Comedian Andrew Dice Clay will be remembered for his dirty nursery rhymes. At the height of the comedian’s popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, fans attending his stand-up shows would yell out the punchlines to his jokes like concertgoers singing along to their favorite musician’s songs. You’ve probably heard some variation of them at one point or another: “Jack and Jill went up the hill, both with a buck and quarter. Jill came down with two-fifty.” And who could forget the now-iconic, “Little boy blew. He needed the money.” Here’s a video featuring some of his more well-known lines:
But although Clay had tremendous success with his adult takes on famous poems, he was hardly the first person to incorporate them into his act. As a matter of fact, Redd Foxx was touching on the subject of dirty nursery rhymes well before Clay came around. “‘Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,’” said Foxx in an early recording, “You’ll break your neck trying to blow your horn.” George Carlin also had his own nursery rhyme bit as far back as 1974, which you can listen to below.
This could all very well be chalked up to parallel thinking, but even some of Clay’s specific lines predate his stand-up act. According to comedian Ritch Shydner, a number of Clay’s nursery rhymes were previously done by Otto Petersen, who reportedly confronted Clay about stealing his act in the 1980s. But did Petersen come up with all of them himself? Take, for example, this legendary Clay joke: “Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider, he sat down beside her, he said, ‘Hey, what’s in the bowl, bitch?’” Now take a look at this clip of George Clinton using a very similar version of that during a 1976 concert:
Is it possible that Clay saw the Clinton show and decided to use the joke himself? Maybe. But in fairness, it’s also possible that these reimagined nursery rhymes have existed for a lot longer than any of us realize, and that none of the entertainers who utilized them thought them up on their own. Hell, here’s Jimi Hendrix doing Clay’s “Old Mother Hubbard” joke in 1970:
Now, it’s easy to assume that Clay stole the line from Hendrix, but here’s the problem with that assessment: the Hendrix song in question wasn’t actually released until 2024. At the end of the day, it would appear that we may never know who the true authors were of these rhymes. Chances are they were passed around by kids for decades, much like the “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” song used in the debut episode of The Simpsons. And if we’re not going to accuse The Simpsons of stealing, we probably should extend Clay that same courtesy. Unless, of course, he did lift the lines from Otto Petersen as suggested, but then again, if they all predate Petersen, isn’t he guilty of the same thing?
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