Dice Rules (1991)

Oh, no. No no no no NO, I can hear you all saying. You're supposed to review bad movies, Dope - not movies that violate the Geneva Convention.

I hear you, dear reader, and I feel your pain. Believe me, though, when I tell you I am not doing this for reasons of my own personal satisfaction. Today I am providing you with a civic service. Consider this as an air raid siren; your own warning to head to a personal lead-lined bunker. Abandon all hope, ye who watch this thing.

For, my friends, I am about to impart an experience to you more horrifying than anything you could possibly see through The Lament Configuration.

Intrigued? Don't be. Just be...fearful.

Before I go any further, let me just say this: I enjoy the comedy of such legends as Lenny Bruce, for whom the English language and the profanity it cultivated offered many opportunities for biting commentary. George Carlin, who observed humanity and its many faults and shortcomings with a self-assured drollness and rapid-fire wit. And Richard Pryor, who relayed the black experience in America and his many drug problems with a harried, frantic stream-of-consciousness series of asides, caustic impressions and profanity-laced tirades against generations of stupidity and narrow-mindedness. They were a brand of comic who brought a certain weight of irony and varying degrees of context to the jokes they told and one-liners they zinged appreciative audiences with. And, even more importantly, they spoke to a generation who appreciated the opportunity to think as well as laugh.

Now, these were men whose comedy not only defined their generation but also ushered in a brand of comedy forever called "shock comedy", where swearing was not only part of the act, but most often dissected letter by letter as the springboard for entire routines. Surely such modern-day comedians as Colin Quinn, Denis Leary, Lewis Black and Eddie Izzard owe much of their livelihood to the trail emblazoned by these pioneers of off-color humor.

Of course, not everyone who was influenced by Bruce and company were as talented, as verbose nor as cerebral as they, and you could easily tell where the dividing line between "funny" and "not funny" was when comparing The Past Masters to The Young Retreads.

Which brings me to the unpleasant topic of Andrew Clay: someone whose act is not to examine profanity and explore social mores, but to use as much profanity as possible and subvert social mores.

To be as fair to Clay as possible, before he became the personae featured in our topic, he was more recognized as a comic actor in movies like Night Patrol, Making the Grade, Private Resort, Pretty in Pink and Amazon Women on the Moon, none of them exactly being barn-burners in terms of success but they all showcased Clay in the role of comedic buffoon. He even had a more-serious role in the classic 1986 NBC series "Crime Story", wherein he actually bothered to portray a character.

There was a darker side to all of this, however, because then Clay adopted the nickname "Dice", put on a leather jacket, smoked an endless string of cigarettes and ranted and railed against every single thing that entered his field of vision.

And I know of countless specials over at HBO and from pay-per-view venues to back me up on this. He'd take the stage, smoke his cigarette, strut around a bit, pick out the poor saps in the front row he'd pick on later and then start in.

Like I said, "Dice" would rant and rail on anything - not make jokes or funny observations. He ranted. Angrily. Against women, the elderly, women, minorities, women, sexual inclinations, women, sexual practices, women, pigeons and women. Oh, and did I mention how much he railed against women?

I'll get to more of that in a minute, but for now let us look into Dice Rules, which is supposed to document the two nights in which Andrew "Dice" Clay played to a fully-packed Madison Square Garden. Two nights in a row. Not a bad feat for anyone who fancied themselves a comic, but for Clay this was even more astounding since in all of the time he is on stage, he is funny for less than three minutes.

And this is an 88-minute movie.

Look at it this way: if this was a specialized form of comedy, or even some kind of Dadaist entertainment I would at least try and understand what was trying to be done here. But when someone comes onstage and immediately starts alienating almost every single member of the audience with insulting comments, then that is not comedy. And it certainly isn't entertaining. And Dadaism would have been preferable.

Director Jay Dubin had a career made up mostly of TV series and documentaries, most of which were pretty entertaining (HBO's "The Joe Piscopo Show" was a very good special that showed Piscopo in his best comedic light outside of "Saturday Night Live", I thought). In Dice Rules, though; not much direction is shown, and very little creativity; apparently Dubin was as stunned as everybody else at what was being said and never had enough time to recover to move the cameras in an interesting way. And since the material was written by none other than Clay himself (and co-writer Lenny Schulman), it wasn't as if Clay could blame anybody else as far as content goes.

Like I said, Clay's routine is a series of insulting comments. Examples? He comments on several women in the audience and the amount of makeup they wear, the clothes they wear, even insisting that one woman be "the pig" that she looks to be. He even comments on how satisfying it would be to kick an old man off of a bus who is taking too long to get out of his way. "Dice" also brags about how he likes to have sex (let's just call it that) with many women then have them clean his house afterwards. Oh, and then there's the jokes he makes at the experience of throat cancer victims; he just makes fun of the way they talk.

Funny.

