Andrew Dice Clay

In the late 1980s, Andrew 'Dice' Clay was the most notorious and controversial comic in the business. Foul-mouthed and abrasive, he was one in a long line of comedic performers whose material stretched the boundaries of decency and good taste to their breaking point; unlike pioneers including Lenny Bruce or George Carlin, however, Clay's routines did not evolve out of pointed social satire or trenchant political commentary, but merely a desire to be as lewd and shocking as humanly possible. Racist, homophobic, and misogynistic, his rise to fame was meteoric, and ultimately -- despite retaining a fervent core audience comprised almost entirely of young, white males -- his fall from grace was just as swift. Andrew Clay Silverstein was born in Brooklyn in 1957. At the outset of his career, using simply the name Andrew Clay, he was an actor who appeared primarily in small roles in low-budget teen sex romps like 1984's Making the Grade and Private Resort. As the decade wore on, he continued to struggle as an actor; finally, he turned to stand-up, creating the Diceman, a comic persona which assimilated the attitude and mentality of an everyday street thug into a bawdy, timeworn sensibility borrowed largely from performers like Pearl Williams and Belle Barth; even the off-color Mother Goose rhymes which first won him notoriety had been party-record staples for decades. Still, Clay touched an obvious nerve among fans; angry and arrogant, he tapped into a rabid, blue-collar following similarly disenfranchised by the slowly increasing cultural acceptance afforded women, minorities and homosexuals. Along with Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks and Denis Leary, Clay was labeled one of a new breed of "shock comics," but while his contemporaries transformed their vitriol into biting social...