In This Piece That Will Be Collected in WE'VE GOT A TERRIBLE SHOW FOR YOU TONIGHT I look back at Andrew "Dice" Clay's Notorious Episode
Saturday Night Live has a sturdy system designed to turn everyone from George McGovern to Wayne Gretzky into the host of a professional ninety minute long live comedy broadcast in less than a week.
If you think about it that way, it really is extraordinary what Lorne Michaels has accomplished in the several hundred years the show has been on the air. It’s honestly remarkable that Saturday Night Live is not a clattering, unwatchable train wreck more often.
Sometimes, however, the show will choose as a host someone who isn’t just controversial or divisive: they’re downright radioactive. I’m talking about people like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Kanye West and Andrew “Dice” Clay.
Clay was so radioactive when he went on Saturday Night Live to promote his new movie The Adventures of Ford Fairlane after getting banned from MTV for his potty mouth that Nora Dunn skipped the episode in protest and Sinead O’Connor dropped out as the musical guest.
O’Connor was replaced by the Spanic Boys and Julee Cruise. I suspect that Cruise found the experience of performing on Saturday Night Live alongside Andrew “Dice” Clay to be downright Lynchian.
For that week and that week only the boycotting cast member was known as “Nora No Fun” due to her unforgivable unwillingness to play in the Diceman’s sandbox just because of his virulent sexism and negative effect on the fragile psyches of the young, suggestible douchebags who compromise his devoted fanbase.
Dunn didn’t just find Clay insufficiently hilarious; she thought that he was a cancer upon the culture, an exemplar of unexamined toxic masculinity who became rich and famous appealing to the worst aspects of the most deplorable dudes alive.
Before Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan arrived as digital-age Moseses leading lonely young men to the Promised Land Clay taught multiple generations that life was about banging hot chicks, swearing, being cool, smoking cigarettes, not caring, banging hot chicks and also banging hot chicks.
Have I mentioned the part about banging hot chicks? Clay cultivated the image of a man who had constant sex with women he did not respect and consequently was just about the coolest guy on the planet.
Clay was very popular among young boys too feeble-minded for the sophisticated satire of Saturday Night Live yet he was red-hot at the time. If given an opportunity to choose between boffo ratings and doing the right thing Lorne Michaels is going to choose a sky-high viewership all the time.
So Saturday Night Live did what it always does. It turned the camera inward and became a show about itself once again. More specifically it became a show about the controversy Clay’s hosting generated and the effect that it had on the cast, crew, guests and world at large.
The meta commentary begins with a cold open that begins with screaming newspaper headlines about Clay’s hosting gig and Dunn and O’Connor opting out.
We then segue to Clay, clad in his signature leather jacket and sporting a teen idol-worthy bouffant pondering taking a suicidal plunge when he is approached by a Guardian Devil played by Jon Lovitz.
It’s a parody of It’s a Wonderful Life that has Lovitz’s demon showing Clay what would have happened if he’d never been born.
Since Clay was not available to host the show, on account of not existing, the job was instead filled by Frank Zappa, who went on a seventy minute long rant about censorship that got the show cancelled.
It’s a nifty meta gag that not so subtly suggests that the writers knew that they had a historic, world-class train wreck on their hands so they might as well cheekily reference one of the show’s most notorious episodes.
Lovitz’s Guardian Devil shows Dice an alternate reality where Nora Dunn didn’t opt out of the night’s episode for moral reasons and was instead crushed to death by Sinead O’Connor’s amplifier.
It’s not the last time the show seemingly throws one of its own under the bus for a cheap laugh but it does have a certain nasty, transgressive punch.
Clay swaggers onstage and starts saying “How are ya?!?!” the exact same way Eugene Levy does as preeminent show business phony Bobby Bittman. It’s less an homage than outright theft.
On a recent Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 piece on The Adventures of Ford Fairlane I officially came out as a Dice fan.
I love the Diceman. I love his look. I love his attitude. I love his cadences. I love his mannerisms. I love his tics. I dig his whole deal.