And when he discusses how women talk to him, his voice guess up three octaves and into his nose, making every woman sound like Lily Tomlin's Edith Ann, only without any of the humor. His complaints about women consist of how they complain when he won't share his feelings with them, how he won't discuss love or any other like emotions, or simply won't pay any attention to them outside of when he demands sex from them.

His responses to their complaints? Unprintable in this review. Sorry.

Yeah, yeah. I know. Clay has said on several occasions that this is not him; the "Dice" character, he insists, is just a stereotypical macho goon whose callous attitudes towards women and humanity in general is all part of his act. Whatever - even if "Dice" is a put-on, all of that garbage had to come from somewhere. Psychologically, somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind, Clay would have had to have believed some of what he was saying.

Go with me on this: Don Rickles is an insult comic, right? And his act all consists of insulting every race, creed and color without exception, right? What's the difference between him and Clay? Rickles at least gives every indication that his act is all a put-on. Nowhere do you get any feel that Rickles truly believes a word of what he says or insult he slings. There is no such a sense of self-awareness with "Dice"...this feels like it might as well be a look into his psychiatrist's notes.

And all the time Clay's on stage, he's accompanied by a big fully-equipped band with guitars, drums, piano and everything...and they only get to play at the very beginning of and the very end of the concert! The rest of the time? They just all sit there and collect their union dues.

Hateful doesn't begin to explain Andrew "Dice" Clay's attitude during the whole 88 minutes of Dice Rules. Every word from his sneering lips is accompanied with the deadest eyes this side of Victor Mature and a dairy cow. To be perfectly honest, all "Dice" comes across as is a school bully who points and laughs at everybody else on the playground, insulting them for the way they look, the way they talk, anything he can pick on at all. And that's all "Dice" does.

I take that back; he also does dirty nursery rhymes.

Geez; he IS like every bully I ever knew from school!

An example:

"Jack and Jill went up the hill, each with a buck and a quarter.
When Jill came down she had two-fifty."

And that's as funny as the nursery rhymes get. Yep.

There's another, even more unfortunate thing about Dice Rules, though. Not all of this is concert footage. Nope. To begin with, the movie starts with a little vignette of scenes supposedly showing what Clay was like back in the days when he was married to a 300-pound woman who pushed him around and constantly beat him up, and a whole neighborhood full of people who would abuse Clay verbally, physically and emotionally. Each scene, of course, would be interrupted with leather-clad "Dice" commenting on each segment with a stupid joke or would-be verbal routine with a skinny guy in a vest. This part, as a guess, would probably be about 10 minutes or so long. Which means, the rest being concert footage, the remainder of the movie is less than 80 minutes long.

Dice Rules is so bereft of material that it had to pad out its running time with more material that wasn't any funnier than what would follow.

I have to mention something else. Remember when I said that this was the result of two sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden? I had to stop and think a moment: At no time did I hear any laughter from this large group of people. Oh, to be sure, there was shouting, cheering, yelling and chanting of "Dice, Dice, Dice". But not laughter.

I found this unusual, but then I realized something: this wasn't as much a comedy concert as it was a gathering of people out to cheer on someone with whom they shared a like-minded philosophy. Did anyone in these audiences actually think "Dice" was funny? Was observant? Was entertaining at all? This was more like a rally than anything else;a group who would shout and cheer what they heard instead of laugh at the irony of it all. And maybe it was because they saw as much irony as Clay put into his own words. They took it at face value. They believed every word they heard. They wanted to be told what to think.

Audiences like this don't make me confident for the future of humanity as a whole.

Near the end, however, there was ONE entertaining moment. ONE. And it had nothing to do with Clay's insulting of any group or demographic. It was just him imitating Sylvester Stallone, Robert DeNiro, Eric Roberts and John Travolta. Not that his impressions were all that good or even came close to their subjects (though DeNiro was a close call), but at least he seemed more at ease and confident with his material, so that he wasn't tromping up and down the stage, talking down the audience or verbally abusing every woman in the front row.

Maybe THAT is what Andrew Clay needed more than anything else; to concentrate on a different aspect of entertaining altogether, because insulting people is only funny when they know that there is that all-important sense of good-natured ribbing in it. It can't be insulting and hurtful as well as be funny. Don Rickles certainly knew that before he went on stage. And so did Bruce, Carlin and Pryor: before they said a word, they made sure they plotted out every single thing they'd say and thought about how it should be said, the tome it should be spoken in and where to place each word.

"Dice"? He gives every impression of a man who just blurts out the first thing that comes into his empty, bullying head.

Three minutes or less of humor is not worth everything else you have to put up with during Dice Rules. My advice is to stay as far away from this movie as humanly possible. Avoid it. Don't even acknowledge it exists. And never watch it, even on a dare. You don't need the excess pain in your life.

It's my understanding that Clay, leather jacket and all, still plays to enthusiastic audiences every night in Las Vegas. Albeit to smaller audiences nightly that in Madison Square Garden, I'm sure.

This makes perfect sense: Andrew "Dice" Clay has finally found a venue as garish, as over-exaggerated and as tacky as he.