Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
I first visited Montréal on July, 13, 2001, when I was twenty, on a meandering road trip with my then-girlfriend. It’s easy to date: Sigur Rós’ album Ágætis byrjun had then recently been released in North America. I purchased it on CD at some Canadian equivalent to f.y.e. or Coconuts, and have a vivid memory of cruising through the Centre-ville by night and being stirred by the combination of extraterrestrial sounds and strange city lights, feeling very young and cool and open to the world and Whoa. I can pinpoint the exact day, however, because—Pourquoi pas?—we went to see an opening night screening of a Québécois vampire comedy called Karmina 2, the release of which was being disproportionately advertised around town. IMDB confirms the existence of this film, but I don’t know that anyone else could: the theatre was almost entirely empty of locals, who apparently knew better.
I have returned to Montréal since—in fact I am there right now, for the 17e edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival, the highlight of which has thus far been a screening of Andrzej Żuławski’s frantic 1996 film Szamanka—and the city has lost none of its mystique. Where else can one find the sacred and profane in such cheek-and-jowl proximity? Ascending to the glowing Croix du mont Royal that overlooks the city on a crisp evening and pausing to regard the view from the Kondiaronk Belvedere is tantamount to a transcendent experience, while alongside the daunting bulk of Saint Joseph’s Oratory one can find the small Chapel of Brother André, decorated with the crutches discarded by pilgrims healed by Frère André Bessette—Saint André of Montreal since 2010. There are also basement peep shows with seedy pebble-dash exteriors that any other self-respecting city would have bulldozed twenty years ago, and many a crucifix necklace poised between mountains of silicone. (Topless breakfasting, hélas, is no more.)
Quebec has been well-served by movies: There’s Otto Preminger’s 1952 The 13th Letter with Charles Boyer, which transposes the action of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau to a Quebecois setting; the chameleonic Ted Kotcheff’s 1974 The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; and then the whole of native cinéma Québécois, of which there is much more to speak of than Karmina 2. It’s a picturesque city in every respect… though it needs be admitted that, in general, the métis Francophones are easier on the eyes than the Anglos–I remember reading, I do not recall where, a passage about the English romance with Soviet cinema having everything to do with the Russians introducing bone structure to a chinless, potato-faced nation. As it happens, however, my favorite Quebecois performer is an English-speaker of Scotch extraction.
I am talking, of course, of Norm Macdonald. Macdonald hails not from Montréal but from the provincial capital, Quebec City, where Hitchcock shot his gloomy, gnawing I Confess. Macdonald grew up there during the height of the Quebec sovereignty movement, an experience I do not believe he has spoken of, though we do know that, at his father’s behest, Norm took Latin in school instead of French. “It didn’t make much sense,” Macdonald later told an interviewer, “because Quebec City, where I lived, was virtually 99 percent French and zero percent ancient Roman.”
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
That’s funny, but would be a great deal funnier if delivered in Norm’s artfully stilted cadence, which makes a joke of the idea of jokes, his eyes gleaming impishly beneath intently furrowed brows, his clenched smile radiating contempt and pity for all of mankind. That delivery would lead Norm up the stand-up ranks, until he “broke” at the ‘87 Just for Laughs/Just pour rire comedy festival in Montréal, the most recent installment of which is wrapping up this weekend. Stand-up success led in due time to Saturday Night Live, to subsequent permutations of variously minor television stardom, and to some film work in between, including a shining moment in 2005’s Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo, and a lead role in one minor classic.
Dirty Work was directed by Bob Saget, the Full House actor and America’s Funniest Home Videos host whose subsequent career has largely been devoted to letting audiences pretend to be shocked that Danny Tanner does very dirty and very unfunny stand-up comedy. Saget’s participation is merely incidental, however: Dirty Work is the apotheosis of Macdonaldian humor. In addition to starring, Macdonald co-wrote the screenplay with Fred Wolf and Frank Sebastiano, both former SNL writers, the latter of whom would work on Macdonald’s ABC sitcom Norm (1999-2001). Dirty Work was released in theaters in the summer of 1998, only a few months after Macdonald had been disinvited from SNL at the behest of NBC West Coast Executive Don Ohlmeyer—per some reports, because Macdonald kept using his Weekend Update platform to insistently rag on Ohlmeyer’s pal O.J. Simpson, The Naked Gun’s Officer Nordberg. (If you have not seen Macdonald’s post-firing appearance on Letterman, drop everything.)