The only thing that I don’t like Andrew “Dice” Clay is all of his material. I do not care for his jokes, if you can even call them that. That’s a little like being a big fan of a band except that you hate their music.
Unfortunately Clay performs some of his stand-up in his opening monologue. I watched Clay’s concert film Dice Rules for the My Year of Flops book and was struck by how worshipful Clay’s massive audience was.
Clay knew the effect that he had on his audience. Throughout the film he would pause for two or three minutes because he knew that when he did one of his filthy nursery rhymes, the dullards and half-wits in the audience would lose their shit and hoot and holler and guffaw and pound on their seats for minutes at a time.
Dice doesn’t just need an audience to succeed. He specifically needs his audience. He needs their love. He needs their enthusiasm. He needs their laughter and their applause.
Clay did not have the luxury of performing his opening monologue to his audience. Instead he performed for Saturday Night Live’s audience, which is a good deal older, hipper and less worshipful than Clay’s usual crowd.
In his opening spiel Clay mentions the controversy surrounding his hosting gig and says “I got enough PR this week. I think the only thing I could do to top it would be to take my penis and wrap it around the microphone!”
Clay is working blue, unsurprisingly. Since each episode invariably reflects the personality of the host that means that show is uncharacteristically smutty and profane as well. It sinks to the level of Dice’s stand-up material.
Clay tries to work clean but it is a struggle. At one point he trots out a weird anti-humor gag where he repeats a nonsensical phrase as if it is a joke. The idea is for the audience to start laughing at Clay’s cadence and the rhythm without noticing that there’s no actual punchline or even set-up.
It’s an audacious bit but it relies upon Clay being able to really stretch out and keep coming back to the same weird gag every once in a while. It doesn’t work at all here because Clay doesn’t have enough time to do it justice.
Clay ends his monologue with a big of crowd work involving a couple that is getting married. He begins talking about the implied purity of a bride being married in a white dress and how there’s some asshole there thinking, “White dress? I had that bitch when she was fifteen.”
It’s an ugly way to close a non-starter of a monologue that embodies the curdled double standard at the heart of Clay’s work. If a man has sex with a lot of women, as Clay presumably did in his prime, then he’s a stud who should be admired and looked up to but if a woman does the same thing she’s a slut to be shamed. If a girl will have sex with you then she’s easy and you don’t have to respect her but if she won’t have sex with you then she’s a bitch and you don’t have to respect her.
This is followed by a sketch that takes place at the Diceman Employment Agency. Unlike a conventional employment agency the Diceman encourages his clients to indulge in rank criminality. He advises a man played by Kevin Nealon to become a drug dealer and a woman played by Victoria Jackson to be a prostitute.
Clay is a talented character actor. The Diceman is a character he played that was so successful that he essentially became him before establishing that he can actually act in movies like Blue Jasmine and A Star is Born.
The problem with Clay’s hosting gig is that he’s hosting it in character as the Diceman and it would not make sense for the Diceman to be a subtle and sophisticated comic performer. So Clay does his shtick in a context where it doesn’t work and is deeply counterproductive.
In another meta touch the writers imagine the sketch getting jeered by TV Guide for its misogyny. The episode can’t stop nervously commenting on itself. That extends to the fake TV Guide asking in exasperation when Saturday Night Live was going to do a sketch celebrating Adolf Hitler, which is illustrated by Carvey in Nazi garb shouting Church Lady catchphrases in a thick Teutonic accent.
A sketch for Phil Hartman’s Anal-Retentive Chef character follows that serves as a reminder that when Andrew “Dice” Clay befouled 30 Rock with his presence the show had one of the greatest sketch comedy ensembles of all time, with an equally, if not more impressive writing staff that included people like Conan O’Brien, Bob Odenkirk and Robert Smigel.
The cast was lousy with talent: Jon Lovitz, Jan Hooks, Nora Dunn (at least when Dice was not on the show), Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, Dennis Miller (before he sucked), Mike Myers, Kevin Nealon, Victoria Jackson (also before she sucked) and featured performer David Spade, before he was terrible.
