On Problematic Standup: Eddie Murphy: Raw and Dice Rules (Part 1 of 2)
This piece is the first in a series of four essays on the subject of free speech and reactionary politics as reflected in film. I did stand-up for over ten years, so the first exploration I’m going with, which will be presented in two parts, is very personal to me.
“Language always gives you away.” - George Carlin
I keep hearing that stand-up comedy is “having a moment.” That comedians live under the threat of having their shows and opportunities for exposure taken from them and their body of work erased for saying the wrong thing on stage. That the current incarnation of political correctness has reached a point where it can be weaponized as a tool of a control system that yokes performers to The Woke Dogsled under threat of ostracization and shaming. And yet for the most part, the only comics I hear about being actually “canceled” are ones whose offenses were for things they did offstage that had nothing to do with what they said in their act - and not even in every instance, at that (Michael Richards can still get stage time if he lobbied hard enough).
In a recent Vox interview, David Cross claimed that nobody’s act is what’s actually getting them canceled. For all the supposed turbulence, you can still go to a club like always. There’ll be comics there. They may succeed or fail to get laughs but nobody is being hustled off stage at the first utterance of a taboo word or subject. What “moment” are people talking about? People are offended? This has always happened. And a contingent of fans will always sprout up no matter what you say up there. This is America. Our whole lives, the principle of Divide and Conquer dictates what products are going to be sold to whom and this includes the cultural figures we’re made to accept or reject (and vote for). So if your act is such a disgusting abuse of free speech that some people get angry about it, you may not be able to sell out stadiums like you used to, but you can still do shows. So I agree with Cross. Mostly.
I say the hullabaloo about “cancel culture” is BS only mostly because when one puts aside all the histrionic terminology surrounding censorship in America, there is a reactionary and censorious contingent in show business. It’s overblown, but it’s not paranoia. The values it asserts are a motherlode of false equivalencies. It privileges sensitivity over hard truth - essentially Being Nice over Being Right. It conflates equality with “sameness.” Worst of all, it fails (often purposely) to differentiate between jokes and the misdeeds committed by the people those jokes supposedly empower. In so doing, it lives up to the very American practice of privileging words and images over deeds.
It’s lamentable, for example, that despite living in what is statistically the most dangerous time ever for transgender individuals in this country, that comedians like Dave Chappelle or
Kevin Hart get in such disproportionate trouble while nothing is done about the architects of the laws which deny the transgender community their rights. More attention has been given to what these performers have said in their acts as being as harmful to trans individuals for instance, than the goons we put in office, whose legacies enable and excuse far more transphobia and actual violence than a comic could. In singling out comedians and their fanbases for blame (a practice whose relative popularity is based on the easy non-commitment of anonymously blasting people from the safety of a screen), we go far too easy on ourselves as a society. It reeks of political impotence and defeat. Of sticking one’s head in the sand. If we can’t get rid of a rotten set of elected officials and their thugs, then what can we get rid of?
I beg of you not to let your knowledge of Lenny Bruce be limited to what you’ve seen on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. No figure in the 20th century did as much to broaden our understanding of and fight for free speech than Bruce.
Stand-up has had to deal with this issue since Lenny Bruce showed people that what he does could be an artform - one that threatens the nefarious agendas of institutional power. Comedians have always been a lightning rod for society and stand-up is perhaps the most direct and honest dialogue it can have with itself. The best comics have the ability to express the human condition in a way that’s real. Comedy can be a form of armor - both for the performer and the audience - against a world of trauma and prejudice.
This is why I don’t believe a comedian should be Politically Correct. One person’s correctness is another person’s incorrectness. Most seasoned performers understand the difference between a need not to unnecessarily insult or hurt someone else’s feelings and the need for an honest exchange of ideas in entertainment and art. But a performer must also expect things from the audience. A performer must be able to use certain words and discuss certain subjects and it is up to the audience and to society to know the difference between hate speech and casual use of slang terms.
Ask most people who defend Political Correctness (which is not exclusively left wing in nature - something the media refuses to challenge) to define it and the answers you typically get are quite revealing. Many people define it as a kind of courtesy, which is bizarre because I can’t think of another form of courtesy whose violation can have such disastrous personal and professional results. I fear the danger of being made to conform to someone else’s arbitrary standards about language is lost on many people, especially younger people raised to privilege their own feelings above all else. As a performer, I personally don’t believe the occasional use of a derogatory term, used in a non-derogatory way is harmful. Of course, standards do change to reflect changes in society and this should be minded. Being a typically sharp and independent-minded lot, most comics are aware of this.
