No Dice

The theme of the blog this weekend has turned out to be train wrecks. Today’s subject: Andrew Dice Clay.

Dice was an incredibly and inexplicably popular comic in the late ’80s and early ’90s, celebrated and denigrated in equal measure for his puerile and simplistic material. His basic take was: Women are stupid and good for one thing only. He conveyed this penetrating insight via nursery rhymes in which he inserted dirty words, which some people found hilarious. No, honest.

As his career ran aground, however, and he tried to reinvent himself, fans would nonetheless demand he return to reciting his nursery rhymes. On a later CD, he responded to his fans’ request thusly: "You don't know how much I hate those f@$&ing poems, you have no idea how I hate those f@$&ing poems, I wish I'd never thought of those f@$&ing poems." So he and I at least have one thing in common.

Dice miscalculated once again in 1995, when he tried to star in a CBS family sitcom. Well, CBS miscalculated, as well; it was quickly cancelled.

Even when his career was essentially over, he refused to be chastened. Take this exchange (via Wikipedia) of a CNN interview, when Dice feels insulted by a question:

Clay: Jesus f@$&ing Christ... with these guys. I come on the news for two seconds... an - and you want to say... every time I do an interview a guy wants to open his f@$&ing mouth. Can't even do a little f@$&ing routine here.
Host: All right Andrew, thank you very much; we thought that you could hold back.
Clay: (removing microphone) You know? Go f@$& yourself. You know what? F@$& the whole f@$&ing network. (leaves) … (off camera) F@$&ing jerk-off, @$$hole guy. Half dead.

Pure comic gold. The guy’s still got it.

And now, VH1, who clearly has too many hours in its broadcasting day if it has time for this sort of thing, returns to its gruesome D-List celeb-reality well once again (following such wince-inducing romps with Danny Bonaduce, Tom Sizemore and Flavor Flav) with “Dice Undisputed.”

You know those nursery rhymes Dice hated? Here’s how VH1’s selling the show:

“Hickory, Dickory Dock/Dice Clay Is Back On The Clock/You Thought He Was Through/But We Got A Clue/And Put Him On Our Celebrity Block.” I hope someone wasn’t paid to come up with that.

Again, it’s little more than home movies of the once-rich and staggeringly uninteresting – Dice, hairline receding and Elvis sideburns gone white, spends most of the first five minutes of the first episode making sure we understand he’s set up a bunch of cameras to shoot himself, so we can be edified by footage of him talking to his kids, b.s.ing with his buddies and frolicking in the Atlantic Ocean.

“I’m gonna blow this thing up all over again,” he declares, deluded into thinking he’ll someday play Giants Stadium. Even his agent tells him, “I want you to have dreams but there’s a difference between dreams and fantasies.” Oops – make that ex-agent.

Not much of his actual act is seen – and even less is heard, thanks to copious bleeping. Of course, that means we rarely get to hear punchlines, but perhaps that’s a good thing, because none of the jokes seem too funny. (Again, via Wikipedia: A performance in November 2006 was roundly booed and heckled.)

Perhaps one could make the case that a young Brooklyn guy exuding idiot attitude is a plausible comic persona, but Dice is gonna be 50 this year, and that same sort of material coming from someone whose half-century on the planet should’ve taught him, well, something, well, that’s just – what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, right: pathetic.

And if a guy can’t even find his room at a motel, as Dice has trouble doing in episode two, then you have to think it’s going to be a long, confused trek from Sundays at 10:30 p.m. on VH1 to Giants Stadium.

The indisputably unwatchable “Dice Undisputed” premieres March 4.