Las Vegas Weekly

June 25, 2009 · 12:42 PM

Planet Hollywood Premieres: Andrew Dice Clay, Peepshow and LOTD

By Robin Leach

Andrew Dice Clay at Sushi Samba's SugarCane Live! in the Palazzo.

Photo: Scott Harrison/Retna/www.harrisonphotos.com

It has to be some sort of a record even for Las Vegas, where we’ve become accustomed to records being set and smashed. I’ve never heard of three major shows opening on the same night -- all within four hours of one another and all under the same roof at Planet Hollywood.

First up is the 7 p.m. launch of the new Lord of the Dance touring company by Irish-American dancer Michael Flatley. Hard to believe this love vs. lust- themed show with the precision tap dance lineup of fabulous footwork has been running since summer 1996 and is still going strong. Around the world, there have been four touring companies, plus Michael’s own Feet of Flames and Celtic Tiger.

If Michael visits Las Vegas during the engagement that runs through Aug. 16 at Steve Wyrick Theater, you can be sure I’ll buttonhole him to see if he’s made any progress with his plans for an Irish-themed casino on the Strip. We don’t know until curtain up tonight how many dancers will form the Las Vegas line, but at one show in London’s Hyde Park, he set an all-time record with 100 tap dancers stretched across a 180-foot stage on three levels for one performance!

Then the casino resort’s lights are switched to Planet Holly for the 9 p.m. media premiere of Peepshow with Playboy beauty Holly Madison and co-star Shoshana Bean appearing for the first time together for us ink-stained wretches. They’ve taken over for Mel B and Kelly Monaco.

Click HERE for our coverage Tuesday morning of Holly’s debut while waiting for Shoshana to move in after her final Broadway concert. We’ll have our photos from the curtain call cast party here on Vegas Deluxe tomorrow.

The triple-threat night continues at 10:30 p.m. with the start of a four-night engagement this weekend and next with outrageous comic Andrew Dice Clay holding down the late spot at the Steve Wyrick Theater. Today’s audiences know him from Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice and VH1’s Dice Undisputed.

But the Diceman has been honing his savage comedy for 30 years and has constantly shocked his audiences by breaking the rules with a never-before-seen style of hardcore comedy. He’s been labeled “the man to hate,” and The New York Times deemed his act “the demise of Western Civilization.”

I chatted with the edgy stand-up comedian just before he arrived here on the Strip:

Robin Leach: What do you love about Vegas?

Andrew Dice Clay: It never ever got old to me as far as the excitement, no matter where I’m performing. It always hits me like, this is Vegas, and it’s always like a dream sequence to me. I’ve played the biggest places in the world, but Vegas, whether it’s a 1,300-seat room, or 1,600, or now I’m going to do 500, I’m backstage thinking, this is where the greatest of the greats played. At least the ones I loved, Sinatra, Elvis, Sammy Davis, Jerry Lewis, I mean, the greatest. Liza Minnelli used to be in the dressing room next to me at Bally’s, and when she would come in to say hello, it would be like, “That’s Liza Minnelli.” What have I got to say to her, I was a brand new star? I try to be cool about it because my whole image is the bad boy, but yet I go, “These are the greatest performers in the whole world.”

RL: You, too, get star-struck?

ADC: It never gets old; I never take it for granted. I never think I deserve this. My attitude onstage is one thing, but how I feel about things is another. That’s what I love about Vegas, the pure excitement.

RL: You deliver these incredible rants that have people literally doubled over in laughter, tears streaming down their face. You say things that nobody else would dare think, let alone say, so here’s the question. Do you do it as a stream of consciousness or is it in fact all blocked out in your mind? Do you prepare it, and if you do, where do you find this unique brand of comedy within you and your experiences?

ADC: There are two ways I perform up there. One of them, like when I do the stuff on Obama, my writing happens onstage. I never sit down and write. Since my second year of performing, and I’ve been doing it 30 years now, I never sit down with a pen and go, “What do I think is funny?” I just can’t work that way. I guess with my experience, I’ve gotten better with it. A piece like Obama, here’s our first black president, so there has to be something from Dice on this. I worked on that onstage. I think the kind of rants you’re talking about is when I go into the crowd and I build on somebody in the front row and turn it into this whole thing about their life. I think when you were there, I started talking to someone in the front, “Do you remember when you used to work, now that there’s a recession?” I will just let my mind go with that kind of thing. It’s totally stream of consciousness.

RL: Now is that a different form of comedy?

ADC: No, it’s actually something I had to teach myself, it took years to do, but what you also have to do is things that are solid, like the fat girl at the end, you have to take all these bits, the Siegfried & Roy, all these bits that are now solid bits, it’s almost like a puzzle, you have to piece it together through all this stream of consciousness. You just have to know not to go backward, not to say something you’ve already said up there because I don’t like doing the same show twice. The stream of consciousness took years of just going up there and saying, OK, don’t do any material, just stand there and look around and find the target, and then start digging in. Now if I find somebody who is no fun, I’ll move on to somebody else. You want everyone to have a good time.

RL: The rant I was thinking of was the one that had me doubled over, the turbaned terrorist in Afghanistan.

ADC: That was something new; I’ve been doing that every night since then. A lot of times when I come off stage, I’ll say, whether it be to my kids or my girlfriend, I know I said some great stuff, I’ll forget it. But sooner or later it pops up again. That’s the beauty of it.