Traditional models of race, religion, sexuality, ethnic or national background and gender inevitably break down because they become useless and oppressive. It’s a good thing that this happens and when it does, it begins to matter much more than it used to how we speak to each other. So up to a point, I get why issues of nomenclature dominate so much of the left wing agenda. But sadly, in a country unable to excercise discrimination (in the dictionary defintion of telling unlike things apart) about these attitudes with any nuance or context, we wind up with a thoughtless, censorious, reactionary culture of vindictive warring factions, which sees no differing level of degree in social or cultural transgressions, real or perceived, for which the winner is the one who does as much damage as possible to the other side.
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This site is not about free speech or about stand-up. It’s about film, and that is the lens through which we will evaluate these subjects. Eddie Murphy: Raw (1987) and Dice Rules (1990) are both dated items: theatrically released stand-up concerts from a very different time in American culture that have more than their fair share of misogynist and homophobic material. Both performers, Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay, delight in “crossing the line.” But lumping these two performers together because of their spoken offenses - lumping Murphy in with Dice - would be dangerous and wrong-headed. When Dice crosses the line, he leaves out everyone that doesn’t share the wide-ranging xenophobia of his character. Murphy, like the greatest comics, crosses that line, brings everyone along with him and has them be glad he did. This is the illustrative contrast worth exploring.
I’m speaking here to the performative nature of 21st century Outrage Culture and its flat assumptions about what it considers offensive. Both the stand-up acts of Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay are minefields in terms of the “problematic” nature of their material (I find the word “problematic” problematic - a kind of weasel code word - its use as a tag is a pretty craven way to look enlightened). Why compare and contrast these dated items and not say Dave Chappelle’s The Closer with Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette (which have many similarities) for an article?
It’s for the very reason that these cinematic features are dated that they have much more to teach. They’re much better tools for getting our bearing on the times. The influence of their reverberations can be seen in their successors, both in comedy and sadly, in the political arena. Stand-up can address the evolving nature of social interactions that are fraught with divisive and corrosive identity politics, but it is also itself a part of those interactions. With a proper meditative distance, maybe we can be enlightened in seeing that evolution a little more clearly.
These contrasts may seem obvious. Yeah, Eddie Murphy is a far funnier and more talented performer than Andrew Dice Clay in every respect. Duh. But I think it makes very good sense at this point to explore why this is so. Because things don’t ever go away in our culture. They come back in more insidious forms, armed with fourth wall-busting justifications for their own existence, usually shrouded in some veneer of self-mockery or self-awareness. This is both a safeguard and a selling point. It widens the market when selling infantile, embarrassing cultural products to assure people that its authors don’t take themselves too seriously, which makes it okay for a skeptical public to embrace them. Viewers are assured that whatever the cultural transgression, the culprit is in on the joke and so it’s okay.
In fact, the nebulousness about the level of the performer’s self-awareness works to their advantage: If you’re not hip to this and you’re taking everything the performer does literally, then great. You’re on board. If you’re hip to the proceedings and are still behind them, you’re a culturally savvy insider, admiring an ironic character performance that pokes holes in society’s successive waves of political hypocrisy. If you see through the transparency of performative controversy and don’t approve, you’re helping their cause, assuring the sycophants that they’re right in their mockery of seriousness. Everyone gets in the tent in some way.
Dice exemplifies this very simplistic and cheap hedging of bets. His act is a calculated effort to provoke his way to stardom. He sees himself as a successor to “Elvis, Sylvester Stallone and James Dean,” (the last of these influences is the most telling) and for all the performative machismo of those personas, he ups the ante to incorporate Donald Trump (his professed friend), who would later glean back from Dice the knack for performing the resentments and fears shared by straight white males misapplied towards The Other. Dice can bitch about being fired from The Apprentice all he wants to. The way for Trump’s mockery of the disabled in the 2016 election was paved for in small part by Dice’s mockeries of hunchbacks, stutterers, twitchers and midgets (yes, I said midgets). In order to get away with these transgressions, he, Andrew Clay Silverstein, the product of a working class Jewish family in Brooklyn - appropriates the superficial markers of his icons without trying to understand them on a deeper level.
