Back in a new Showtime series, ‘Diceman’ returns to his role as the ‘Elvis of comedy’
PASADENA, Calif. — Although he was a massive standup sensation as his roughhewn character “the Diceman” in the late ‘80s, Andrew Dice Clay insists he’s never been a standup.
“What I noticed about comics is they didn’t know much about performance. That’s why I would get bored with any comic onstage after about 10 minutes,” he says seated in a wing-back chair in a hotel room here.
“That’s when I’d go home to Brooklyn and tell my mother: ‘If I’m going to do this’ — because I knew about drums and rock and roll and singing - I said, ‘I’ll become the Elvis of standup.’ The image of Elvis and James Dean and Brando in films — and Travolta came along when I was about 16, Henry Winkler as the Fonze, it was done on TV. It was done in rock and roll. And it was done in film. But THAT guy never happened as a comedian.”
What he does, says Clay, is perform. And he’s doing it again with Showtime’s new series, “Dice,” already enjoying positive feedback. It’s based on his “crazy” real life, he says. And it includes his third wife, Valerie, and his two sons, Dillon, 21, and Max, 25.
“I love performance, I always did. I did the Rose Bowl with Guns N’ Roses, that’s 102,000 people. That’s a lot of thousands,” he says, his black leather jacket squeaking as he moves.
“I just always had brass balls to do my thing. I was a kid that wasn’t good at sports and turned to entertainment, saw the Beatles on TV. I saw drums, and I started playing drums. When I was 13 I got a real set of drums, and I was always into entertaining. It wasn’t necessarily comedy,” he says in his nasal Brooklyn accent.
He never idolized standup comedians. “I loved ‘The Nutty Professor’ when I was a kid. Jerry Lewis playing those two characters — the nerd and Buddy Love. So that was very influential on me. I never got into comics. I never studied comics. If a guy was funny I’d watch, but I wasn’t into it,” he lifts his gloved hands, explaining that he always wears them though they’re usually fingerless.”
“I was more into rock stars, or bigger-than-life personalities like Elvis and Muhammad Ali — stars like Stallone and Travolta,” he continues. “I understood it. I didn’t start out doing Dice. It was just an act I put together. It evolved. It was never really about standup to me, it was theater to me.”
When he was 21 he left home and headed for the Comedy Store in L.A. run by the redoubtable Mitzi Shore. “When I hit the Comedy Store I figured instead of going to acting school, I’ll just be on stage every night and develop my acting chops,” he says.
“And when I started doing ‘Dice’ Mitzi told me how it would NEVER work. Because she loved my other act, and all of a sudden, I’m going on stage with the leather jacket and I wasn’t (doing) the impressions. She said, ‘It’s not self-deprecating.’ She goes, ‘And it’s too tough. And it’s never going to work.’ I remember telling her: ‘Keep me at the Westwood Comedy Store, let me worry about it.’
“I told her, I said, ‘I will be the biggest standup to ever walk through these doors. No comic on Earth ever saw something like that.’ I was gonna be the biggest at something. I said, ‘I know I’m going to do this. I’m from Brooklyn, I’ve got the right attitude. I’ve got the right look.’ I just knew myself really well.”
It turned out he was right and rode that wave for several years. But eventually things slowed down. “There was a time I went through a lot of personal stuff and I sort of did stop in terms of managements and agents and really trying to make career moves,” recalls the 58-year old.
“And I would just go out and make a living during the time I went through the divorce from my sons’ mom. And I put my time into raising them because that’s my whole world, and that’s what I love. So it was like, who cares about career moves? I’m not going to leave two kids to bring themselves up . I stayed home at least 10 years. I would go out - weekend warrior make my living, but these weren’t ‘career’ moves. I wasn’t parlaying a club into a theater and a theater into an arena. It was just about making a living and surviving and being with them.”
Throughout much of his career, Clay’s father served as his manager. “I used to tell him, ‘I don’t know why you’re saving any money. You’re going to have whatever you want, whatever condo, whatever car, all the money in the world.’ And my mother used to look at me, ‘How you going to get that for us?’ I said, ‘The face. You gave me the face.’ They wound up with every dream they had. They’re both gone now, but they got to live that life.”