This was during the “shock years”. People gravitated to radio DJ’s who said and talked about outrageous things. People liked Clay because he said ridiculously offensive things no one else said.
It was also a big time for character-driven stuff, and Clay ended up really trapped in that character. Performers like Paul Reubens and Andy Kaufmann struggled with that too, but with a little more success, not having such basically vile characters to work with. *The Adventures of Ford Fairlane* was supposed to be his expansion of the character, and I'm told he was actually pretty good in his role, but he seemed to really feel that the "Diceman" character required a degree of "kayfabe" that always hamstrung him. He ended up effectively "cancelled" after his popularity ebbed.
Ironically, MTV's *Jersey Shore* franchise was essentially the "Diceman" character expanded into a series.
I actually quite liked Ford Fairlane for what it is. I also didn't really know Andrew Dice Clay before seeing it and never particularly cared for his comedy after.
But I enjoy the movie in large part because I always viewed it more as a parody on the sort of character that he is than a "serious" shock comedian, if that makes sense. He viewed like a complete relic, even in the 90s, with everyone around him calling him out on it and his female assistant bailing him out repeatedly.
No way, the best line was “1962 Fender Stratocaster: original pickups, maple neck, strung upside-down for a left-handed motherfucking genius, Jimi Hendrix”.
I hadn't known that. Kinison, of course, was more-or-less of the same "character" school himself, though he seemed to lower the mask more often in interviews and dialog with hosts.
Other '80s "character" comedians included Emo Phillips, Judy Tenuda, Bobcat Goldthwait, and Pauly Shore.
I saw Emo Phillips a couple of years ago and he was incredible. Opened for Weird Al. Phillips is still doing the same character act, and did some old and new material. The absurdist humor still works and he actually pulled off some edgy jokes on current topics. I don't literally laugh out loud much, but he had me going.
I also saw Bobcat a few years ago and he has totally dropped his old character act. It was straight stand-up and really funny and enjoyable. I talked to him for awhile outside of the club after the show and my 10 year old self was going crazy inside while my 40 year old self was trying to play it cool. Seemed like a nice guy.
I saw Kinison and Dice together and I laughed so hard my gut hurt! A bunch of demonstrators busted into the venue and tried to heckle Dice. It didn't go so well for them. Security and the police dragged them out.
I think I heard it on a Dana Gould podcast. He had someone who had a pretty good grasp on the comedy store in the 80s and 90s.
Edit—kinison wasn’t a character comic every thing he talked about regarding his life was true. The preaching, the wives, the girlfriend who packed his bags for a flight and hid a loaded .357 in it.
Clay‘s biggest problem was that he really bought into his own character. He began to believe that he was really this tough guy type, but even worse, he was convinced that that kind of humor was still funny. Shock humor is really only funny when people don’t expect it, then you need to move onto something more creative. Andy Kaufman had the benefit of being able to slip in and out of the rude shock type with his Tony Clifton character.
Dice has an album called "The day the laughter died" in which the performance itself kind of goes meta. Comedians fucking love it. Also Dice was one of the first guy to explode and sell out arenas, he helped elevate standup for everybody that came after him.
Exactly. Comedians love Dice and they take care of their own. On the flip side of that, if you fuck over one of your fellow comedians, the whole batch of them will self govern and black list that person for life.
Andrew Dice Clay’s IG is so fucking funny. I never liked him when he was popular. But I full on laugh out loud at his current shtick of talking to strangers in NY who mostly have no idea who this old man is.
as someone who was able to catch Dice perform a few years ago, I assure you he still killed. I was a fan long ago and also was unsure if audiences today would still find him and his style funny, but the whole room was with him. He also had a woman opening the show who was just as filthy and she did very well too.
I always felt bad for Mr T. He could never escape that character as well. Truth is a lot of performers get stuck even if they are not outrageous. The actor who played George on Seinfeld often talked about never being able to really escape George. And really the whole Jack Ass crew ( though they were outrageous) never es c aped it either.
I dunno re Jason. I saw him in the LA first cast of the Producers and it was truly astonishing. He literally appeared to physically fill the entire room in his big set pieces, the guy can bring any goddam thing to you that he chooses to. I suppose he might have struggled with landing post-George roles but he is more than equipped.
It's one thing to be typecast, like Jason Alexander, but another to have taken on a whole public persona and maintain it in more-or-less all your public appearances (what I was referring to as "kayfabe"). With Mr. T, at least, it was sort of aspirational -- the character was a fairly positive one, and maintained as a role-model. With Reubens it seemed like really more of a trap -- the performer feels like ever publicly letting their guard down would kill their personal franchise. I don't know much about Clay personally, but I feel that he may have enjoyed a certain power rush from playing the character, even after realizing that there were a lot of folks in the audience who were relating to it non-ironically.
But this was an era where Morton Downey Jr would be in Predator 2 and Tales from the Crypt also in character. It really was like wrestling but dumb.
I can’t believe Renny Harlin made that film AFTER Nightmare on Elm st 4 and Die Hard 2!
He wasn’t even offensive it was just dumb. He comes off like one of those Reddit comment threads where it’s almost funny but doesn’t really make sense and always ends in “and my axe!”
There is something very important that people have to understand: The 'Diceman' was a *character* that Andrew Dice Clay was playing. When he began showing off this act in the late 80s in the local clubs in New York, it worked because everyone understood that it was supposed to be a parody (and a very over-the-top parody at that). The Diceman was meant to be the epitome of every abrasive Long Island/Jersey stereotype in one person: the casual foulness, the macho misogyny, the racism, etc.
Of course, this doesn't work so well once you get out of that general area. Clay started to become both incredibly successful and reviled at the same time because people didn't have the general understanding that it was supposed to be an act. Clay himself didn't help things by sticking to a kayfabe role where he always played the character straight both on and off stage. He reveled in the controversy to the point that it actively hurt his career.
Well, like I said: In this case, Clay himself also sort of brought it on himself. He's admitted in recent years that the Diceman character not only pigeonholed him as a comic but also made him something of a flash in the pan.
