The 1998 cult comedy classic Dirty Work stars Norm Macdonald and Artie Lange as lifelong friends Mitch and Sam, who need to raise $50,000 in order to get Sam’s father a heart transplant. After getting back at their abusive boss by showing a gay porn film at his movie theater, the two decide to start their own revenge-for-hire business. To promote the new venture, they sabotage a shady car dealer’s TV commercial by having hookers pose as corpses hidden in the trunks of his cars. The jobs Mitch and Sam get paid for from there include planting dead fish in the home of one client’s noisy neighbor and preventing another’s building from being demolished by overloading the bulldozer’s engine with popcorn.
Although Dirty Work was the only film Macdonald was credited with writing, a number of sources have reported that the movie was based on a Roald Dahl story. The story in question is said to be “Vengeance is Mine, Inc.,” first released as part of Dahl’s 1980 collection More Tales of the Unexpected. In it, two impoverished men come up with an idea for a business that involves them performing acts of vengeance for money. They quickly hear from several potential clients, three of whom request that they punch a local gossip columnist in the nose.
While the basic premise of the characters running a revenge-for-hire business is similar, we weren’t able to find any official confirmation that Dirty Work was actually based on “Vengeance is Mine, Inc.” The story isn’t referenced in the film’s opening or closing credits, and no one associated with the movie appears to have said it was an influence. That, of course, doesn’t mean that Macdonald or one of his co-writers weren’t aware of it, or that they didn’t have it in the back of their minds at any point.
It’s also been pointed out that Macdonald has at least one other link to Dahl. During an episode of his podcast, Norm Macdonald Live, from 2014, the comedian tells a joke about a man who visits a woman and her daughter and later has sex with one of them in a dark room. He leaves without knowing which of them he’s slept with, but later finds out that there was another daughter living in the house who has leprosy. Dahl wrote a story with that exact twist called “The Visitor” in 1965, which would seem to indicate that Macdonald was familiar with Dahl’s work in some way. Whether or not he knew Dahl was the source of either story, we can’t say for sure, however.
Check out Macdonald’s version of “The Visitor” below.
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