In early 1990, he was invited to host Saturday Night Live a media furor ensued when Sinéad O'Connor, the scheduled musical guest, and cast member Nora Dunn walked off the show in protest of Clay's sexist persona, raising his visibility even higher. 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 commentary - and frequently attacked their own neuroses and weaknesses - Clay's posturing was relentless instead of insight or hard truths, he offered nothing but self-aggrandizing bile and hatred, and while fans loved it, his opponents grew outraged.Īfter the release of his 1989 debut, Dice, Clay exploded - the album sold extremely well for a comedy record, and the merits of his act were hotly debated across the nation. 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. As the decade wore on, he continued to struggle as an actor finally, he turned to standup, creating the Diceman, a comic persona that 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 that first won him notoriety had been party-record staples for decades. 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. Clay was racist, homophobic, and misogynistic, and although his rise to fame was meteoric, his fall from grace - despite retaining a fervent core audience comprised almost entirely of young white males - was ultimately just as swift.Īndrew Clay Silverstein was born in Brooklyn in 1957.
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 and 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. In the late '80s, Andrew Dice Clay was the most notorious and controversial comic in the business.
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