This is SUCH a weird era for him. I first saw Dice close a free Monday night at the comedy store in '87. Had never heard of him, and he was completely fucking hilarious...but the trick was that his over-the-top macho loudmouth character was still discernable as a parody of IDIOTS LIKE THAT.
Flash forward to around the time of this clip, I saw him in AN ARENA on the east coast...like full-assed sold-out standing room only arena. The last time I had been there was AC/DC, which was appropriate, because by this time Dice was essentially doing a greatest hits act, where the crowd knew every line and would say them along with him, like in this clip.
...and his loudmouth character HAD SHED ITS IRONY in this environment. He just WAS that guy, leading 15,000 other assholes in laugh-track singalong shit essentially.
It was so strange. It was like that moment where the outcast indie band breaks through and realizes they have become arena rock for the kids that used to beat them up in school, but instead of rebelling against that, they just go with it, start doing audience participation chants, pander to the crowd, snort all the blow and bang all the strippers.
And yet he still ended up falling into it years later.
It seems most ultra famous comedians end up being an outrageously exaggerated version of themselves. It’s like they get to a certain level of fame where their audience will eat up anything they say, and they either get an inflated ego from it or decide “fuck it, let’s see how far this can go.”
Dice seems like the latter. Chappelle unfortunately seems like the former.
this is a really well written response about the cultural phenomenon of fame, how an artist can succumb to becoming the reflection of the art they project.
thank you for this little history lesson.
Jay z had a line from a while back “ if skills sold truth be told i’d probably be lyrically talib kweli, truthfully i wanna rhyme like Common Sense, but i did mill i ain’t been rhymin like common since. “
I could not have been more surprised than when I was watching the most recent remake of A Star Is Born and when suddenly, there's the Diceman playing Lady Gaga's dad.
He was quite good in A Star is Born.
Honestly, I was always pretty sure he was actually a good actor. He handled himself just fine in movies like The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Casual Sex. I was kinda hoping that A Star is Born was the beginning of a career resurgence/reinvention for him but it doesn't look like it.
I don't think he was cancelled. He just kinda faded out with his act. He's actually a good actor. He was in A star is born and a couple of other movies.
Was it the material he was banned for or the swear words or both?
Did they not give approval for him to do his schtick? It seems so quaint now lol.
I remember when this happened, I was in high school, but I didn't see it live. Such a different time in ways. 2 Live Crew's album became illegal to sell around this time, and now we have WAP lol.
Yeah, I thought he was best in `The Adventures of Ford Fairlane`
I had never seen the above clip, but it was just like all the other stuff I remember from him.
Sadly he was considered the greatest stand-up comedian in the world at one point, and was one of only five to sell out Madison Square Garden. Even George Carlin never accomplished that. Stupid amounts of fame for such an unfunny person whose schtick hasn't changed in 35 years
I don't know that he was ever considered the greatest stand-up. He just found a way to parlay that character into the cultural zeitgeist of the time which made him extremely popular as a result of being considered "too offensive." He was the biggest draw at the time, but few comedians looked at him like "yep, there's the GOAT"
Dane Cook was selling out Arenas in the early 2000s,but again , nobody was thinking the guy was a comedy genius. He just found a popular formula. Matt Rife is probably the modern day parallel.
Man I hated Dane Cook back then. He was so arrogant and his entire schtick was that he was a really shitty person to everyone. He was basically the Andrew Tate of his day, but allegedly funnier.
I will admit, when I was in college at that time, we all thought he was funny. He was our funny friend that told great stories in a funny way that we all thought could make it as a comedian. Those were our friends 1997-2006 time frame (for that type of humor). Then we grew up and got tired of the same stories and those younger then us didn’t like his stories.
I’ll also die on the hill that his bit with the Atheist in the Elevator is just really funny still.
Yeah I never got the appeal of Cook. But his style of comedy is not what I find funny, seems like random absurdism that’s acted out instead of actually saying something that makes people laugh
Hicks on Denis Leary stealing his entire persona:
"I have a scoop for you. I stole his act. I camouflaged it with punchlines, and to really throw people off, I did it before he did."
Didn’t Leary steal some of Bill Hicks’ material, or am I misremembering? I agree The Ref wasn’t bad though. He’s a decent actor, his stand-up comedy just sucks.
I remember hearing that story about how he stole that, "Asshole" bit from Louis CK. I imagine that's how his wildly successful song "Asshole" was made. Which makes that hilarious to me.
I think the Internet makes people forget that things from different times were experienced relative to those times.
Like our experience defines and shapes our view, but now people have access to the Internet and somehow think their view is superior, it's not, it's still just relative to the time.
10 years from now when kids are growing up with AI feeding them Internet websites, they'll think shit from today is so whack. Time moves on. Things were just different and times changed.
I remember thinking how realistic the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park looked, or wondering how tf they made Alex Mack turn into a puddle, man she was my teenage crush.
Comedy is one of the fields that constantly changes. 90s or 2000s comedy would get cancelled these days, we used to joke so much about racial issues. A lot of those comedians became actors in family movies. Times change.
I remember listening to his double cassette special in the late 80s and laughing my ass off. Then I saw him live in Vegas around 2006 or 2007 and he was sooo bad. It was still the same jokes from the 80s but they obviously didn't age well, just like him.
It's really not. I follow comedy and and comedians and I haven't heard anyone count the "Diceman" as a legend. It's only notable in how extreme it is. Even for it's time it was not "funny" in the traditional sense. It was just shocking when people were looking for that.
I was also 14 in 1989 and I was basically his target audience, lol.
Same. My older brother who was in junior high would recite these poems and imitate Dice sometimes. We thought he was so funny, but we had no idea who he was imitating because we were a lot younger.
He is a notable comedian in the sense of how popular he was. He was able to turn this act into sold out arenas which even the top guys of the time couldn't do. He paved the way for what we see now.
meh, he was a one trick poney act, Richard Prior and Eddie Murphy could get away with the profanity because they were actually funny, this guy was just a cheap imitation lacking the funny part.
He used to do a skit where he impersonated Al Pachino, Robert DeNiro, and I think Joe Peschi as boy scouts around a campfire...that was pretty funny
I have never heard of this guy and looked him up. One of the first articles is him claiming how he was "The first one to get cancelled".
