Dice Goes Back to Square One

Perhaps the funniest thing in Andrew Dice Clay’s HBO comedy special “Assume the Position” is the opening title card, offering a peculiarly Hallmark-style bromide: “More important than other people believing in you is you believing in yourself.” A Dice performance might more appropriately be prefaced along the lines of “That which does not kill you. . . .”

Clay himself had been trying to off the witless, misanthropic Dice character for a few years; apparently his fans got a little too rabid and under-evolved even for him. His best shot, a sitcom called “Bless This House,” ran briefly on CBS this season. Despite some good reviews, fans weren’t interested in diluted Dice and non-fans weren’t interested, period.

So, back to square one. “Assume the Position” opens with a bit of an apologia, with fans--including female fans, just imagine--assuring America that Dice really is funny and his character’s misogyny is all in good fun.

Onstage, Dice preens aplenty, but he does try to back off some of his and his audience’s more unsavory impulses. He presents a couple of routines--the pathetic life of an orchestra’s tuba player, a doctor delivering some bad news--that in defter hands would be pretty funny. Dice, however, by definition lacks that kind of grace and therefore lumbers through the gags like a careening mastodon.

At the end of the day, it’s just more toilet jokes for the pre-verbal crowd, who wildly cheer his sophomoric tirades (he imagines sex with Sade and Marcia Clark). By show’s end, he’s run out of material, so he just recalls earlier glories by dragging out old leather jackets and his celebrated nursery rhymes.

Dice always deflected blame from his scabrous material, saying it was the audience response that was inappropriate. (But just what was the audience responding to, Dice? Do the math.) At one point, he grouses, “I tell a [penis] joke, and people want to give me the electric chair; what’s goin’ on in this country?” Well, Dice, problem is, it’s not a funny penis joke, and America’s a tough room for a comedian to play.

* “Assume the Position” airs at 10 tonight on HBO.