In 1946 Dick Wessel began working in Columbia Pictures' two-reel comedies, often with writer-director Edward Bernds.

Wessel became a fixture in Columbia shorts, as a comic foil for The Three Stooges, Andy Clyde, Hugh Herbert, Gus Schilling and Richard Lane, Sterling Holloway, Harry Von Zell, Billie Burke, and Eddie Foy, Jr.

When character actor Eddie Acuff left the Blondie series, Bernds hired Dick Wessel to replace him as the hapless mailman perennially flattened by Dagwood Bumstead in his rush-hour run for the bus.

In Frank Capra's comedy Pocketful of Miracles, based on a Damon Runyon story, he's a New York mug masquerading as the governor of Florida.

From 1959 to 1961, Wessel co-starred as Carney Kohler in all forty-two episodes of the NBC western television series Riverboat.