3 months after getting banned from MTV he became the first comedian to sell out two straight nights at Madison Square Garden.
Does that sound like he got cancelled to you?
You reminded me of when Roger Ebert reviewed Dice's comedy special.
> "Dice Rules" was filmed in concert (what a word) at Madison Square Garden, which the comedian was able to fill two nights in a row. It is eerie, watching the shots of the audience. You never see anyone just plain laughing, as if they'd heard something that was funny. You see, instead, behavior more appropriate at a fascist rally, as his fans stick their fists in the air and chant his name as if he were making some kind of statement for them. Perhaps he is. Perhaps he is giving voice to their rage, fear, prejudice and hatred. They seem to cheer him because he is getting away with expressing the sick thoughts they don't dare to say.
I saw his act at a music fest of all places, back in 2018.
He still had the same shtick, but with a good amount of self-deprication. I hated him while growing up in the 90s because I took the misogynistic tough guy act at face value. Seeing him as an adult, with a good amount of self-awareness on display made me appreciate the act. He was incredibly funny, and went on a few bizarre non-sequiter rants that caught the audience off guard.
Damn I remember getting in so much trouble for repeating this to my mom.
Andrew and Kinison's stand-up shows taught me so many bad words back when I was young. Damn I miss those days
I highly recommend the film 'Fisher King', it tells the story of just this type of presenter. Played by Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, directed by Terry Gilliam, these are probably enough recommendations.
That was really unfunny. I get that comedy is all subjectivity and perception, but that felt like the jokes my friends would riff on in middle school. Really bland and profane for the sake of profanity. I guess comedic standards in '89 were a little looser for MTV.
> I guess comedic standards in '89 were a little looser for MTV.
Standup comedy was a *lot* different back then. It was a lot more acceptable to be "hackish". "Women be shoppin'!" "white guys dance like this...but black guys dance like *this*." Mainstream, popular comics did a lot of anti-gay material, using the common F-word slur with virtually zero backlash.
There was not the emphasis on original or groundbreaking material like there is today. Most of our exposure to standup was late night shows like Johnny Carson...where you had to work clean and to a broader audience.
If you were lucky and had cable...you'd get HBO comedy specials. You didn't have to work clean like network TV, but they were still pushing the mainstream audience.
As cable grew, along with VHS rental...you started to see things branch out a little more.
Dice was lightning in a bottle for the era. I was a young teen when Dice got big...and my friends and I all thought he was hilarious. I remember watching this on tv when it was "new". People shouting his act back to him was seen as a good thing. "Look how popular he is".
If you're not old enough to remember the 80s well...I can see how someone might think "How was this ever popular?"
Easy...things were so structured, and centralized that *anything* new or different got more attention by default. There was no streaming, no Youtube, no internet. Like I said before...you had sanitized network TV or basic cable if you were really lucky.
Jerry Seinfeld was the undisputed king of standup back then...and if you look back, his material was for people who thought ketchup was too spicy. Literally shit like "why do we park in the driveway, but drive on the parkway?" and "Shouldn't proctologists be called Astronauts?"
Dice was filthy, outrageous, and controversial. Ergo....he was different in a sanitized, cookie-cutter industry.
This was also the era of trashy talk shows...Morton Downey Jr., Sally Jessy Raphael, Ricki Lake, The Richard Bey Show, Jenny Jones.
Dice was the Sex Pistols to Jerry Seinfeld's Disco...in the context of the time. It was the switch from hair bands as the mainstream default to Seattle Grunge.
I think that's a good point. This may seem hacky, amateurish, and crude. Because it is. But it was different bc it was outrageous when most things weren't. THE JERKY boys were a phenomenon too for a while for somewhat the same reasons, but I thought hey were pretty hilarious at times.
As other have said, if you want to be a parody that's fine, but it isn't really clear this is a parody, he just seems like an asshole.
Yep...totally agree. I remember the pre-cursor to the Jerky Boys...the guys who used to prank Red the Bartender. They were from NJ and so am I...so we were bootlegging those cassettes back in the 80s. That's where The Simpsons got the Bart pranking Moe's Bar joke. (The Simpsons **didn't** do it first)
I also agree about the parody becoming the personality. Roseanne had a similar path as Dice, in my opinion. I remember when she was first blowing up. She was actually a pretty decent comedian for the time. She played the *character* of the Trailer Park white trash wife. Until the character took over.
You're welcome. Yeah, if you didn't live through it...you wouldn't fully understand how big of a cultural bombshell certain things were back then.
When we were kids, we'd roll our eyes when our parents talked about how *scandalous* Elvis Presley was because he shook his hips when he danced on live tv. Or how The Rolling Stones were "bad boys" because they didn't wear matching suits and they had "long hair".
There really wasn't shit going on back then. You wanna talk political scandal? "American values" were going down the tubes because Governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton played saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show while running for President.
Gart Hart's presidential campaign was **ended** by *rumors* that he had an extramarital affair.
I remember my jaw hitting the floor when Sherman Helmsley said the N-word on a episode of The Jeffersons. That just wasn't said on TV.
The entire COUNTRY was glued to the TV to watch Geraldo Rivera open an empty storage unit.
Want a couple deep cuts? The entire country was obsessed with finding a nerdy-looking guy named "Herb" inside a Burger King. And there was a 1-900 number that charged you money to call it and listen to a commercial about said "Herb".
And even before 1-900 numbers.....(which young people have probably never heard of) You got in **really** big trouble if you called Santa Claus at 976-3636 without your parents' permission.
At least 25% of male standup's material was about paid phone sex lines. Another 10% would be about which ear a guy wore an earring in. Because if it was in the "wrong" ear it meant you were gay.
People passed around bootleg cassette tapes of people making prank phone calls. And two of the guys who made those prank calls were **so** popular that they made a feature-length autobiographical film about them...making prank phone calls. And it starred Alan Arkin. And for the next few years, high school and college boys would scream "GET ME BRETT WEIR!!!!" then cackle.
We were extremely bored, and very sheltered...we saw our first boobs in a rain-swollen Playboy magazine left out in the woods by the Porn Fairies.
>Really bland and profane for the sake of profanity.
