Andrew Dice Clay: On a Roll Again

Hickory dickory dock.

Andrew Dice Clay is a . . .

Yeah, never mind.

He's a 50-year-old comic who cursed and raged his way to stand-up infamy in the late 1980s, left two marriages in his wake, spent the past 20 years holding a home video camera up to his own face for posterity and has two treasured sons who've never seen their father at the top.

We'll call him unsettled, among other things.

Now he's on tour with a stop Friday at the Warner Theatre, and this certainly will be called a comeback effort. But that doesn't really capture the whole story, or at least the duration of the effort.

"Any time I've done something, they've called it a comeback. It's not like I stopped working. I worked throughout all the years," he says in a rambling, 55-minute, expletive-laced phone call from his Los Angeles home an hour before leaving to pick up his 13- and 17-year-old sons from school.

But this time, he insists, in moments alternately cocky and fevered, it's different. "I gotta call this 'Dice Mania II,' 'cause all of a sudden it just seems like the climate in the country has people wanting this again," he says. That's more proclamation than prediction. As evidence, he points to a moment in February when he hijacked the stage at an awards show for entertainment industry executives and unleashed six minutes of new material that found its way to YouTube. Promoters from big venues started calling for the first time in more than a decade.

At his height, Clay was a boundary-destroying, love-him-or-hate-him bulldog who smoked on stage, insulted his audiences and was so offensive that Sin�ad O'Connor refused to appear with him on "Saturday Night Live." It worked. Clay regularly played to packed arenas, sold millions of albums and changed the image of stand-up comedy.

Twenty years ago, audiences flocked to hear him rail about the flagrant, graphic sex that was central to his act. He says he has struck a similar nerve that people recognize in themselves today and are ready to be berated for: self-absorption. "When they're that self-absorbed," he says, "they're going to be plugged into nine different phones in their car. . . . They nearly cause an accident 'cause of the text they were trying to send when they were doing 45 miles an hour. It's my job to go on stage and vent about it."

When he's on stage, he's talking about them. Before and after, he is looking into a camcorder, talking through and documenting thousands of hours of his own life.

"I just started filming my own history," he says, so much so that he suffered a shoulder injury from the repetitive stress of angling the camera toward himself.