Dice’s act is a pose in service of an attitudinal brand. Strutting, preening, posturing, pulling out the lapel of a studded jacket that says “Dice Rules” on the back, cocking his head, shooting his cuffs, conspicuously lighting and taking a drag on a cigarette. It’s about striking a pose. The pose is what people are paying to see. Dice’s character fit neatly into the toxic machismo culture of 80’s sexism and homophobia. Like Trump, he bucked a cultural trend, seeing an opportunity to exploit the resentment and fear of white Americans who felt threatened by minorities, women, gay people, immigrants, the disabled and the ill (Jewish people like Andrew Silverstein are also typically on that list).
That fear forms the basis for the entirety of Dice’s (and Trump’s) cosplay adventure. In exploiting the politics of resentment at their most naked and honest, he affected a character he felt people would like and identify with more readily and quickly than his own - that of a brash Italian-American tough guy (the most morally unattractive type of individual imaginable) and used that get ahead in showbusiness.
The degree to which Andrew Silverstein - who is very likely as much of a raging liberal as Howard Stern - may regret his role in prepping the public for President Donald Trump is anyone’s guess.
All you need to know about Dice’s “authenticity,” can be learned from his appearance on Stephen Colbert’s show in 2018. Colbert observed he was still wearing the costume which included the jacket and fingerless gloves, still playing the part like it meant something. Dice is not tattooed, nor is he overweight or visibly having any physical ailments. His clothing is clean, his hair is neatly coiffed and his face is not lined beyond what one would expect for a man his age. His inability to hide his cosmopolitan New York Jewishness behind this character any longer, which he so desperately desires, is glaring (he’s all but wearing a yarmulke with a Yankees logo on it). All in all, he shows no traces of the extraordinary wear and tear one would expect from a character who dresses, moves and speaks as if he’s been living the Rock & Roll life. Dice looks clean and well groomed, his vanity having persevered to maintain an image that now suffers as a result of its presentability. He looks like a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis.
There is nothing other than business on Dice’s mind. He mentions in that interview having been able to sell out Madison Square Garden on consecutive nights, reverting back to his glory days as if they were last week, insisting on his relevance in order to plug a desperate new series for Showtime that bears his name. Dice’s measure of success is judged by the amount of people that were in the audience at two shows he did over thirty years ago, not what those people who came out of the show were thinking or feeling. I normally actually wouldn’t care about someone just playing a goofy character for people on stage and trying to make a buck if they hadn’t already gone to so much trouble to sell themselves as the real deal. The antidote to an unworthy society. That’s why the bragging about the crowd size sticks in my craw.
It’s impossible not to think of the remark Donald Trump made after the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11 about his building at 40 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan now being the tallest in the area. Because for Trump to have had the tallest building (or penis, of course) is worth any amount of slaughtered innocent lives, just the same as filling Madison Square Garden is, to Dice, the height of his possible success even in the 21st century, no matter what behaviors are encouraged or excused by his act. Because it’s all based on a pose, Dice’s fame is as hollow and fragile as his “masculinity.” The jacket, the glasses, the gloves, the cigarette and the stance serve only the character’s hustle for monetary success. He’s like Gene Simmons or Mike Ditka, with whom he shares MANY traits: A guy who spends all of his interview time showing off the brand that is his own facile image, huckstering his products to such a degree that you get the sense he got into this line of work not out of love for what he was doing, but to build an empire that would make him rich and famous. Phony writ large.
Some one-trick cultural figures, stretching their legends as thin as possible in hustling their phalluses
The Madison Square Garden show of Dice Rules is the closest thing you’ll see to a fascist rally in mainstream culture until the political arrival of Donald Trump. Like a Trump rally, the theme of the event is Grievance. Spectators turn up not to laugh, be told stories or have their perceptions challenged but to have their anomie, their moral bankruptcy, their contempt for society and humanity affirmed by a figure who can give a voice to their prejudice, their hatred and more tellingly, their fear, cynically and falsely packaged as counterculture. The crowd appears thrilled to identify itself with the Dice character’s reassurance of the justification of his own fears, or to marvel at itself being shocked by a thing Dice says. They want approbation for the absence or depletion of their ordinary feelings of taste and decency. Or excusal for their inability to think for themselves. They’re content to let Dice do their thinking for them, articulating their sociopathic impulses.
How do I know they’re not in on the joke? Because they’re rarely shown laughing.
Dice Rules features many, many shots of the audience reacting to their icon. There are so many of these cutaways. They’re like a sociological study. In equal measures, they’re the most fascinating and stomach-churning element of the movie, as they reveal the base nature of scared, miserable individuals who would hide within a crowd. I may find it deflective and inaccurate to attribute social ills to audiences like Dice’s. But man, are they awful. At least they relieve us of the sight of Dice and his boulevard farce for that amount of time.