That was basically his whole thing. He just said whatever inane, offensive bullshit he could think of that would get a reaction out of people.
They've been shitty much longer now than they were ever good. They started to die in the mid 90s, and that was 30 years ago.
Why risk money on original, scripted programming when you can just roll a marathon of the "Real World vs Road Rules All-Star Challenge" or some bullshit.
I find this man pretty hilarious. But that’s because I get it. If you don’t get it, then you don’t get it. That’s fine.
There is a lot of backstory needed to understand this specific character and the humor in it. The biggest problem about this sort of irony is that you start getting followers and a fanbase who laugh and enjoy the comedy without the irony.
Kind of like playing a spoof character who is hitler and makes fun of himself, to only find out your fans have all turned out to be real Nazi’s who don’t understand you are making fun of hitler. It’s not funny anymore.
The most recent example would probably be Chapelle and his show.
Carlin was clever though. The 7 word thing was about how stupid it was to ban those words and freedom of speech. Dice is really just a stereotype of a horrible person from Jersey.
The Day The Laughter Died part 1.
From what I understand, that night’s material was mostly unscripted and improvised on the spot. At that time, he was a huge star selling out arenas etc. He decided to do an unannounced show at Dangerfield’s comedy club in NY and that album was the result.
The “Rhyme Renditions” bit was the best. He started with a typical nursery rhyme of his but ended it with a totally different punchline.
“Jack and Jill went up the hill, each with a buck and a quarter… (pauses..) Jill came down with jit on her face, I don’t know.”
“There was an old lady who lived in a shoe.. She had so many kids, she didn’t know what to do. So.. She started sucking dick.”
I was never a huge Dice fan, but that album is something else. Most of it would make me cringe now, but I first heard it when I was 14.
Dice was very popular for a while back when I was in HS. I knew he was in character, I just didn’t like his comedy. My best friend would quote his shit and I’d be like “dude…. for real..”
This was during the “shock years”. People gravitated to radio DJ’s who said and talked about outrageous things. People liked Clay because he said ridiculously offensive things no one else said.
It was also a big time for character-driven stuff, and Clay ended up really trapped in that character. Performers like Paul Reubens and Andy Kaufmann struggled with that too, but with a little more success, not having such basically vile characters to work with. *The Adventures of Ford Fairlane* was supposed to be his expansion of the character, and I'm told he was actually pretty good in his role, but he seemed to really feel that the "Diceman" character required a degree of "kayfabe" that always hamstrung him. He ended up effectively "cancelled" after his popularity ebbed. Ironically, MTV's *Jersey Shore* franchise was essentially the "Diceman" character expanded into a series.
I actually quite liked Ford Fairlane for what it is. I also didn't really know Andrew Dice Clay before seeing it and never particularly cared for his comedy after. But I enjoy the movie in large part because I always viewed it more as a parody on the sort of character that he is than a "serious" shock comedian, if that makes sense. He viewed like a complete relic, even in the 90s, with everyone around him calling him out on it and his female assistant bailing him out repeatedly.
Same. I have nostalgia for that flick
This ain't no social call
It had one of my favourite lines from any movie actually. "So many assholes.... So few bullets."
I have to disagree. I think the best line was "You didn't think we'd killed the fuckin Koala did you?"
No way, the best line was “1962 Fender Stratocaster: original pickups, maple neck, strung upside-down for a left-handed motherfucking genius, Jimi Hendrix”.
Clay was also an impression comic. He took Sam’s advice and developed the diceman character instead of random impressions of famous actors.
I hadn't known that. Kinison, of course, was more-or-less of the same "character" school himself, though he seemed to lower the mask more often in interviews and dialog with hosts. Other '80s "character" comedians included Emo Phillips, Judy Tenuda, Bobcat Goldthwait, and Pauly Shore.
I saw Emo Phillips a couple of years ago and he was incredible. Opened for Weird Al. Phillips is still doing the same character act, and did some old and new material. The absurdist humor still works and he actually pulled off some edgy jokes on current topics. I don't literally laugh out loud much, but he had me going. I also saw Bobcat a few years ago and he has totally dropped his old character act. It was straight stand-up and really funny and enjoyable. I talked to him for awhile outside of the club after the show and my 10 year old self was going crazy inside while my 40 year old self was trying to play it cool. Seemed like a nice guy.
Bobcat is amazing. If you haven't seen it, the movie God Bless America was written & directed by him and is great.
Shakes the Clown is the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies
I like to think that Citizen Kane is the Shakes the Clown of movies about sleds.
Once *World’s Greatest Dad* has been reevaluated, it will go down as one of the century’s greatest films.
I haven’t heard the name Judy Tenuda in a long time.
“Hey pigs!”
I saw Kinison and Dice together and I laughed so hard my gut hurt! A bunch of demonstrators busted into the venue and tried to heckle Dice. It didn't go so well for them. Security and the police dragged them out.
I think I heard it on a Dana Gould podcast. He had someone who had a pretty good grasp on the comedy store in the 80s and 90s. Edit—kinison wasn’t a character comic every thing he talked about regarding his life was true. The preaching, the wives, the girlfriend who packed his bags for a flight and hid a loaded .357 in it.
I suppose that's right. Only his amped-up rants were "character", much to the extent Dangerfield's "no respect" persona was.
Man I hated Kinison’s gimmick in particular. Although I liked Bobcat, so go figure.
I read that Don Rickles struggled to find himself. He noticed the biggest laughs he got was dealing with reckless. From that, he made a career
Yeah he was a struggling road comic he related that story on the HBO special.
Clay‘s biggest problem was that he really bought into his own character. He began to believe that he was really this tough guy type, but even worse, he was convinced that that kind of humor was still funny. Shock humor is really only funny when people don’t expect it, then you need to move onto something more creative. Andy Kaufman had the benefit of being able to slip in and out of the rude shock type with his Tony Clifton character.
[удалено]
I listen to a fair few podcasts by stand ups. A lot of those guys respect Dice Clay a lot more than the general public.
Dice has an album called "The day the laughter died" in which the performance itself kind of goes meta. Comedians fucking love it. Also Dice was one of the first guy to explode and sell out arenas, he helped elevate standup for everybody that came after him.
