How could anyone enjoy a film like the Bob Saget-directed Dirty Work? First of all, I don’t think movies should be a series of funny scenes following a loose plot with a bunch of funny actors being hilarious. Great movies have drama, Nazis, broken hearts and deal unabashedly with real important social issues. What are the issues in Dirty Work? Immaturity? Silliness? No thanks.

And I have a bone to pick with the casting director. Where do you get off putting Norm McDonald, Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, and Chevy Chase in the same movie? What is this, a Saturday Night Live reunion? If I want to watch these actors in the same scenes, all I have to do is splice together some old SNL episodes and paste them in a YouTube video. How about giving somebody else a try guys and stop hogging up all the movies? I’d like to have seen Liam Neeson in the Norm McDonald role. He would have brought some well-needed class to a juvenile endeavor. And instead of Chris Farley doing the same side-splitting schtick he always does and will never do again because he is dead, how about a person of color? I’d love to have seen Marlon Wayans play the part of “Jimmy,” especially when he claims that a “Saigon whore” bit his nose off. Mr. Wayans is the greatest comic actor of our generation, and he can’t even a cameo in this thing?

You know what else bugs me about this movie? You sit down on your couch, grab some popcorn and snuggle up with your loved one, and the next minute you find that you are laughing uncontrollably. A few jokes are fine. I even like some comedic situations. But a whole movie of hilarity? What happens is that your sides start hurting and you can’t breathe? Your face turns red (very unattractive), and you end up slapping your knee so hard that you have welts the next morning. Who wants all that? A masochist, that’s who. How about a nice family film like Dennis Quaid’s opus Yours, Mine and Ours? I watched that movie and didn’t laugh once. No popcorn getting lodged in my throat, no tears from laughing too hard, no aching of the sides or intolerable pain erupting around my mouth from smiling too big and too hard for too long. Yours, Mine and Ours is content to provide a few light chuckles and just move on.

Meanwhile, Dirty Work is greedy and thinks it has to make you laugh throughout the whole damn thing. Why else would they bring in a professional comedian like Don Rickles to play the part of a theater manager? The man has been at this for years. He heckles one of the characters pointing to the man’s fat belly and asking, “Hello ice cream, having a good time?” Who else would have thought to do that? And you know what? Being fat isn’t funny, it’s an epidemic. So when Rickles tells a fat man, “Got a call from Baskin Robbins; they said they’re only down to five flavors,” it’s not entertainment -- it’s just insensitive. How about some weather jokes, a Polish joke, or the classic “take my wife, no really, take her” bit? Well, none of that appears in this movie, and it suffers because of that.

You know what else isn’t nice to joke about, but Dirty Work still finds a way to make a giggle-inducing joke about? Rich guys drinking Chihuahua piss, hookers playing dead in a trunk, pranks where men pretend to be police and then get a bunch of jackass frat boys beaten up, and a bar fight set to the tune of “If you like piña coladas…” And what’s with Dirty Work’s indecision? One minute you have Norm McDonald’s deadpan humor and the next you have some slapstick, perhaps from MAD TV’s Artie Lange. Pick a comedy, fellas. You are supposed to pick one joke for the whole movie like “my boyfriend is white!” like Guess Who or “they’re acting like white girls, but they’re actually black men!” like in White Chicks. Speaking of which, where are the tired and overused race jokes? What’s a comedy without reversing the progress of Civil Rights?

It’s obvious that the people that made Dirty Work didn’t know what they were doing. They are probably the same people who made the movie that the characters in Dirty Work watch called, Men In Black Who Like to Have Sex With Each Other. In the scene where that movie is played, the patrons run out of the theater, the same way I wanted to when watching Norm McDonald crack joke after joke.

So instead of renting this way too funny for its own good movie, why not read the Lifestyles section in your local paper or play jacks with your sex-offender neighbor? That way you won’t have to suffer through the pain of laughing and laughing. And you won’t have to suffer through Chevy Chase in the role of his life as Dr. Farthing, the gambling-addicted doctor who places bets on everything from Jets games to the fight in Rocky III. You’ll thank me.