Craps: In Which I Take a Dump on Andrew Dice Clay

Good looking guy, huh? Maybe that’s the problem.

I briefly considered holding this piece until Andrew Dice Clay (Andrew Clay Silverstein, b. 1957) passed away so I could call it “The Diceman Goeth”, but if the 45th President is any example, the most heinous assholes never die, they linger for decades, the better to inflict maximum misery, so it would seem. Bad comparison, him and the other guy? I hardly think so. Demagogic bullies from the outer boroughs who rode to fame and success by embodying the worst that humanity has to offer. From that perspective, what do they NOT have in common? The one helped pave the way for the other as fas as I’m concerned. And we’re supposed to consider adopting the culture of these guys PERMANENTLY in five weeks, so, no, there’s no waiting. Yeah, permanently. Trump is on record saying that if he returns there will be no more elections, and that he’ll be a dictator. So any chance to condemn this shit, in terms that are 100% unambiguous, I’m taking.

I’m old enough to remember when Silverstein broke into the popular consciousness. (I’m calling him Silverstein throughout this article for the same reason I’m using his pre-Dice head-shot at the top of it. It’s an attempt to do what he himself has never done — distance the real man from the character he plays. In one sense it gives him credit for NOT being the asshole he portrays, although I strongly suspect the distance is not as great as he sometimes pretends. And it’s also useful to remove the armor of character that he projects. No one is JUST a clown, if that is what he is.)

Anyway, from the very first moment I ever laid eyes on him I’ve hated Andrew Dice Clay, or hated, let us say, rather, his “act”. I hated every element of it. He’s famous for being offensive, but before we even go there, let’s talk about his look. That’s always the first impression. By the mid ’80s, when he first came on the scene, can you imagine how SICK some of us were of the “greaser revival” thing? We’d had a decade of it by then, with the advent of the Fonz, the ascension into heaven and deification of Elvis Presley, followed by such things as Sha Na Na, and John Travolta in Grease. The idea of doing it as a comedy character on a stand-up stage seemed lame, and worse, not funny. (There are several layers to how he is not funny; that is the first of them). This was the great age of character stand-up, and I really loved most of those people. Guys like Steven Wright and Bobcat Goldthwait were like gods to me in the ’80s. But a hoodlum with a D.A. smoking a Lucky in a leather jacket? I mean, what community theatre talent show did he come from? …was my first impression.

That MIGHT have been okay if he were ridiculing that fad. But he didn’t seem to be. He seemed to be embodying it. He claimed to be channeling guys he knew from his Sheepshead Bay neighborhood. Sure! But claims by himself and his fans that he was satirizing or parodying those people and their attitudes rang false. Instead he seemed to be revelling in the performance as a liberating experience. But wait — we skipped the part about his name. WTF is up with the name? Have you ever met ANYONE whose nickname is “Dice”? Or “Dice MAN”? “You’re the coolest, Dice Man!” It vaguely suggest craps, or the fuzzy things hanging off the rear view mirror of your convertable. As far as I’m aware, he’s never explained it, and until I encounter an adequate explanation I’m afraid I’m going to have to go ahead and write it off, along with the rest of his act, as stupid. Interestingly, most people pronounce it “Andrew Dice-Clay”, as though he were a hypenated British snoot (e.g., Wilfrid Hyde-White), as opposed to “Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay” which is theoretically the idea of it.

As it happens, Clay (or Silverstein) did roll the dice, and to everyone’s suprise, it came up boxcars. According to him, it grew out of his doing an impression of Jerry Lewis as Buddy Love in the original The Nutty Professor. And like, Lewis, he seems to have forgotten that that character was supposed to be a huge asshole. The reason he forgot such a seemingly important detail is also easy to put your finger on: this was Ronald Reagan’s America. As we have written many a time, Reagan seemed to give permission to the worst elements of this country to be as boorish and awful as possible. I’ll always associate this comedian with that historical moment, the age of Morton Downey Jr (oh just wait til I take HIM apart) and Rambo and Carl Icahn (the model for Gordon Gecko). Also, he was buff like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He clearly worked out a LOT. Which I don’t judge, but we’re talking about comedy. Traditionally (and laudably) American comedy had always been about underdogs and shlemiels, from Charlie Chaplin to Woody Allen. Or more pointedly, since he’s the guy who gave Silverstein his shot: Rodney Dangerfield. ALL of Rodney’s comedy was self-deprecating. But now we’re supposed to embrace this skull cracker? Its like laughing in the school yard when some big monster beats the asthmatic kid’s head in. I’m at a loss to see how it’s different.