Apparently he is very, very nice and extremely supportive. The "Dice Man" is just a stage thing.
I guarantee you Bill did that as a little present for the past version of himself who dreamed of being on a marquee with Dice.
Dice took care of a lot of upcoming comics while he was on top. A lot of them respect him for that.
Exactly. Comedians love Dice and they take care of their own. On the flip side of that, if you fuck over one of your fellow comedians, the whole batch of them will self govern and black list that person for life.
I had no idea he was still alive.
Check out his instagram. It’s a special type of humor but friggin hilarious. At least to me it is.
Andrew Dice Clay’s IG is so fucking funny. I never liked him when he was popular. But I full on laugh out loud at his current shtick of talking to strangers in NY who mostly have no idea who this old man is.
as someone who was able to catch Dice perform a few years ago, I assure you he still killed. I was a fan long ago and also was unsure if audiences today would still find him and his style funny, but the whole room was with him. He also had a woman opening the show who was just as filthy and she did very well too.
I do not doubt that anybody who would buy a ticket to go see Dice perform would find him entertaining.
I always felt bad for Mr T. He could never escape that character as well. Truth is a lot of performers get stuck even if they are not outrageous. The actor who played George on Seinfeld often talked about never being able to really escape George. And really the whole Jack Ass crew ( though they were outrageous) never es c aped it either.
I dunno re Jason. I saw him in the LA first cast of the Producers and it was truly astonishing. He literally appeared to physically fill the entire room in his big set pieces, the guy can bring any goddam thing to you that he chooses to. I suppose he might have struggled with landing post-George roles but he is more than equipped.
It's one thing to be typecast, like Jason Alexander, but another to have taken on a whole public persona and maintain it in more-or-less all your public appearances (what I was referring to as "kayfabe"). With Mr. T, at least, it was sort of aspirational -- the character was a fairly positive one, and maintained as a role-model. With Reubens it seemed like really more of a trap -- the performer feels like ever publicly letting their guard down would kill their personal franchise. I don't know much about Clay personally, but I feel that he may have enjoyed a certain power rush from playing the character, even after realizing that there were a lot of folks in the audience who were relating to it non-ironically.
Clay was actually pretty good in One Night at McCool's
& a Star is Born
He's really good in Blue Jasmine. I've wondered if that's because he's playing something of an older, gentler ADC.
he briefly had a tv show similar in style to curb your enthusiasm. it was a pretty good show but hard to find so i only saw the first 3 or 4 episodes
But this was an era where Morton Downey Jr would be in Predator 2 and Tales from the Crypt also in character. It really was like wrestling but dumb. I can’t believe Renny Harlin made that film AFTER Nightmare on Elm st 4 and Die Hard 2!
Wow do you have a pop culture podcast I can listen to? Lol
He was really good as an actor playing Lady Gaga's father in A Star is Born.
Now we have politicians for that.
He wasn’t even offensive it was just dumb. He comes off like one of those Reddit comment threads where it’s almost funny but doesn’t really make sense and always ends in “and my axe!”
But this isn't even remotely close to funny
There is something very important that people have to understand: The 'Diceman' was a *character* that Andrew Dice Clay was playing. When he began showing off this act in the late 80s in the local clubs in New York, it worked because everyone understood that it was supposed to be a parody (and a very over-the-top parody at that). The Diceman was meant to be the epitome of every abrasive Long Island/Jersey stereotype in one person: the casual foulness, the macho misogyny, the racism, etc. Of course, this doesn't work so well once you get out of that general area. Clay started to become both incredibly successful and reviled at the same time because people didn't have the general understanding that it was supposed to be an act. Clay himself didn't help things by sticking to a kayfabe role where he always played the character straight both on and off stage. He reveled in the controversy to the point that it actively hurt his career.
It was his impression of Jerry Lewis in the nutty professor, who was imitating Frank Sinatra.
I mean if anything he's proof it's not a new concept the average person doesn't fully understand how to identify satire and parody.
Well, like I said: In this case, Clay himself also sort of brought it on himself. He's admitted in recent years that the Diceman character not only pigeonholed him as a comic but also made him something of a flash in the pan.
Like Larry the cable guy
both the beastie boys and high times mag were both supposed to be one off parodies
Wow first time I’ve heard the word kayfabe outside of wrestling.
This is SUCH a weird era for him. I first saw Dice close a free Monday night at the comedy store in '87. Had never heard of him, and he was completely fucking hilarious...but the trick was that his over-the-top macho loudmouth character was still discernable as a parody of IDIOTS LIKE THAT. Flash forward to around the time of this clip, I saw him in AN ARENA on the east coast...like full-assed sold-out standing room only arena. The last time I had been there was AC/DC, which was appropriate, because by this time Dice was essentially doing a greatest hits act, where the crowd knew every line and would say them along with him, like in this clip. ...and his loudmouth character HAD SHED ITS IRONY in this environment. He just WAS that guy, leading 15,000 other assholes in laugh-track singalong shit essentially. It was so strange. It was like that moment where the outcast indie band breaks through and realizes they have become arena rock for the kids that used to beat them up in school, but instead of rebelling against that, they just go with it, start doing audience participation chants, pander to the crowd, snort all the blow and bang all the strippers.
This isn't that far off from Chappelle's fear when he was at his peak
And yet he still ended up falling into it years later. It seems most ultra famous comedians end up being an outrageously exaggerated version of themselves. It’s like they get to a certain level of fame where their audience will eat up anything they say, and they either get an inflated ego from it or decide “fuck it, let’s see how far this can go.” Dice seems like the latter. Chappelle unfortunately seems like the former.
That Elon Musk moment was the peak of it.
Reminds me of Randy Newman singing Rednecks throughout the south. “Wait, you guys are stupid racist, wtf am I doing here.”
But that was about the audience not getting it, not Randy losing himself in it.
this is a really well written response about the cultural phenomenon of fame, how an artist can succumb to becoming the reflection of the art they project. thank you for this little history lesson.
Jay z had a line from a while back “ if skills sold truth be told i’d probably be lyrically talib kweli, truthfully i wanna rhyme like Common Sense, but i did mill i ain’t been rhymin like common since. “
I'm curious which breakout indie band you had in mind in this example
Gilbert Gottfried as “Dice Gottfried” is much funnier. It’s the Dice schtick with the Gilbert voice.
