The Comedian Who Changed My Life is Andrew Dice Clay

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The Comedian Who Changed My Life is a new series where comics talk about, you guessed it, the comedian who changed their life.

The comedian that changed my life is Andrew Dice Clay. Early 90’s…I got no direction in my life. I’m cutting lawns for a living. I’m the weed whacker guy. I wasn’t even good enough to be the riding mower guy or the big mower guy.

I had to do the weed eater guy. Just go around the fucking trees and get whatever high grass there was and cut it. Cause they didn’t trust me doing anything else. So basically I was a loser, nothing going on, drinking a 12 pack every night. Living in a shitty apartment, eating shitty food. And I put on HBO one night and I saw the Rodney Dangerfield Young Comedian special and I saw Andrew Dice Clay do his seven minutes, and it changed my life.

When he went out there with the cigarette and started doing all those dirty jokes, it put an idea in my head to do standup. I was always a big rock and music guy and a metal guy, and I couldn’t play in a band. I didn’t have any talent whatsoever in music. I tried everything but it didn’t work. I wanted to get on stage somehow, I didn’t know what I was going to do—when I saw that seven minutes. And then six months later, he followed it with his HBO special. And he was wearing a leather jacket. He brought like a rock—a rock and roll attitude toward stand up. Him and Sam Kinneson, but really Dice for me. And when he opened his HBO special—I think it was on New Year’s Eve—I stayed home and watched it. And he said, “So I got my tongue in this chick’s ass.” That line changed my life and I wanted to be a standup comic. And that was twenty years ago.

And I’m very happy that Dice was a pig back in the 90’s that said, “so I got my tongue up this chick’s ass” cause usually as a comic, you want to win the crowd over first. You don’t want to open with something like that. And just that he had the balls to do that made me get on stage.

So thank you Andrew Dice Clay. And I’ve stuck my tongue in a lot of chick’s asses since.

Jim FlorentineJim Florentine is a standup comic and co-host of VH1’s “That Metal Show” and host of “Metal Midgets” on SiriusXM satellite radio. Metal Midgets airs on Ozzy’s Boneyard at Channel 38. You can visit his website JimFlorentine.com, or follow him on twitter @MrJimFlorentine.  You can also download his podcast “Comedy Metal Midgets” on itunes.com