The ’80s was a time when homophobia and misogyny and racism could and did thrive, with the cheerful cooperation of most of our cultural gatekeepers. One of this comedian’s early signature bits consisted of crude and unimaginative riffs on Nursery Rhymes. Yeah — I said “crude.” I’m not prudish about comedy or sexual depictions or stuff about body parts, and I totally resent being placed in the position of being a scold. I only ask that you not be a fucking moron. On that basis I’ve always hated dick humor, in PARTICULAR when performed by stand-up comedians. Chimps and gorillas are all about dick humor. And they throw their shit against the wall, and rock back and forth and screech with glee at the accomplishment. The laughter, I guess, is theoretically about shock, which is why schoolkids laugh at peepee and poopoo. But, um…if you’re over body parts? If you got over them when you were eight years old? I think we’ve learned in recent years that a substantial percentage of the American public are, just that, mentally eight years old. “He said ‘dick’! Haw, haw!” This is the same portion of the public that thought Trump’s impression of the disabled reporter was hilarious.

Which makes a nice pivot back to the issue of bullying. I honestly don’t know if he still does this, but back in the day, Silverstein didn’t just make objectifying jokes about women, he joked about raping them. He just didn’t kid about homosexuals, he joked about murdering them. This was the stuff that was new, this was what was supposed to be hip and edgy. And he claimed it was the character, but there was no effort in the writing to demonstrate that the character was an animal and an idiot. He apparently liked who the character was, was absolutely comfortable being that character. He didn’t editorialize, or make the comedy ultimately turn out to be at his own expense. He just said these things. And as had happened earlier with Archie Bunker, a scary mass public embraced him, thought he was the coolest. Andrew Dice Clay went with things like pro wrestling and hair metal and trash TV and radio shock jocks (which also throve in this culture). And at his peak, he FILLED STADIUMS, which is something that few comics even aspire to, because who else has done that? Steve Martin, sure, or those Comic Relief festivals where ALL the comedians performed. Andrew Dice Clay, by himself, filled Madison Square Garden — just like the German American Bund. If it seems ill-advised to compare a man named Silverstein to a Nazi, I didn’t do it without an internal struggle.

It’s good to have internal struggles. I see no evidence that the subject of today’s post has ever had any. He got big reactions and huge success from the public for his bad behavior, so he doubled down on it. Just like Trump and just like Fascists over the past century have done. And it’s the larger category of Fascists that I can compare his act to, not Nazis per se. A Nazi comedy act would punch down on Jews, and he obviously doesn’t do that. Just queers and women. For all of his supposed daring, I prefer the courage of someone like Nora Dunn, who boycotted the Saturday Night Live episode Silverstein hosted in 1990, at some risk to her career and reputation. That was a crucial year for Mr. Silverstein. That was when he starred in his very own feature length film The Adventures of Ford Fairlane — and it was pretty dreadul, so it tanked, for which I have always been grateful, for it proved to be a speed bump to the momentum of what was a unmitigatedly ugly pop culture phenomenon. He continued to put out comedy records and to host HBO specials, but most of us weren’t paying attention.

He’s in the midst of a comeback now, fueled by some success as an actor, and I must say I like him much better when he’s not “Dice”, whatever that is. The past decade or so has seen him give good performances in Woody Allen’sBlue Jasmine (2013), the Scorsese-directed pilot episode of Vinyl (2016), the 2018 remake of A Star is Born, and the series Pam and Tommy (2022) among other things. He got his own Showtime reality series (2016-17). As has always been the case, he’s more likable as himself, even more so now that he is somewhat flabby and old and vulnerable.

To the best of my knowledge he’s never condemned Trump, though, claiming to be apolitical. But as we’ve always known, there is no such thing when Fascism is on the rise. Ordinarily I’d say that you either defend the weak when they’re being attacked, or you’re a collaborator. But for the fact that he’s far worse than a collaborator. Oh!

For more about show business historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.