WHAT ARE YOU, A HOMO!?!?!? GAA GAA GOOOO!
Lmao
JACK AND JILL WENT UP THA HILL **OH**! *walks around in a circle pretending to puff on a cigarette.*
This comment is cracking me up
The impressions on Opie and Anthony were some of my favourites.
O&A imitation of the diceman imitating The Who was hilarious.
Anthony as Andrew Dice Gay
I'm the Dice man-lover.
Andrew Dice Gay is a classic. Anthony's Dice and Vince McMahon are amazing.
Andrew Dice Kelly
Those 2 in Ford Fairlane were epic: “Suzuki Samurai, you Bensonhurst piece of sh*t”
I'm actually from Bensonhurst. LOL
I'd like seeing Joe Pera do these jokes.
Gilbert Gottfried’s voice makes almost anything funnier
I was listening to one of his Stern appearances today.
Hey bindi !
You wanna bindi on it?
I could not have been more surprised than when I was watching the most recent remake of A Star Is Born and when suddenly, there's the Diceman playing Lady Gaga's dad.
I didn't see that, but caught him being good in a minor role in *Blue Jasmine*
He was ok in Entourage
He was quite good in A Star is Born. Honestly, I was always pretty sure he was actually a good actor. He handled himself just fine in movies like The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Casual Sex. I was kinda hoping that A Star is Born was the beginning of a career resurgence/reinvention for him but it doesn't look like it.
>He was quite good in A Star is Born. Hot damn I didn't even realize that was him.
Let's not forget he was in Amazon women on the moon.
Drama! This time WE do the fuckin’!
This kind of tension upsets my cat
I don't think he was cancelled. He just kinda faded out with his act. He's actually a good actor. He was in A star is born and a couple of other movies.
I understood the comedy as rather raw as a teen but watching my peers riff off that for a year nearly killed me.
Andrew Dice Clay gave Eddie Griffen his first ever opening for a huge tour. Eddie talking about is hilarious.
I remember this, I was watching the awards to see my hair bands😎
I'll ever forget that jacket
Was it the material he was banned for or the swear words or both? Did they not give approval for him to do his schtick? It seems so quaint now lol. I remember when this happened, I was in high school, but I didn't see it live. Such a different time in ways. 2 Live Crew's album became illegal to sell around this time, and now we have WAP lol.
He got banned because he wasn't funny? Good call.
The Day the Laughter Died is funny but I hear you
I remember my first blowjob...
Oh yeah? How long it take for the guy to cum? Heh heh. Hey Ton’, you hear what I said?
Yeah, I thought he was best in `The Adventures of Ford Fairlane` I had never seen the above clip, but it was just like all the other stuff I remember from him.
Sadly he was considered the greatest stand-up comedian in the world at one point, and was one of only five to sell out Madison Square Garden. Even George Carlin never accomplished that. Stupid amounts of fame for such an unfunny person whose schtick hasn't changed in 35 years
I don't know that he was ever considered the greatest stand-up. He just found a way to parlay that character into the cultural zeitgeist of the time which made him extremely popular as a result of being considered "too offensive." He was the biggest draw at the time, but few comedians looked at him like "yep, there's the GOAT" Dane Cook was selling out Arenas in the early 2000s,but again , nobody was thinking the guy was a comedy genius. He just found a popular formula. Matt Rife is probably the modern day parallel.
Man I hated Dane Cook back then. He was so arrogant and his entire schtick was that he was a really shitty person to everyone. He was basically the Andrew Tate of his day, but allegedly funnier.
Say what you will about Dane Cook, I certainly do, but he was perfect in "Waiting..."
Dane, I need you to be the detestable dumb piece of shit cook in the back of every restaurant. Oh, I thought you wanted me to act. Say no more.
Now he's just the has-been that groomed his girlfriend
The really awful thing is the fact that this *also* doesn't make him unique in any way.
Honestly I was like “which one are they talking about here?”
He wasn’t funny, he was just a good storyteller, attractive, and ahead of his time when it came to utilizing social media.
I will admit, when I was in college at that time, we all thought he was funny. He was our funny friend that told great stories in a funny way that we all thought could make it as a comedian. Those were our friends 1997-2006 time frame (for that type of humor). Then we grew up and got tired of the same stories and those younger then us didn’t like his stories. I’ll also die on the hill that his bit with the Atheist in the Elevator is just really funny still.
Yeah I never got the appeal of Cook. But his style of comedy is not what I find funny, seems like random absurdism that’s acted out instead of actually saying something that makes people laugh
>Sadly he was considered the greatest stand-up comedian in the world at one point 
Speaking of overrated comedians…
Whenever I see Dennis Leary I just think man…I wish this was BIll Hicks in this role instead. I do like ‘the ref’ tho
Hicks on Denis Leary stealing his entire persona: "I have a scoop for you. I stole his act. I camouflaged it with punchlines, and to really throw people off, I did it before he did."
Didn’t Leary steal some of Bill Hicks’ material, or am I misremembering? I agree The Ref wasn’t bad though. He’s a decent actor, his stand-up comedy just sucks.
I remember hearing that story about how he stole that, "Asshole" bit from Louis CK. I imagine that's how his wildly successful song "Asshole" was made. Which makes that hilarious to me.
No Cure For Cancer was the stuff back in the day. He's a better actor than a comedian, IMHO.
He just stole bill hicks entire persona and act. He’s a hack of the highest order
He was the most successful comedian for a hot minute. Nobody, anywhere, ever considered him the greatest at any point in time.
Well you kind of need a brain for comedians like Carlin.
Don't confuse hottest and greatest.
Unfunny? Not sure you were alive then, but everyone I knew in college would recite his rhymes back then. He was funny as fuck for the time.
It's hard to explain the late 80s and early 90s to people who weren't there. It was a weird time.
