Rolling the Dice . . . Again : The Mouth That Roared Tones Down Growl for Fans

Consider the schizophrenic existence of Andrew Clay Silverstein. By day, he performs the requisite spin control with the media, explaining how he honestly doesn’t advocate the views and attitudes expressed by his comic creation, Andrew Dice Clay. By night, as Dice, he becomes his usual revolting, women- and immigrant-hating lout.

“I just had to clean up my kid, and if you just saw me with him, you’d say, ‘This isn’t Dice,’ ” Silverstein said during a phone interview. “Dice wouldn’t do that, he’d call his ‘chick’ in, that’s what he’d call her, his ‘chick’ . . . Dice is just a great acting job. They say you can’t fool all the people? I did, to the point that they were all afraid of me. They were calling me a Nazi when I’m a Jewish guy from Brooklyn.”

(He spoke from his East Coast home where he lives with his wife and “too many kids to afford”--he declines to discuss details of his personal life.)

After some time maintaining a low profile and mulling over what to do about his prickly persona, the mouth that roared is roaring back. At 36, he recently released a new CD, “The Day the Laughter Died, Part II,” he’s presenting a pay-per-view special tonight, “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” and he’s even hopped back into bed with Fox, the company that released his film, “The Adventures of Ford Fairlane.”

This time it’s for a TV series to premiere in the fall (“Bangers,” a projected sitcom for ABC, never made it beyond a pilot last year). A Fox network spokesperson declined to comment on the planned series.

For Clay, it’s a spate of activity to rival the amount of work at his career peak at the turn of the decade.

Spinning off a character who was initially a small part of his stand-up routine, Dice became the man who, along with the late Sam Kinison and, on a more modest level at the time, Howard Stern, helped usher in what was called “rock ‘n’ roll comedy”--jokes that were noisy, white-male-oriented and frequently stupid. It was the kind of stuff that had genteel critics fretting that the Apocalypse was nigh and First Amendment champions defending its practitioners, while cringing at the same time.

After “Ford Fairlane” and some notorious TV appearances that got him banned from MTV and “Saturday Night Live,” critics and feminist groups cried foul. “Politically correct” soon became the country’s buzzword and 20th Century Fox backed off a three-picture deal, apparently thinking its tarnished image wasn’t worth the modest box-office projections of his future product.

“If that character was put in a sitcom, on a network, there never would have been any controversy, it would have been like Barbarino (John Travolta’s “Welcome Back, Kotter” character) in the ‘70s,” he says. “But because I do it alone in stand-up, and with the foul language and adult material, I’m looked at as this bad guy. I just wanted to show what was out there, to do the ultimate (obnoxious person), to show what things go on in the country, what goes on beyond closed doors. I’m like Dr. Ruth on acid.”

Even though Clay doesn’t blame the PC brigade for his waning popularity, Silverstein the creator eventually came to realize “I had a certain element in the audience that liked that kind of character, and would cheer. I saw the influence it had on some men, taking that stuff as gospel, and thought, I’ve gotta get rid of those fans. So I decided . . . to rip men, to take it so overboard that you’d have to ask, how can anyone take it so seriously? This is a goon, a buffoon you’re gonna hear. I did a lot of men-bashing stuff.”

According to the comic, what accounted for his slide in popularity after his peak is that he lost those in his audience who were making him--and his critics--uncomfortable.

“That’s why I’m not playing arenas anymore,” he posits. “I took some grief from fans, but those were the fans I didn’t want. I feel the difference now in crowds--there are more couples, but there are still groups of guys. But the couples, they take it for what it is--nonsense.”

Not everyone is convinced that even Dice Lite is palatable for mainstream audiences.

“I was blackballed from Leno and Letterman--I can’t believe things like that can still go on,” Clay--or Silverstein, it’s still hard to tell sometimes--grouses. The best he could manage was appearing on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” last week--as the second guest of the show, and only after a lengthy internal debate among the program’s brain trust. “Those other guys are idiots,” he says, and you can imagine the shrug through the phone line.

He credits Fox with taking another chance on him. “They got a lot of guts,” he says, adding that on the show, “I’ll be a Brooklyn guy. Onstage, I’m one-dimensional. But in a sitcom you can’t do that, there’ll be a lot of different sides. I’ll be vulnerable, I’ll have heart, an edge, I’ve got to have it all. The pilot will be about sex versus romance.”

Never one to indulge in understatement, Clay says, “I could give them a historic show. If it’s done right, they will see a great actor. I’ve got the base audience and once the rest of the country sees me and sees what I’m about, sees the whole, rounded person, I think they’ll enjoy it. They’ll see I’ve got a lot to offer. Things got crazy back then, but I don’t mind that they did--in four months’ time I went from playing 200 seats to 20,000 seats a night, I filled every arena in the (expletive) country more than once.”

And just in case you feared him the first time around, and are wondering when his lightning will strike a second time, when you’ll need to start stocking up on goods for your underground safehouse, he has the answer: Nine months.

“It’ll be a huge return, with movies and the sitcom,” he vows. “I’ll be here again, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. You’ll look back at this story in nine months and say, he knew, he actually told me.”