Stop us if you’ve heard this one: a brash, vaguely charismatic vulgarian manages to lodge himself firmly in the public consciousness, via a mixture of mean-spirited comedy, misogyny, and volume. And if you can’t distinguish whether the previous sentence was referring to ’80s shock comic Andrew Dice Clay, or tomorrow’s president, Donald Trump, well, that’s the point Clay is making, too. The nursery rhyming stand-up went on Conan tonight to promote his Showtime series Dice, and took a moment to accuse Trump of ripping off his distinctively awful on-stage style.
“The guy stole my whole act,” Clay joked, while also accusing Trump of stealing his wardrobe from his old colleague Rodney Dangerfield. Trump and Clay do actually know each other, of course; the stand-up appeared on the second season of The Celebrity Apprentice, where he provided plenty of fodder for YouTube clips with improbable names like “Andrew Dice Clay offends Donald Trump.” Clay seemed a little rueful about Trump’s rise to power, though, malaproping that it could have been him getting “invigorated” tomorrow if he’d taken his comic sexism to its natural extremes. (At the very least, he might have gotten a second invite to host SNL.)