Desperation is mostly inseparable from masculinity. Men strain for fame, for female attention, for sad, trivial triumphs over one another. We are a people perpetually trying to figure it all out—flexing in the mirror, using lines we've heard before, trying to seem bold and dignified. We're not cowboys or poets. If we are, we wear it as a disguise. Mostly, we are vulnerable and self-conscious and probably masturbating for the third time on a Tuesday afternoon, because we're off and that Lea Thompson scene in All the Right Moves just came on. We are not men, but almost. Note: columns may also contain William Holden hero worship and meditations on cured meats.
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His arena shows are about FUCKIN' HOOERS and quotidian inconveniences, texting and Starbucks menus and lane changes, because his audience of howling white philistines needs something they can process easily and celebrate. In that context he is only the balding loudmouth with a keep-my-dick-in-your-mouth-so-I-don’t-have-to-hear-you-talk-honey chauvinism. The audience salutes the mirage, and he respects it because it’s his, but he lives in its cold shadow. The real Dice Clay, The Day the Laughter Died Dice Clay, is fearless and precise. He’s at his best not during rehearsed material, but in improvisational moments, shredding subjects in the audience for their blind adherence to societal conventions. To Dice Clay, they exist specifically to be exposed. It’s not so much target practice as it is shooting a bazooka at an anthill. Frustration swirls into an indignation uninterrupted by reason or basic human respiratory functions until his voice is just a frothy, spitted sputtering of words. The Angry Guy is a tired archetype in comedy, but there is a real beauty in a sincere irritation devoid of all that shrill, contrived Sam Kinison rage. He talks in a whiny, half-annoyed, half-disgusted tone, as if someone just told him they shit their pants and wanted him to change them. He alternates between insouciance and window-pane-rattling God wrath. In the second season of Celebrity Apprentice, when explaining to Donald Trump why his team lost a challenge, he said, “We get there in the morning and there’s no bagels, there’s no butter…”
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He does three voices— voices women make, voices dentists and nerds and people who use Twitter make, and the voice he makes. You either get fucked or never fuck or fuck like he does, like some rabid Caligula disciple. He sees the universe in such absolute terms. There is no subtlety or room for nuance. As he once said, “I don’t understand bisexuals; you either suck dick or you don’t.” He is crude and indelicate, blowing money on garish furniture, his dih-vawse, blackjack, walking to get the newspaper in his underwear.Few people have ever so willingly abandoned discretion and decency just for a laugh, detonating everything in sight and cackling as the pieces fall to the ground. He’s Paulie Walnuts making conversation on a car ride from New Brunswick to Binghamton to pick up stolen iPod Nanos. On Dice Clay’s podcast, which debuted last week, in the back of a truck in Las Vegas at two in the morning, a question from the audience about his favorite TV show growing up spiraled from “Petticoat-fuckin-Junction” to “Petti-cum-junction” to “Petti cum all over my fucking dick,” to a six-minute absurdist recollection of his first orgasm, which was reached when he had an itchy penis and decided to scratch it by having sex with a “furry glove that my mother got me at Sears.”
In 1990 the New York Times said witnessing his standup is to “come to a fresh realization of what a Nazi rally must have been like.” But to say he is just some wretched misogynist is an inaccurate, lazy hypothesis reached by a generation prone to immediate outrage. On Howard Stern, Dice indirectly admitted to his wife regularly licking his asshole; in a Slate interview he talked about how exciting it is when the girl gets on top and “bangs the shit out of you.” He says he doesn’t watch porn because it’s artificial and implausible. He has an entire bit about being “Richard Nixon in that ass,” and he talks about girls needing to make sure there aren’t any toilet paper bits in their vaginas because he loves to eat pussy. He is maybe not a Romantic, but he is not a lecherous date rapist either. Dice is an instigator; as eager to elicit a human response as he is curious what the response will be. He is the deal with it dog, a giant neon billboard of him squeezing a waitress’s ass with "HI, HATERS" written in blinking Christmas lights at the bottom.
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