RL: So how do you feel before you go onstage and how do you feel when you come offstage? Do you go on wound up tight, and do you come off exhausted and dripping?

ADC: I get that pre-show thing, that’s what I’m talking about how it never gets old. Like there were very rare shows where I just stand there and say, “OK, let’s go up and do the show.” There are always pre-show jitters, there’s always tightness, whether it be in my chest or my gut. And then the moment you hear those first laughs, you loosen up. And, yeah, I’m completely spent when I come off stage. That’s why I don’t like to see people after. People I work with don’t understand that you put in an eight-hour day in that hour, hour and 15 minutes. Now it’s time to relax a little.

RL: Is comedy difficult and painful as a profession?

ADC: Yeah, it can be, there are different sides to it. You might take something you’re going through in your life and put it onstage in a comedic way. I wear my emotions on my sleeve. If I’m in a bad mood, no matter what you’re going through, at the end of the day, you still have to go up there and make people laugh. That’s the job; it will come out through my comedy. If there’s someone I’m going with, I might mention that person in a comedic way through how I’m feeling, and the audience laughs. They don’t know what you’re going through; the whole idea is to make it funny.

Let’s say there is a guy in the audience with his wife. I say, “Let me tell you something, pal, you see that little fat ass of hers? You want to keep pummeling that, forget your golf for now, because anyone I see who plays golf, I find that’s a very sad life to lead when you got a fat little ass like that sitting at home, so keep pummeling that because one day, I guarantee, she will leave!” And then I turn around and say something like, “Elvis Presley was the biggest star in the world, the star of the century, it was on TV Guide, every chick in the world wanted to f*ck Elvis. Guess what? His wife left him, so let me ask you, pal, what chance you think you got?”

There are three things that I’m about: I love my kids more than the world, they’ll be opening for me in Vegas this time. I have one comic who will open the show, and then my kids will do 20 minutes. I have two boys, 14 and 18. They’re called L.A. Rocks. They’re a rock band, but they’re not the rock band of today. My son writes songs that you go, “How does he come up with these lyrics?” He’s 14, he plays the guitar, he sings incredibly, he’s just a great frontman, and my other son plays drums, it’s just the two of them. … It’s unbelievable watching them. I sweat more for them than I do for my own show.

RL: Let’s go back to your own show for a minute. Let’s talk about the limits you have. Have you ever gone over your own line? Have you ever set a line not to cross?

ADC: Yeah, years ago. I’ve learned to not make fun of real events. Many years ago, when the space shuttle exploded, I had a few lines about that, and I regretted ever saying it because these were heroes, and that’s when I realized you don’t make fun of that kind of thing. It never became a big bit or anything like that, but that’s where you don’t go. I don’t mean to cause people pain, like I would never make fun of the World Trade Center. I don’t care how many years go by, you just don’t make fun of that, there’s no joke there.

RL: Do you object to the label of being called outrageous and a foul mouth? Does it worry you in any way?

ADC: It doesn’t worry me. When people ask me about being controversial, I never set out to be controversial. That was never my aim. That just went with the territory. … I never thought it would be controversy. When I was coming up, everything that anybody ever wrote about me, it was things like, “The Cagney of Comedy,” “The James Dean of Comedy”, and then the day my special aired on HBO, The New York Times the next day, “the demise of Western Civilization.”

RL: Was that the ultimate compliment to you?

ADC: I knew that, but yet the media went nuts because they weren’t expecting me, like who’s this guy selling out these arenas. I wasn’t expecting the controversy, and it bothered me for a while. I was like, they don’t get it; I’m just entertaining people.

RL: The Celebrity Apprentice experience? Good, bad, ridiculous? How did you label it to yourself?

ADC: Ridiculous is a good word. When people call it a reality show, I have to laugh. It’s not reality; it’s a game show. I like Donald; he’s a smart man. I knew they were setting me up on that show, to get rid of me right from the start. He admitted to me when I came back for the last show: “It was the biggest mistake getting rid of you because the show was boring. There was nobody to keep it funny.” It’s like in any good show, you have the serious one, the good-looking one and the funny one. So because I called him Donny, I mean you want to talk about an ego, he couldn’t handle that I asked for certain things, but I did it funny. I even asked him before we started filming, “Do you want a good show from me or do you want me to play it straight?” He says, “No, I want a show.”

I’m just asking, I have respect for the guy, I’ve worked for him, and I’ve worked his casinos. You want me to be on your show, I’ll be on your show, but tell me how you want me to do it. For me it was fun, but if I were he, I definitely would have kept me around for a while. Yeah, because the funnier I would make it, the more the viewers would like it. They lost 22 percent of their audience when I went. Why would you do that to yourself if you’re a businessman? You hired me for a reason, but it worked for me as far as going out to do concerts again. It’s a career boost.

RL: And it’s been a long career, right?

ADC: Yeah, well I took off in ’88. It’s a long time, and I’ve been doing it 30 years. I do it the way I want to do it because it works. I’m writing a book about my life right now, and they’re thinking about turning it into a movie. Now I have a story to tell, some longevity and experiences to my life to relate. It’s like filming me, and I’ll let you in on a secret: I love writing about me.

Robin Leach has been a journalist for more than 50 years and has spent the past decade giving readers the inside scoop on Las Vegas, the world’s premier platinum playground.

Follow Robin Leach on Twitter HERE.

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