by Paul Fischer

David Spade needs to maintain his uniquely self-effacing sense of humour. After all, when your own personal assistant is attacking you, staring death through the barrel of a gun, it's healthy to joke about it. "That was one of those things where I thought it could be over, and that lasted about 15 minutes. Then when I got out of it, the jokes started." Not that it was a laughing matter to begin with Spade hastens to add. "It was really unfortunate and took me by surprise, and unexplainable, but it happened."

Spade lived through his ordeal, and now is enjoying a major career turn. He stars in the new movie Joe Dirt, which he also co-wrote. The self-titled character bursts on the screen with a unique hairdo, searching America for his long-lost parents. A film that satirises the white trash mentality of urban America, Spade partly came up with this oddball creation. "My fellow writer and I have seen these guys all over America; they're here and there's a lot of 'em", Spade laughingly retorts. In this wacky comedy, Spade is Joe Dirt, a janitor with this odd, mullet hairdo, acid-washed jeans and a dream to find the parents that he lost at the Grand Canyon when he was a stroppy, trailer park-raised eight-year-old. Now, blasting Van Halen in his jacked-up economy car, the irrepressibly optimistic Joe hits the road alone in search of his folks. As his wandering, misguided search takes him from one misadventure to another, Joe finds his way to Los Angeles, where an aggressive radio DJ brings Joe on his radio show to insult him. But as Joe's life story unfolds, jeers turn to cheers, and an entire captivated city tunes in to hear the adventures of Joe Dirt. Now Joe Dirt is not the kind of American hero moviegoers expect to see on the big screen. Spade aggress "that we're always trying to hide these guys from the world; what we really want is Tom Cruise as our official representative", he says. But Spade insists that the Joe Dirts of this world, at least in Spade's America, "are under every piece of plywood and outside every 7 Eleven." Ah yes, the real USA. "Oh yeah, this guy is out there en masse. So now the word is out there, and all the other countries will figure out that this is really the US."

The best comedy stems from real life, and in the case of Spade's Joe Dirt, there is some personal resonance, he admits reluctantly. "My dad did leave when I was about four, coming back a year at a time, but I still see him. I do know what it's like not to have around, so it was easy to feel for this guy." In fact Spade's trademark character is far more of the sarcastic variety; here, he wanted a chase of pace. "It was nice to play a character you could feel and root for." It was equally important for Spade to create a character poles apart from Finch, the irascible assistant to George Segal in the hit sitcom Just Shoot Me. "You see Just Shoot Me for free every week, and there's a lot of competition in the movies, so if they can see the same thing, why bother. I want to give them something that maybe they haven't seen from me. These characters are in me." They were in the brash 35-year old comic's numerous routines on the perennial TV favourite Saturday Night Live, and Joe Dirt became an amalgam of the kinds of characters he had previously created. "I wanted to play a character that everyone could relate to, that would be fun to play, and I relished growing out some sideburns and wearing a ridiculous wig." Growing up in Arizona, Spade says that he also "knew guys like that, so this guy is really me - except of course I'm famous."

Born in Michigan but raised in Scottsdale, Arizona, Spade first made a name for himself as a stand-up comedian. Spade recalls that the comedian within began with his height. "I was really microscopic growing up," he explains. "I grew 5 inches the first year of high school and another towards the end. But it was a great defence mechanism and a good way to get friends to hang out with me, like a lot of sarcastic people. He grew a little bit more while developing his comedy routines, which began to bear fruit while performing in clubs, theatres and in college campuses during the eighties. He joined the cast of Lorne Michael's long-running television show Saturday Night Live in 1990 as a writer and a performer, where he soon gained popularity for such recurring sketches such as "The Hollywood Minute" in which Spade would sarcastically shred some of this town's biggest stars with his nasty comments.