The story arc of Dirty Work has all the hallmarks of a by-template Lorne Michaels SNL-spinoff production, so much so that it is surprising that Michaels wasn’t involved in its making. Like Tommy Boy (1995), Dirty Work begins with a voice-over introducing the protagonists as children (the preadolescent verion of Macdonald’s character wears a Habs jersey), hinges on a ticking-clock fundraising plot, and has a ludicrously-wicked and smarmy foil—real-estate developer Travis Cole (Christopher McDonald, stepping into the Rob Lowe Part.) The protagonists are Mitch (Macdonald) and Sam (Artie Lange), lifelong best friends who one day discover that they share the same cantankerous, crass, horrible father—Pops (Jack Warden). “Back then we didn’t have these fancy birth control methods,” Pops says by way of explanation, “Like pulling out.” When Pops needs a $50,000 heart transplant, Mitch and Sam decide to raise money by opening a freelance revenge business, called “Dirty Work,” where clients can retain their services to extract reprisal on wrongdoers. This backfires when they play into Cole’s hands, though they prevail thanks to one of those publicly-upstanding-but-truly-nefarious-guy-reveals-his-secret-rottenness-thanks-to-a-surreptitiously-recorded-tape-that’s-then-broadcast-to-the-populace twists, the esteemed history of which stretches from A Face in the Crowd (1957) to UHF (1989).
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Dirty Work was Macdonald’s first starring film role, and he called in favors. He’d played one of Billy Madison’s permanently-squiffed buddies, and so Adam Sandler obligingly makes a cameo as Satan, pre-Little Nicky. Before working with Sandler at SNL Macdonald had written for Roseanne, and that was good for a John Goodman walk-on. Chris Farley, who’d OD’d the previous December, leaving the posthumous Matthew Perry co-starring stinker Almost Heroes (1998) behind in the can, gets a worthy swansong here as Mitch’s friend Jimmy, a barfly who had the tip of his nose bit off by a “Saigon whore.” Mr. Warmth himself, Don Rickles, appears as Mitch and Sam’s boss, a movie theatre manager, who gives Sam a memorable dressing-down. (The mid-‘90s were a mini-career renaissance for Rickles, who not only voiced Toy Story’s Mr. Potato Head, but appeared in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 Casino, a film in which the most disturbing act of violence among so many is, oddly, Joe Pesci beating Rickles up with a phone.) Finally, Chevy Chase, on record as (accurately) stating that Macdonald was his only worthy successor at the Weekend Update desk, appears as Dr. Farthing, Pops’ gambling addict attendant physician.
Chatting with former co-star Lange on The Howard Stern Show in 2009, Chase discussed the scaling-back of Dirty Work’s original hard-R script. And while it’s true that there are a few corny jokes here that read as concessions, the finished PG-13 film is still, despite Chase’s reservations, pretty salty. Every curse outside of the f-bomb is freely scattered about, especially “whore,” which Macdonald always pronounces with particular relish. There are also a lot of jokes about homosexuality, including Mitch and Sam switching out a print of Men in Black with Men in Black (Who Like to Have Sex with Each Other), and a particular emphasis on nonconsensual same-sex activity. (If there is any justice in the world, Macdonald’s post-prison rape monologue in Dirty Work will someday be anthologized alongside the St. Crispin’s Day speech.)