Calling the show a “concert” is simply insane. Insane that you could get away with this in the 80’s.
But look closer at the individual audience members in these shots. Very few of them are shown laughing. Individuals laugh occasionally, but never groups. They’re cheering, pumping their fists, pointing to their Dice t-shirts, quoting the regurgitated punchlines, looking shocked and high-fiving. Few, and I mean shockingly few cutaways to plain, simple laughter (which would be perfunctory anyway). Maybe this is because Dice’s schtick has very few actual jokes to offer. They’re more like statements made in character. His bits are basically unenlightened anecdotes. They lack exaggeration or any kind of angle. The joke is the moment the performer reveals the truth, or the exaggeration of the truth, or some indication of shame in the face of truth - the thing that unites the audience in a kind of humility at its own folly. The truth that was on the tip of our tongues.
”I let my dad bang my chicks.” No. No, you didn’t. That never happened. That you wish you did could be funny because it’s fucked up. But that won’t be explored. Besides, that never happened.
But there’s no such moment when Dice gets to the punchline. Take the bogus story he tells about feeling betrayed by man’s best friend when he catches his dog licking his date’s vagina. It’s one of many set up to punish women for existing. Dice’s essential view of women as little more than receptacles for semen is one of the few consistencies of his act (cutaways to female audience members apparently unaware or unconcerned that Dice is in the process of verbally raping them are another bizarre phenomonon entirely). The story ends with him telling the dog: “I’m not even in the front door and you’re eatin the bitch!” Then he goes on to say, “you had to see what I did when he brought somebody home!” and then he doesn’t bother to explore that idea. To Dice, the idea of a one-way servicing of something else sexually - even a hypothetical animal - means being subservient to it, which would weaken his overpotent image. So he adds, “nobody fucks Dice over! Dice does the fuckin!” It’s pretty extraordinary that there are not enough actual real life targets for Dice to use to prop up his misbegotten sense of tough-guy masculinity or reject all those elements in himself that he consciously or unconsciously perceives or misperceives as feminine, such that he would have to invent non-human threats to it. Like any subject, this could be made funny. But this Dice lacks the humility to make it so.
Studying Dice’s other specials as well as his various TV interviews, I believe he’s for real in a false way. Andrew Silverstein is a guy who wanted to get into show business. Having failed the heavy-cat test of white negritude, created Andrew Dice Clay, a glamorous taboo-breaker threatened by competent women who assert themselves. There is never anything to suggest the possibility of commentary on toxic alpha types in the form of wink at the camera, suggesting a guy who may at heart be sillier and less of an actual tough guy than he pretends. Even ostensibly macho figures like Charles Bukowski, Burt Reynolds and Denis Leary benefited from those moments of admission later in their careers. Not Diceman, who must evoke the figure of a schoolyard bully with the equivalent of pointing and laughing at his targets. It’s the laziest kind of provocation. Our culture has so much of it now (politicians are doing it for tweets), it’s easy to take it for granted.
Behold a comedian with no jokes, received by an audience that does not laugh. Again and again in Dice Rules, a diatribe might start out like there’s going to be a punchline on the end of it, but a punchline never surfaces. Never that moment that puts the subject into a perspective that sees the human folly within it. Perhaps because if there was any trace of intelligence or humanity in Dice’s act, it wouldn’t work for his audience, who’ve attended his shows to be preached at and affirmed by a demagogue. Their hero is slyly pushing an ideology, and in doing so he cannot be funny, even if he had funny material. Ideologues can never be reflective or honest about their grievances, because their concern is saying the thing that the audience agrees with. That’s not comedy. It’s a bad place when you have to serve an ideology before a joke. The commitment to a way of thinking, or to a narrative or an audience, is the act of ideology trumping art and that’s not funny. It’s boring.
The Dice character’s ideology is that of self-worship and the scorn of anyone who is not Dice. That’s what makes Dice Rules so unwatchable: Dice’s need to be liked. Nothing - NOTHING - is so destructive to comedy as a performer who fears being disliked. Not political correctness or the threat of a twitterstorm, but the fear of being disliked. This is why one of the best things a comic can do is bomb because it keeps the comic grounded in reality. But for Dice to bomb would threaten his inflated sense of self. So to fill out the rest of an hour long show for which he lacks both material,and the performative brio to sustain this static character, he puts on dark glasses and goes into a musical number rendered in a lazy Elvis impersonation that is nowhere in the vicinity of comedy.