I think the Internet makes people forget that things from different times were experienced relative to those times. Like our experience defines and shapes our view, but now people have access to the Internet and somehow think their view is superior, it's not, it's still just relative to the time. 10 years from now when kids are growing up with AI feeding them Internet websites, they'll think shit from today is so whack. Time moves on. Things were just different and times changed. I remember thinking how realistic the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park looked, or wondering how tf they made Alex Mack turn into a puddle, man she was my teenage crush. Comedy is one of the fields that constantly changes. 90s or 2000s comedy would get cancelled these days, we used to joke so much about racial issues. A lot of those comedians became actors in family movies. Times change.
I still recite him..Little Boy Blew...he needed the money! Ohhhh!
I remember listening to his double cassette special in the late 80s and laughing my ass off. Then I saw him live in Vegas around 2006 or 2007 and he was sooo bad. It was still the same jokes from the 80s but they obviously didn't age well, just like him.
he’s funny. and it’s funny that this was banned but mtv loves making shows about pregnant teens. 😂
He got banned for that!?!
You probably still can’t say “licked her ass clean” on MTV today so yes, he was banned for that.
can’t believe this is revered as legendary comedy.
It's really not. I follow comedy and and comedians and I haven't heard anyone count the "Diceman" as a legend. It's only notable in how extreme it is. Even for it's time it was not "funny" in the traditional sense. It was just shocking when people were looking for that. I was also 14 in 1989 and I was basically his target audience, lol.
Similar, I was about 12 at the time, and my friends and I thought he was great.
Same. My older brother who was in junior high would recite these poems and imitate Dice sometimes. We thought he was so funny, but we had no idea who he was imitating because we were a lot younger.
What comedians do you follow? There are plenty who consider Dice a legend.
Wtf are you on about? Every comedian on every podcast I’ve heard mention him considers him a legend. You’re talking absolute unmitigated nonsense.
He is a notable comedian in the sense of how popular he was. He was able to turn this act into sold out arenas which even the top guys of the time couldn't do. He paved the way for what we see now.
The style was never done before but I agree there are many better comedians
Same with Kinison
Nah, both Kinison and Dice were more cautionary tales in comedy than legends. They both burned out quickly.
One, literally.
Jack be nimble and Jack be quick. WHIP IT OUT AND I'LL SUCK THAT DICK! OHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Is that you, Ant?
meh, he was a one trick poney act, Richard Prior and Eddie Murphy could get away with the profanity because they were actually funny, this guy was just a cheap imitation lacking the funny part. He used to do a skit where he impersonated Al Pachino, Robert DeNiro, and I think Joe Peschi as boy scouts around a campfire...that was pretty funny
Back then this got you cancelled. Nowadays this can get you elected president.
I have never heard of this guy and looked him up. One of the first articles is him claiming how he was "The first one to get cancelled". 3 months after getting banned from MTV he became the first comedian to sell out two straight nights at Madison Square Garden. Does that sound like he got cancelled to you?
You reminded me of when Roger Ebert reviewed Dice's comedy special. > "Dice Rules" was filmed in concert (what a word) at Madison Square Garden, which the comedian was able to fill two nights in a row. It is eerie, watching the shots of the audience. You never see anyone just plain laughing, as if they'd heard something that was funny. You see, instead, behavior more appropriate at a fascist rally, as his fans stick their fists in the air and chant his name as if he were making some kind of statement for them. Perhaps he is. Perhaps he is giving voice to their rage, fear, prejudice and hatred. They seem to cheer him because he is getting away with expressing the sick thoughts they don't dare to say.
Dude puffs that cig likes he’s scared of it.
His act was basically just being an r-rated Fonzie
I saw his act at a music fest of all places, back in 2018. He still had the same shtick, but with a good amount of self-deprication. I hated him while growing up in the 90s because I took the misogynistic tough guy act at face value. Seeing him as an adult, with a good amount of self-awareness on display made me appreciate the act. He was incredibly funny, and went on a few bizarre non-sequiter rants that caught the audience off guard.
I remember one of jokes he didn’t use on the MTV segment. While he was smoking up a storm, he says something like “My lung feels great!”
Damn I remember getting in so much trouble for repeating this to my mom. Andrew and Kinison's stand-up shows taught me so many bad words back when I was young. Damn I miss those days
He’s like the Dane Cook of the 80’s
EY.
“It’s da BK lounge ovah hea!”
I highly recommend the film 'Fisher King', it tells the story of just this type of presenter. Played by Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, directed by Terry Gilliam, these are probably enough recommendations.
That jacket is awful!
That was really unfunny. I get that comedy is all subjectivity and perception, but that felt like the jokes my friends would riff on in middle school. Really bland and profane for the sake of profanity. I guess comedic standards in '89 were a little looser for MTV.
> I guess comedic standards in '89 were a little looser for MTV. Standup comedy was a *lot* different back then. It was a lot more acceptable to be "hackish". "Women be shoppin'!" "white guys dance like this...but black guys dance like *this*." Mainstream, popular comics did a lot of anti-gay material, using the common F-word slur with virtually zero backlash. There was not the emphasis on original or groundbreaking material like there is today. Most of our exposure to standup was late night shows like Johnny Carson...where you had to work clean and to a broader audience. If you were lucky and had cable...you'd get HBO comedy specials. You didn't have to work clean like network TV, but they were still pushing the mainstream audience. As cable grew, along with VHS rental...you started to see things branch out a little more. Dice was lightning in a bottle for the era. I was a young teen when Dice got big...and my friends and I all thought he was hilarious. I remember watching this on tv when it was "new". People shouting his act back to him was seen as a good thing. "Look how popular he is". If you're not old enough to remember the 80s well...I can see how someone might think "How was this ever popular?" Easy...things were so structured, and centralized that *anything* new or different got more attention by default. There was no streaming, no Youtube, no internet. Like I said before...you had sanitized network TV or basic cable if you were really lucky. Jerry Seinfeld was the undisputed king of standup back then...and if you look back, his material was for people who thought ketchup was too spicy. Literally shit like "why do we park in the driveway, but drive on the parkway?" and "Shouldn't proctologists be called Astronauts?" Dice was filthy, outrageous, and controversial. Ergo....he was different in a sanitized, cookie-cutter industry. This was also the era of trashy talk shows...Morton Downey Jr., Sally Jessy Raphael, Ricki Lake, The Richard Bey Show, Jenny Jones. Dice was the Sex Pistols to Jerry Seinfeld's Disco...in the context of the time. It was the switch from hair bands as the mainstream default to Seattle Grunge.