A fascination with sex between homosexual men is one of the hallmarks of Macdonald’s humor—see for reference “World’s First Gay Guys,” from 2006’s long-anticipated comedy album Ridiculous. (This bit also relies on one of Macdonald’s favorite pieces of business—having characters unnecessarily and unnaturally narrate events that go unseen by the audience, much in evidence in Dirty Work: “Holy Lord, that’s a picture of you and my mother, and you’re having sex!” “Now you’re killing me with that chainsaw!… He took away my chainsaw, and now he’s using it on me!”) More recently and more bafflingly, in a series of Tweets that appeared and were deleted shortly after the airing of Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra, Macdonald stridently and repeatedly asserted that Liberace wasn’t gay.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Macdonald’s hang-up might be attributed to homophobia, though it’s worth noting his tone has more little-boy fascination than mean-spiritedness, and to call him a flat-out homophobe would discount his unwavering loyalty to Max Wright. Wright, who played father Willie Tanner on the genuinely-vile sitcom ALF, collected his first of a pair of DUIs while appearing on Norm, and in 2001 pictures of the married father of two smoking crack and having sex with homeless men popped up in a National Enquirer spread. It all sounds like a Norm punchline, but Wright nevertheless got repeated votes of confidence from Macdonald, who cast him in both of his abortive post-Norm sitcoms, A Minute with Stan Hooper and Back to Norm. Macdonald has similarly been steadfast towards the troubled Lange, and some have concluded—though I don’t believe this—that given the company that Macdonald keeps and the deceptively-rambling circumlocutions of his stand-up, Norm must himself be a boozer and user. (This point is addressed in a recent episode of his “video podcast” Norm Macdonald Live: “I should explain my face… Y’know how huge it’s getting? People think I’m a drunk or something.”)
Macdonald does have a bit in which he insists that having a gay son is nothing to be “proud” of, but he also has a bit where he insists that all sex is by its nature shameful–”You wouldn’t draw the blinds to bake a cherry pie for old Widow Hamilton…”–so I can’t fault him for bias. And in comedy, as in all art, I generally prefer the artist who has something to work through rather than something to dictate. (When was the last time you listened to Shut Up You Fucking Baby?) Instead of locking Macdonald up in any reductive boxes, better to say that he has a complex moral code entirely his own, as well as a series of preoccupations—sex (gay or otherwise), death, God, prostitution, and grizzled men—whose need of expression transcends either commonplace bullying or nice-guy self-censoring. As entertaining as Norm Macdonald Live can be, there is nothing in it to top Macdonald’s denuding appearance on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, a full disclosure of the profound well of sadness that lies beneath Macdonald’s comedy. This ruminant melancholy sometimes manifests itself in work that is genuinely cathartic: It is impossible not to be moved when watching Macdonald perform his anything-but-routine routine about his father’s fatal heart attack, which he appears truly to re-live on-stage night after night.
I have not watched Macdonald’s Screwed, in which he co-stars with Dave Chappelle, since its 2000 release, yet feel safe in standing by my initial low opinion of it—until something better comes along, Dirty Work will have to stand as Macdonald’s finest hour in cinema, even if it only glances at the depths of his stand-up. It’s unlikely that Macdonald will risk anything radically experimental or ambitious with his career in the near future. He has a college-age son, which possibly accounts for a flurry of activity over the last few years, and the fact that you see his fat face all over billboards in Midwestern cities, as the spokesman for Safe Auto.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Dirty Work is not a perfect film. It isn’t Chaplin or Keaton or Lloyd—though it does have a few nice catapult-launched pratfalls. (And did you know that Mack Sennett was born in Quebec?) Its framing is never more than functional, and it’s bedecked throughout in cartoonish, eye-searing colors, a fact that Mitch and Sam’s hideous shirts bear much of the blame for. The soundtrack stinks, too. In common with a number of comedies of the period—Dumb and Dumber (1994) springs immediately to mind—it’s a cross-section of whatever was on Alternative radio at the moment, selected seemingly at random: Better than Ezra’s “Good,” Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping,” Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life.” (Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work,” in a piece of perversity, is no-where to be found.) Finally, it’s saddled with a wholly unconvincing and unnecessary romantic subplot, a point that Macdonald has spoken about: “[I]t’s really hard to be a star because you have to be a nice guy and then fall in love, or you have to be a bad guy and then turn out to be a nice guy and fall in love with a girl and all this crazy stuff that has nothing to do with comedy. In the old days, they would just have a nominal leading man as the star of the movie, which would just be some guy, and then they’d have, like, Abbott & Costello or the Marx Brothers, like, hanging around.”
There are few more adept at being intrinsically funny while hanging around than Norm Macdonald, and his Dirty Work remains consistently good for a larf–just scanning the imdb Quotes page is enough to banish dark thoughts. Here’s hoping for more; I would like just once to see Norm do Beckett, while a resourceful writer or director could certainly find much to explore in the Macdonald persona. So, filmmakers take note: Hot property Norm Macdonald is still out there; don’t leave him on the shelf until he gets too grizzled.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.