Dice's Book-The Filthy Truth

In the early 90's I started high school (1991), and discovered Andrew Dice Clay. Here was this guy dressed in leather, smoking cigarettes, and telling dirty nursery rhymes. It was nothing I'd ever seen, and I couldn't get enough. I loved his whole character. 

Other kids listened to Milli Vanilli or Paula Abdul in their bedrooms. I listened to Dice's comedy albums, and knew them word-for-word. I edited all of the curse words on the album Dice Rules together in one long string of vulgarities. I found a poster of The Diceman at Spencer's Gifts and had it on my wall. He's always been an inspiration to me. 

I got to see him live with my buddy Jimmy D

On 11/11/14 Andrew Dice Clay's autobiography The Filthy Truth was released. I downloaded it on my Kindle that night. Clay, 57, has been out of the spotlight for years, and I couldn't wait to see what he's been up to. Unfortunately the book doesn't live up to the legend. It started when he's six years old. He talks about his parents and sister, referring to them throughout the book as The Originals. 

Personally I don't like when celebrities start their books with their childhoods. I don't buy their book to find out that they were a class clown in elementary school. I want it to start when their career started. Clay waxes on about his childhood for the first 15% of the book, finally mentioning a comedy club around there, and doesn't start talking about the beginning of his career until about 20%. 

His first bit was coming on stage as Jerry Lewis's Nutty Professor, then he'd drink the elixir, there'd be a black out, and when the lights came back up, he'd be Travolta in Grease singing Greased Lightning. He references that it was the 70's, before YouTube, and he had to see Grease in the theater three times to learn the song and choreography. The way it's written, this was the only bit he did, and his dad would book him at discos for $800-$1,000 a night. 

The chapters are short without much substance. The book isn't written in the Dice voice, but Clay's Brooklyn dialect sneaks in from time to time. A lot of pages are devoted to sexual encounters he had. These parts come off as a high schooler bragging that he had sex. They're not funny, and go into too much detail. The worst is when Clay describes a couple he heard having sex in the next hotel room. He describes the whole encounter. I started skipping through these parts.

He discusses coming up through LA's famous Comedy Store, where he lived in the comic house with, most notably, Yakov Smirnoff. He describes some of the antics that happened in the house, but is derailed by talking about women. He mentions a young Sam Kinison and how they were friends, Dice even writing Kinison's opener. He talks about their feud later in the book,  and even memorializes him in a short chapter.

The interesting stuff is around the filming and release of Ford Fairlane. He talks about how he was banned for life from MTV, and his subsequent appearance on Saturday Night Live, which was boycotted by cast member Nora Dunn. These too were interesting, because I knew that they happened, but Clay gives his side of these stories. I feel like I learned something reading them.
Clay was featured in a short-lived VH1 reality series, that I think only I watched, that he only gives one paragraph to. He never mentions his appearance on Arsenio Hall in 1990 where he cried.

The book is a quick, easy read. Because I'm such a fan, I would have liked the denser version of his career, and comedy stories. It's a fun sized bag of potato chips when I would have liked a steak off the grill. I hate to have to give the book a C-.