A cultural chud-bucket of regurgitated male poses, rooted in obsolete impulses from 100,000 years ago, calculated for profit and any incidental flattering of the ego
He also reprises his equally humor-free dirty nursery rhyme bit, during which the audience chants all the punchlines along with Dice in unison. These ritualized sequences are the chinks in Dice’s brittle armor, showing up his fraudlent postering as a humorist. For his audience, they’re also an opportunity to identify in fellowship. It’s a club, in which everyone who’s miserable, fearful, contemptuous of their bodies and the sexuality of women’s bodies can feel safe from the horror of the impending PC movement. The audience reportedly booed and heckled the black comic who opened for Dice both nights. The show is a kind of Safe Space for the hateful. It is some of the purest and most uniquely American fascism you will see in a contemporary film.
Again, I grappled deeply with the notion that Dice’s act is a conjob. That he may be a genius troll separating idiots from their money. It is and it isn’t. The costume, the physical tics and the name are fake. The sociopathy, the adolescent angst and the self-aggrandized image are real. I think his fear of women is also very real. To quote Roger Ebert’s zero star review in 1990: “It is too painful and too consistent to be explained otherwise.” I hasten to add that any decent con artist would have spent more time on observations that would have led to humor than Dice did. He goes, “Thank God for Donald Trump or the Japs would own everything,” though they do “know how to fold shirts.” Despite being pressed to come out against the racist culture stoked by Trump in the Colbert interview (which causes Dice to squirm), I have a hard time believing it was all supposedly part of some elaborate statement about the lower classes that this character can’t distinguish the Japanese from the Chinese.
He’s just not that good at observing human behavior. His unchanging impression of a woman registers the bare minimum of imagination - like a bad impersonation of Jean Stapleton’s Edith Bunker from All in the Family. His affecting of a stammering, meek spazz is basically a nod to Jerry Lewis’s original incarnation of The Nutty Professor, which would make Dice Lewis’s alter ego in that film, Buddy Love, who I would argue was a bigger influence on Andrew Silverstein than the performer’s professed macho idols.
Jerry Lewis as the The Nutty Professor (1964) - the true prototype for Dice’s character that anticipates and satirizes his showbiz boorishness in advance
My evidence for this would lie in what I consider the most telling aspect of the empty provocations of Andrew Dice Clay. This would be the first half hour of Dice Rules, which is a series of filmed segments depicting him as a meek and feckless loser who’s abused and insulted by everyone he runs into. That is, until he gets a studded leather jacket from a shop window, which is advertised with the phrase, “Be a real man!” Once he puts it on, slicks his hair back and lights a cigarette, the sting of Jerry Lewis’s profound and lacerating portrait of the modern male identity is reduced to a series of unbelievably stilted scenes in which Dice learns to dominate his surroundings.
He stands up to and conquers the sadistically abusive and grotesque obsese woman he lives with. He triumphs over all the carnival geeks who stood in the way of his greatness: An Indian grocer, a manic gas station attendant (young Eddie Griffin) and most tellingly, a Jewish neighbor who criticized him. The filmmaking is so amateurish, paceless and unfunny, it’s easy to forget that it’s being offered as a justification for Dice’s supposed transgressions. The childish doublethink implied by it is like something out of Ayn Rand: I didn’t ask to be this way. It’s the fault of a mediocre society for pushing me to this.
Andrew Dice Clay’s idea of male weakness and impotence, lifted from Jerry Lewis and dropped into the world with no nuance or context.
The most unusual and off-putting thing about Dice’s charade - the one thing that really disqualifies him from being taken seriously as a performer in my book - is that he picks on the underdogs. Comedy must first achieve laughter, but it also contains something that can speak truth to power and its abuses - like good journalism. Dice’s targets are those without power (I use the term “underdogs”) and it’s always been understood you can joke about the powerless without punching down on them or dehumanizing them.
In breaking this rule, Dice violates the entire ethos behind stand-up, one of the most difficult jobs a person can do. When a comic's act works, it’s something miraculous: a live collection of ideas that if arranged and executed properly, has the power to make people feel better. But there is nothing noble about Dice’s solipsism. His act places himself between the audience and the world at large, channeling no larger truths, repelling any opportunity to engage with the same world that most sane people live in.
In closing the show, Dice tells the audience, “You were an unbelievable crowd!” I agree with that. I couldn’t believe them myself.
(Continued in Part 2)
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