David Spade on the new rules of comedy and the lessons of ‘Joe Dirt 2’

From the looks of it, David Spade has dodged at least one bullet with “Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser.”

“There were people who were like, ‘Please don’t do a sequel. It’ll ruin my childhood,’” he told the Los Angeles Times recently. Based on the comments he was retweeting Friday, many of his “Dirthead” fans’ childhoods remain intact.

“It’s good for the people who like it,” Spade said of the flick, which premiered in late June and started streaming via Crackle on Wednesday. “The two movies I’m known for are ‘Tommy Boy’ and ‘Joe Dirt,’” he said, noting that with Chris Farley gone, “‘Joe Dirt’ was the only thing I could do again.”

Reviving his mullet-rocking, cult-hit character for Crackle was an education for the “Rules of Engagement” alum. Translation: The budget was a lot smaller than for the first film.

“It was a learning experience for me, very dialogue driven, character driven,” he said. “You realize that one cutaway shot might cost you a million bucks, so you learn to look closely and ask yourself, ‘Is this our best use of money?’ ... You’ve got to go for jokes and laughs.”

But jokes and laughs have been a different game lately, as Jerry Seinfeld pointed out so adeptly: “There’s a creepy PC thing out there that really bothers me,” Seinfeld said in an explanation of why he no longer plays college campuses.

Spade agreed. Even in comedy clubs, which have “the safety of a secret meeting” where edgy things can be said, “Things you don’t even think about get hissed. A hiss isn’t a boo ... [but] there are things they pick out.”

After Spike TV but Clint Eastwood’s Caitlyn Jenner joke from the 2015 Guys Choice Awards in June, he said, he ran a Caitlyn Jenner-related bit by some people -- a bit he emphasized was related to all the buzz about Jenner, not a joke about her directly. It wasn’t well received.

“Even alluding to that in some throwaway joke ... it’s like we have a new no-transgender joke rule,” he said. “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t a good joke. But whether it was good or bad, when nobody [in comedy] mentions what’s in the air, that’s weird.”

Always in the air around Spade is his lady-killer reputation, and while he joked about dating -- “I’m getting better at it. Dating a nicer girl. But, I’ll blow that soon” -- there’s one lady who’s definitely got his heart: daughter Harper, who’ll be 7 in September. She lives across the country, but they Skype all the time, and now that they’re closer, stuff like Father’s Day is a bigger deal.

“Before, when she was a baby, it didn’t sink in. But now she can have opinions and stuff. We joke.” Plus, Spade said, his daughter really gets him.

What does he do, according to Harper?

“My dad jokes people.”

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