He struts onstage, and 17,000 New Yorkers start to cheer. Andrew Dice Clay tells jokes for a living -- dirty jokes, stag-party jokes, jokes designed to singe a churchgoer's soul and turn a feminist's stomach -- but he attracts crowds whose size and ardor would thrill a rock star. In sold-out Madison Square Garden, he looks like a samurai biker, with Brando's pout, Elvis' sideburns and a sequined jacket, its back stitched with the phrase DICE RULES. And he does too. He is America's rajah of comic raunch, ready to beguile fans who dress like him and talk like him and who have memorized his earlier routines from hit records and HBO specials. "I know you know the old s," he slurs between drags on a cigarette. "But it's a new decade, and I got new filth for ya." And he does too. Again the crowd roars.
So are the '90s destined to be the Filth Decade? What has happened to comedy, not to mention the English language, if a scoundrel like Clay can twist these fine old instruments to touch minds and make a mint? Clay may be at the rough edge of popular entertainment, but he stands there proud as well as profane, and he does not stand alone.
There's an acrid tang in nearly every area of modern American pop culture. Heavy-metal masters Motley Crue invoke images of satanism and the Beastie Boys mime masturbation onstage. Rap poets like N.W.A. and the 2 Live Crew call for the fire of war against police or the brimstone of explicit, sulfurous sex. Comedians like Sam Kinison and Howard Stern bring locker-room laughs to cable TV and morning radio. On network television, sitcom moms get snickers with innuendos about oral sex. In movies, the F word has become so common, like dirty wallpaper, the industry's conservative ratings board doesn't even bother to punish the occasional use of it with a restrictive R rating.
Words and ideas formerly on the extremes have engulfed the cultural mainstream. But have they polluted it? Many people think so. The moral right wing surely does, and it has friends in powerful places. Senator Jesse Helms fights to force artists to forswear any unwholesome intentions before receiving Government support. Alfred Sikes, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, leans on radio disk jockeys to clean up their acts. No less than the FBI sends a warning letter to a rap group. Susan Baker (wife of the Secretary of State) and Tipper Gore (wife of the Tennessee Senator), founders of the Parents' Music Resource Center, lobby for proscriptive labeling of certain albums. John Cardinal O'Connor, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, inveighs against an Ozzy Osbourne song whose theme is suicide.
Stranded in the middle are the majority of Americans. They wonder at the effluence of raw language and worry about its impact on old-fashioned notions of civilized discourse. Is there room for subtlety and gentility in a culture overrun by expressions of gross intolerance? And what impact will this culture have on the first generation to grow up within it? Does this stuff have artistic merit? Is it tonic or toxic? Can we dance to it or comfortably laugh at it? Should we march against it or just sit back and enjoy it?