Name: Who Inspired Mike Rowe to Make “Dirty Jobs”
Uploaded: 2023-03-04T01:09:36.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Who Inspired Mike Rowe to Make “Dirty Jobs”' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-04. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Who Inspired Mike Rowe to Make “Dirty Jobs”' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-04. Transcript available.

Dirty Jobs was a tribute to a guy named Carl Noble.
Carl Noble was my neighbor and my grandfather.
Both of those things.
Both of those things.
And he was a magician.
A real magician?
No.
As good as they can be?
No, the kind of magician who, you know,
the guy woke up clean every day and came home dirty every night.
And somehow, during the course of the day,
something magical happened.
Something was fixed.
Something was repaired.
Something was built.
The guy could build a house without a blueprint.
Take your watch apart.
Put it back together blindfolded.
A combustion engine.
A plumbing line.
Whatever it is, right?
He was born.
He was drug-free.
He was drug-free?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, as far as I know,
I never saw him drink, to tell you the truth.
Wow.
But he only went to the seventh grade.
But by the time he was 30,
he was the chief electrical inspector for the state of Maryland.
He had a licensed electrician, plumber, steam fitter, pipe fitter, welder,
architect.
He could do all that stuff, right?
So I thought I'd follow in his footsteps.
I worked as his apprentice for a couple summers.
The handy gene is recessive, right?
So all the stuff he could do, all the stuff he could do naturally, it didn't
come easily to me, right?
I, one day, I was working with him on a concrete pour on some construction site,
and I just bitched up the mix.
Completely ruined it, you know?
And I was probably 16 at the time, and he said,
Mike, you know, just because you, you can be a tradesman, right?
Just get a different toolbox.
Yeah.
And I mean, that, that advice changed my life.
And anyhow, long story short, I got in the entertainment business.
I started pursuing things that I didn't, I didn't know I would like, and I didn't
know I cared about, like singing, and acting, and writing, and hosting, and,
and narrating.
You know, I, I got into all of this at a community college as I tried to put a
different toolbox together.
And, you know, way leads on the way, and I, I freelanced for, for 20 some years
in, in the TV business, had a lot of jobs.
And then, uh, my mother called, I was working for CBS in San Francisco on a
show called Evening Magazine, terrible little show.
One of those half hour things that comes on after the news, right?
Yeah, sounds bad.
It was awful.
Um, but I was good at it, you know?
I was, I was good at creating the illusion of, um, of competence in, in short
bursts.
Yeah, like Russell Wilson.
Sure.
Yeah.
Sure.
You said it, not me.
Um, and so I'm, I'm sitting in my cubicle one day, uh, preparing for the show
that night, and my mom calls me, and she says, Michael, you know, your, um,
your grandfather turned 90 today, and he's not gonna be around forever.
Mm-hmm.
And I was thinking, would it be great if, uh, before he died, he could turn on
the TV and see you doing something that looked like work?
My mother, no, no, my, my, my mother hits me with this, right?
So I take a, uh, I take one of my cameramen, uh, actually I go to the boss and
I say, hey, why does Evening Magazine always have to be hosted from like a winery
or a, or an art museum?
You know, why, why can't it be hosted from a, a factory floor or a construction
site or a sewer?
Yeah.
And he's like, you wanna host Evening from a sewer?
And I said, why not?
He goes, Mike, I don't give a shit.
No, no one's watching the show.
Do whatever you want.
So I, I took my cameraman into the sewers of San Francisco and what happened
down there, um, is actually a, a book I wrote a couple of years ago.
It's a, it changed my life.
The, um, the whole experience in the sewer, the rats, the roaches, the, the,
just the endless chocolate tide that washed over us and, and, and kept me from
doing the job.
I was trying to do all of that forced me to do the only thing I could do, which
was work with the sewer inspector who was down there replacing these rotten
bricks.
You know, that was his job.
I was just there to, to shoot raps, to host the thing.
Anyhow, that footage, uh, wound up on the air.
Um, and it turned into dirty jobs.
It crushed.
And so my granddad saw the first episode died.
Oh, killed him.
Killed him.
Killed my own pop.
No, he, he, he had an amazing life and he, he, he lived long enough to see me
doing something that, as my mother said, looked like work.
Right.
And so, uh, and then dirty jobs blew up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so this, this is, you know, I'm, I'm, I know you've seen this kind of thing
in show business.
I hadn't at that point, I'd had a lot of jobs, but I'd, I had never gotten mail
from people saying, you think that's dirty?
You should see what my father does.
Hmm.
You should see what my father does, my brother, my cousin, my uncle, my sister.
Wait till you see this.
And that's when I was like, oh, oh, this is not a show.
This is something else.
This is, um, I, a love letter to work.
It's a romp.
It's, I mean, a truly unscripted, you know, back before reality was reality.
It was like, it was a very unusual thing for discovery to put on the air.
Hope you enjoyed that video and you can watch another and you can watch this
one.
You can watch this one, different options, different choices.
Some guy just brings you a one option, not this guy, two options, watch one,
this one or this one.