Broke and irrelevant by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Andrew Dice Clay has now strung together a series of successes that even his biggest fans could never have envisioned.
First there was the guest spot on the eighth season of the HBO series of Entourage, where Dice (alongside son and aspiring comedian/musician Max Silverstein, who occasionally opens for Dad) played a caricature of himself as a foil to the long-suffering Johnny Drama. Then there was the critically praised role in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, which found him sharing billing with Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin and Louis C.K.
Snaking throughout all of it was a triumphant return to the stand-up stage, with the one-time Madison Square Garden headliner taking theater audiences back to the crude, occasionally sophomoric, frequently brilliant observations that made him a comedy superhero sometime around the end of the Reagan administration. In Las Vegas, that translated into club dates at Vinyl inside the Hard Rock Hotel, a run produced by Richard Davis, in a room that seems custom-built for Dice.
For his part, Dice seems more grateful than ever for his latter-day successes.
“I think it’s the greatest business in the world,” he said in 2012. “It’s got its ups and downs. There’s always going to be potholes in the way, but you go around them, you go under them. That’s what life is to me. Things get real tough, OK, they’re tough, but tomorrow’s a new day.”
The next six months seem even brighter for Dice. Earlier this month, he filmed a second Showtime special, Andrew Dice Clay Presents: The Blue Show, at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara, Calif. Set to air in 2015, the special features a familiar face, Eleanor Kerrigan, Dice's ex-fiancée, who he once called “the best female stand-up in the country.” (We’ll give you one guess who he thinks the best male stand-up is.)
In October, Dice jets to Australia for a series of concerts that marks (unbelievably) his first-ever dates outside of the U.S. The three-week tour kicks off Oct. 7 in Sydney and continues through Oct. 28 in Auckland, New Zealand.
The following month marks the release of Dice’s long-awaited autobiography, The Filthy Truth, co-written with David Ritz, who previously added his byline to memoirs by Etta James and Marvin Gaye. Then comes an as-yet-untitled rock ’n’ roll drama on HBO, executive produced by Martin Scorsese and starring Bobby Cannavale, Olivia Wilde and Ray Romano, among others.
Still, however successful any of these ventures, it seems unlikely that additional specials, books or starring roles will ever erase the Dice that reappears each night at Vinyl, the one that comes bounding onstage, shades on, cigarette in hand, dispensing the “nursery rhymes” that made him famous.
“It's like having a hit song,” he said. “That’s something they can actually do with me, and the crowds always love it. So I don’t mind doing it. It’s called a signature piece.”
Vinyl at the Hard Rock Hotel, 9 p.m. Sept. 18-21, starting at $59 plus tax and fee, 18+. 888.929.7849
