Work Got a 20% and Lost Money. Norm Macdonald's Flop Is Better Than You Think

Dirty Work opened on June 12, 1998, and closed shortly after, the way a man opens an umbrella in a hurricane. It cost around $13 million and made about $10 million at home. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 20 percent. The New York Times called it a desert of comedy, and the Los Angeles Times called it cheesy, and I suspect they compared notes in the parking lot.

The plot is about two lifelong losers, Mitch and Sam, played by Norm Macdonald and Artie Lange, who start a revenge-for-hire business to pay for heart surgery for Sam's father, played by Jack Warden. That's the whole engine. It's a movie about getting even, made by people who were not, at the time, even.

Because here's the part the reviews left out. While Dirty Work was being made, Macdonald had been fired from Weekend Update by Don Ohlmeyer, an NBC executive and a friend of O.J. Simpson, who did not enjoy Norm's nightly reminders that Simpson had done it. Ohlmeyer then refused to sell the movie advertising time on NBC. Imagine a studio making a comedy about revenge and the star's old boss getting revenge on the comedy. NBC relented a week after it opened. A week after it opened is when a movie is already in the hospital, so the flowers came late.

Then the studio moved it from February to June, where it ran into Godzilla, and insisted on a PG-13, which is a bit like putting a seatbelt on a cannonball.

So what's good about it? Look at who showed up. Don Rickles as a theater manager. Chevy Chase as a gambling-addicted surgeon. Adam Sandler, uncredited, as the Devil. Chris Farley, uncredited, in his last released film appearance. John Goodman, uncredited, too. It's a cast that looks like a wedding where everybody owed the groom money.

And at the center is Norm, who could not act and refused to pretend otherwise, which is the only honest acting in most comedies. He reads lines like a man reading the warranty on a toaster, and somehow that's what makes the jokes land. Bob Saget, the father from Full House, directed it, and he directed it like a man who had been holding something in for eight seasons.

Audiences eventually figured it out. Rotten Tomatoes' audience score sits around two-thirds. Somewhere along the way it became a cult classic, the kind of movie comedians quote to each other in green rooms to see who's real. A sequel was talked about until Macdonald and Saget died in the early 2020s, which is the one plot twist nobody wanted to pay for.

The critics weren't wrong that it's sloppy. They were wrong that sloppy was the problem. Dirty Work is a dumb movie made by a very smart man who thought dumb was funnier, and he was right, and a civil jury eventually agreed with him about Simpson. Being right twice and broke both times is what the world calls a cult following. Heaven, I'm told, calls it a résumé.