The Filthy Truth

August 25, 2014
Clay rocketed to stand-up comedy stardom in the late 1980s on the back of his “Diceman” persona—a loutish, leather-clad loudmouth talking trash about women and gays to fans who, Clay says, knew he “was gonna be raunchy and funny and not give a fuck who I offended.” Those fans will be more than satisfied with Clay’s pedestrian rags-to-riches narrative, starting with his youth in Brooklyn and moving through his professional peak in 1990, when he sold out Madison Square Garden and controversially hosted Saturday Night Live. Clay describes in detail almost every sexual encounter in his life, and includes many of his most popular stage bits, such as his dirty nursery rhymes (“Little Boy Blue, he needed the money”). But Clay, writing with Ritz (who’s coauthored books with Don Rickles, Cornel West, and Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry), doesn’t do much to rein in his enormous ego—in his description of a scene in the film Pretty in Pink in which he wraps his arm around his head to light a cigarette, he says that the gesture “that turned me into a cult favorite of comedy film fans and became one of my most beloved signature moves.” The result is a one-note, self-congratulatory account of a one-note career.