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Jokes like these gave the FCC an excuse to muscle and perhaps muzzle the shock jocks, notably New York City's morning maven Howard Stern. Was Stern hurt by this notoriety? Not at all: his show is now aired also in Philadelphia and Washington. Turn him on, and odds are you can't gulp down your morning coffee before you hear him say "penis." Last year, in the guise of his comic superhero Fartman, he placed a call to Iran and mercilessly berated the poor Shi'ite who picked up the phone. Fans of shock-jock jokery highly prize this rude dude. Trouble is, anyone scanning the radio dial can accidentally alight on his malice. You can't put a lockbox on a radio.
Or on Andrew Dice Clay's mouth. A few years ago, Clay was playing small clubs and working as a supporting actor. Now he is poised between stand-up and stardom. He is top-lining in two summer movies, one a comedy concert film, the other a detective spoof called The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. With his suave prole looks and his studded, studied cock-of-the-Brooklyn-walk demeanor, Clay wears the aura of danger that Hollywood wants in a movie star. So maybe he'll be one. That still leaves doubts about his popular appeal.
In Clay's comedy, woman is only a sexual convenience, a sentimental slag, a "dishrag hoo-er." For him, all romantic encounters hover between mechanical sex and date rape. "So I say to the bitch, 'Lose the bra -- or I'll cut ya.' Is that a wrong attitude?" The obvious answer is yes. Nearly everything he says is wildly heinous. Clay knows this, and so do his fans; their laughter is a release at hearing forbidden thoughts twisted into jokes. Says Leonard R.N. Ashley, an English professor at Brooklyn College: "Because the seven dirty words are in now common usage, there are different standards. The new pornography is violence, often sexual violence. And the new obscenity is race. For most people, it's O.K. to call someone a bastard but not a nigger or a kike. But Clay is saying the taboo words we don't dare use. That's why he's popular. He's telling the secrets we keep inside us."
Clay spills his latest secrets on a double comedy album, The Day the Laughter Died, which, the warning label advises us, "contains filthy language and no jokes!!!" Talk about truth in advertising: in 100 minutes of banter there are not half a dozen good dirty jokes. Yet some of the loudest laughter comes from women. Good sports at their own immolation, they giggle and groan along with their beaux. Perhaps proving they are tough is as important to them as it is to men. Others have found the spectacle less edifying. One woman at Madison Square Garden listened to Clay's sluice of abuse and said she felt like a Jew at the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Remember, she said, when pop culture was not naughty but nice?
Once there was a single official pop culture: white, middle class, mid-cult, status quo. Pretty much everybody hummed the same tunes, saw the same movies, laughed at the same genteel jokes. That changed in the '50s with rock 'n' roll. The new music took rhythm, danger and sexuality from the underground black culture, cranked the volume up, electrified it and handed it to a brand new consumer group: white teenagers. The young connoisseurs of metal and raunch are similarly adrift from the entertainment that amuses or moves today's adults.