The Anal Retentive Chef sketch is not particularly funny but it is a veritable masterclass in the art and craft of comedy from two bona fide comic geniuses with amazing chemistry.
It would be easy for a sketch like this to make fun of mental illness by making Hartman’s OCD-riddled television cooking personality and his mental illness the butt of the joke.
Instead Hartman gets so deep inside the character, and takes us with him, that you start to get annoyed by the same things that he does and empathize with his fussy perfectionism.
It’s a meticulously written and performed sketch about meticulousness taken to a pathological level that pointedly does not feature Dice or anyone other than Hartman and Hooks.
Incidentally I’ve heard that Hartman’s wife was jealous of Hooks’ connection to her husband. She apparently felt that people with that much chemistry must be sleeping together but she was an unwell women who robbed us all of a great man and decades upon decades of laughter.
The Anal Retentive Chef sketch is tonally decidedly different from all the Dice stuff. While the rest of the show was working blue, Hartman and Hooks were doing virtuoso character-based social satire.
The highlight of “Weekend Update” is an appearance from David Spade as Michael J. Fox in the Philippines talking about filming Casualties of War 2 and 3 back to back the same way he shot the sequels to Back to the Future.
Spade nails and exaggerates Fox’s tics and mannerisms, particularly his breathy earnestness and the way his voice constantly seems to be breaking with emotion. For some reason this sketch has stayed with me through the years, particularly a tag that finds him helplessly crying out “Mallory!” to his phantom Family Ties sister while showing off some dialogue from the Casualties of War sequel.
Then comes a sketch where Mike Myers plays a little boy who asks his father about sex. But get this: his old man is the Diceman! So “the talk” is a little on the ribald side! This is not your old man’s sex advice.
Instead of using clinical terms, Clay instead substitutes vulgar phrases such as “poontang”, “dong”, “honey pot”, “pubes”, “boinger”, “bologna pony” and “raincoat.” Talk about politically incorrect! Clay has quite the potty mouth and for one episode at least so did Saturday Night Live.
Hartman returns as the head of Planned Parenthood in another bit of meta-commentary where he agrees more or less with the message of the sketch but objects to the language.
When Phil Hartman uses phrases like “dong”, “tallywacker”, “the vertical smile”, “the silk igloo”, “boinger” and “nookie” it’s funny because he’s a class act and those phrases seem utterly foreign to him whereas it seems like the Diceman probably drops those phrases into everyday conversations.
The show’s funniest sketch finds Clay briefly abandoning his Diceman persona to play Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta in a sketch that parodies the scene in Raging Bull where an amped up and angry LaMotta dares his brother to hit him.
The sketch works on the principal of comic escalation. It opens with Clay’s LaMotta asking a brother played by Jon Lovitz to hit him. That leads to him asking for more and more abuse until he’s yelling for his sibling to throw a microwave oven at him (despite the sketch taking place in the 1940s), demanding that a refrigerator be dropped on him and finally angrily insisting that he be hurled out the window.
It’s a simple sketch that goes in one direction very quickly but it also fundamentally just works in a way that nothing before it has. It’s just funny and this episode is a little light on laughs.
Clay closes things out by playing a tiny version of himself that feels like a pale version of the Little E sketches about a tiny Elvis Presley.
The Diceman did not work on Saturday Night Live. That wasn’t because he tried to bend the show to his will the way that Milton Berle and Frank Zappa did. It also wasn’t because he thought he was too good or too big for it.
Saturday Night Live sank to Clay’s level during his ill-fated hosting gig although I may have a more positive take on his episode if I’d seen the Spanic Boys and/or Julee Cruise perform, something that was not included in the episode I watched on Peacock.
Clay’s hosting gig on Saturday Night Live was like his concert film Dice Rules and his vehicle The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. They were all supposed to bring him mainstream crossover popularity commensurate to his massive cult following. Instead they established that his shtick was not yet ready for prime time and never would be.
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