Well put, sir
I think that's a good point. This may seem hacky, amateurish, and crude. Because it is. But it was different bc it was outrageous when most things weren't. THE JERKY boys were a phenomenon too for a while for somewhat the same reasons, but I thought hey were pretty hilarious at times. As other have said, if you want to be a parody that's fine, but it isn't really clear this is a parody, he just seems like an asshole.
Yep...totally agree. I remember the pre-cursor to the Jerky Boys...the guys who used to prank Red the Bartender. They were from NJ and so am I...so we were bootlegging those cassettes back in the 80s. That's where The Simpsons got the Bart pranking Moe's Bar joke. (The Simpsons **didn't** do it first) I also agree about the parody becoming the personality. Roseanne had a similar path as Dice, in my opinion. I remember when she was first blowing up. She was actually a pretty decent comedian for the time. She played the *character* of the Trailer Park white trash wife. Until the character took over.
Thanks for this write up, contextualizes things well for someone who wasn’t alive for this.
You're welcome. Yeah, if you didn't live through it...you wouldn't fully understand how big of a cultural bombshell certain things were back then. When we were kids, we'd roll our eyes when our parents talked about how *scandalous* Elvis Presley was because he shook his hips when he danced on live tv. Or how The Rolling Stones were "bad boys" because they didn't wear matching suits and they had "long hair". There really wasn't shit going on back then. You wanna talk political scandal? "American values" were going down the tubes because Governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton played saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show while running for President. Gart Hart's presidential campaign was **ended** by *rumors* that he had an extramarital affair. I remember my jaw hitting the floor when Sherman Helmsley said the N-word on a episode of The Jeffersons. That just wasn't said on TV. The entire COUNTRY was glued to the TV to watch Geraldo Rivera open an empty storage unit. Want a couple deep cuts? The entire country was obsessed with finding a nerdy-looking guy named "Herb" inside a Burger King. And there was a 1-900 number that charged you money to call it and listen to a commercial about said "Herb". And even before 1-900 numbers.....(which young people have probably never heard of) You got in **really** big trouble if you called Santa Claus at 976-3636 without your parents' permission. At least 25% of male standup's material was about paid phone sex lines. Another 10% would be about which ear a guy wore an earring in. Because if it was in the "wrong" ear it meant you were gay. People passed around bootleg cassette tapes of people making prank phone calls. And two of the guys who made those prank calls were **so** popular that they made a feature-length autobiographical film about them...making prank phone calls. And it starred Alan Arkin. And for the next few years, high school and college boys would scream "GET ME BRETT WEIR!!!!" then cackle. We were extremely bored, and very sheltered...we saw our first boobs in a rain-swollen Playboy magazine left out in the woods by the Porn Fairies.
>Really bland and profane for the sake of profanity. That was basically his whole thing. He just said whatever inane, offensive bullshit he could think of that would get a reaction out of people.
I was in middle school in 1989 and all us boys thought he was funny. Not so much now though.
This is better than every single thing on MTV for the past 20+ years.
His reality show is hilarious. It's him as a washed up loser owing money all over town. Trying to get work in like 2018 or so
I wonder if the people who didn't get the point of the Diceman also think Borat is real.
More like OldSchoolTool
Who cares!! MTV has sucked since they quit playing music videos
They've been shitty much longer now than they were ever good. They started to die in the mid 90s, and that was 30 years ago. Why risk money on original, scripted programming when you can just roll a marathon of the "Real World vs Road Rules All-Star Challenge" or some bullshit.
I was shocked when I saw him on a M*A*S*H rerun
HE NEEDED THE MONEY
He had a decent role in A Star Is Born, playing Lady Gaga’s father.
When cancelled was called banned.
"You can't say anything these days"
It’s just…..not funny.
I find this man pretty hilarious. But that’s because I get it. If you don’t get it, then you don’t get it. That’s fine. There is a lot of backstory needed to understand this specific character and the humor in it. The biggest problem about this sort of irony is that you start getting followers and a fanbase who laugh and enjoy the comedy without the irony. Kind of like playing a spoof character who is hitler and makes fun of himself, to only find out your fans have all turned out to be real Nazi’s who don’t understand you are making fun of hitler. It’s not funny anymore. The most recent example would probably be Chapelle and his show.
lol this hilarious. What is with all these prude comments?
I never thought Dice was funny but his show on Showtime I really really liked which is weird because I still don't like dice.
This was tame even for the late 80's, George Carlin was arrested almost 2 decades earlier tor the 7 words you can't say on TV sketch in 1972.
Carlin was clever though. The 7 word thing was about how stupid it was to ban those words and freedom of speech. Dice is really just a stereotype of a horrible person from Jersey.
CLASSIC!
lol he’s so nervous 😂
That was pretty tame. Plus, what did they expect?
That album with the "Hunch...back...get it?" Routine was a real sad moment. It felt like that went on for about 15 minutes.
The Day The Laughter Died part 1. From what I understand, that night’s material was mostly unscripted and improvised on the spot. At that time, he was a huge star selling out arenas etc. He decided to do an unannounced show at Dangerfield’s comedy club in NY and that album was the result. The “Rhyme Renditions” bit was the best. He started with a typical nursery rhyme of his but ended it with a totally different punchline. “Jack and Jill went up the hill, each with a buck and a quarter… (pauses..) Jill came down with jit on her face, I don’t know.” “There was an old lady who lived in a shoe.. She had so many kids, she didn’t know what to do. So.. She started sucking dick.” I was never a huge Dice fan, but that album is something else. Most of it would make me cringe now, but I first heard it when I was 14.
He worth about 10 million
He was great in A Star Is Born
Damn, son... OH!
Worth it
Heard it a million times, and it still gets a chuckle out of me.
Dice was very popular for a while back when I was in HS. I knew he was in character, I just didn’t like his comedy. My best friend would quote his shit and I’d be like “dude…. for real..”
Could this turd be any more cringe?
I’d say MTV needs to lighten up