"Fag is a funny word" Clay maintains. A comedian whose on-stage persona has a long history of being slated for making homophobic, racist and misogynistic jokes is coming to New Zealand for the first time. Andrew Dice Clay, who had his heyday in the late 80s with his Brooklyn tough guy act, is a member of Queerty’s “Homophobic Stand-Up Hall of Fame” for his cracks at gay people. He'll perform a show in Auckland in October. One of his most infamous jokes is the quote: “That’s why I don’t understand this whole faggot thing. To me it’s just common sense. I don’t see how a guy lays on the beach, looks at another guy’s hairy ass and says, ‘Oh yeah, I gotta have that!” I ain’t leaving the beach till I see him!’ “And they’re too sensitive—they don’t know whether they wanna be called gays, homosexuals, fairies—I call ‘em cocksuckers. I think it spells it out.” Clay has also ridiculed AIDS victims in the past, said gay people "are not from this planet" and said there are no gay people in Brooklyn because "they're all dead, all we got is a big sign that says 'Welcome to Brooklyn, fourth largest city in America' with this dead fag hanging off the pole." He’s since stated “The jokes I told years ago were not hateful jokes. They were comedic jokes. It was really the gay activist groups that made more of a deal out of it than it was, because if they attacked me, they would get attention.” Since he’s made a comeback he still throws the word faggot around – in 2012 Rolling Stone wrote “Age has not mellowed the Diceman. Even by modern standards, his act is still shocking. He says ‘fag’ so often it's easy to lose count. ‘Gay just isn't as funny a word as faggot,’ he says.” In the same year he was questioned by Slate about one of his very first jokes when he gets on stage, giving the one of the guys in the front rows a hard time by saying he was going to “catch gay.” Clay responded “You’re going to ‘catch fag.’ I don’t say gay …” and went on to lengthily explain it was some kinds of political statement “Why would I say gay? That’s politically correct. But the other reason I say fag—number one, let’s just talk about the word fag. Fag is a funny word. To gays, it was insulting years ago, and I understand that because I have gay friends. But as a word onstage, for what I do as a comic, you don’t say, ‘You’re going to catch gay.’ It’s not funny. ‘You’re going to catch fag’ is funny. “But the reason I did the bit, honestly, is that during the presidential race, when Romney was saying that when he’s president there will be no gay marriages, I’m thinking, ‘Is this guy just a fucking idiot?’ The way it is today with this recession, people can’t afford to keep their homes anymore, everybody’s losing everything, and this guy is worried about who’s going to marry who? Whether you’re gay, straight, you can’t tell anybody who to love and who to marry. It’s unconstitutional and it’s morally wrong. And I was like, I’ve gotta do some kind of bit—because I’m not a political comic—leading up to the whole thing about the guy trying out for president saying ‘no gay marriage.’ And that’s my way of almost saying to the gay people, ‘Hey, do what you want. Do what you feel in life. Because nobody’s got that right.’ “There are points I look to make in the act. I do it in a street-tough, language-riddled act, but from the gay stuff to talking about this new generation of women, none of the stuff I’m talking about up there isn’t going on. I try to make it like cartoon pictures in peoples’ eyes—I blow it up to that level because the whole idea is to make people laugh at what animals they are behind closed doors in this day and age.”
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Monday, 11th August 2014 - 10:05am