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      in Movies

      Minute-Long Soap Operas Are Here. Is America Ready?

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      Popularized in China during the pandemic, ReelShort and other apps are hoping to bring minute-by-minute melodramas to the United States.When Albee Zhang received an offer to produce cheesy short-form features made for phones last spring, she was skeptical, and so, she declined.But the offers kept coming. Finally, Ms. Zhang, who has been a producer for 12 years, realized it could be a profitable new way of storytelling and said yes.Since last summer, she has produced two short-form features and is working on four more for several apps that are creating cookie-cutter content aimed at women.Think: Lifetime movie cut up into TikTok videos. Think: soap opera, but for the short attention span of the internet age.The biggest player in this new genre is ReelShort, an app that offers melodramatic content in minute-long, vertically shot episodes and is hoping to bring a successful formula established abroad to the United States by hooking millions of people on its short-form content.“The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband” is one of the many short features you can watch on ReelShort, an app that offers short dramatic content meant to be watched on phones. ReelShort

      @reelshortapp On your 18th birthday, the Moon Goddess granted you a RED wolf. She said a new journey awaited you, but there were also evil forces after your power… Called weak your whole life, what POWER could you possibly have?! #fyp #reelshort #binge #bingeworthy #bingewatching #obsessed #obsession #mustwatch #witch #alpha #werewolf #moon #wolfpack #booktok #luna #drama #film #movie #tiktok #tv #tvseries #shortclips #tvclips #filmtok #movietok #dramatok #romance #love #marriage #relationship #couple #dramatiktok #filmtiktok #movietiktoks #saturday #saturdayvibes #saturdaymood #saturdaymotivation #saturdayfeels #saturdayfeeling #weekend #weekendvibes ♬ original sound – ReelShort APP We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Music

      Fake Explicit Taylor Swift Images Swamp Social Media

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      Fans of the star and lawmakers condemned the images, probably generated by artificial intelligence, after they were shared with millions of social media users.Fake, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift likely generated by artificial intelligence spread rapidly across social media platforms this week, disturbing fans who saw them and reigniting calls from lawmakers to protect women and crack down on the platforms and technology that spread such images.One image shared by a user on X, formerly Twitter, was viewed 47 million times before the account was suspended on Thursday. X suspended several accounts that posted the faked images of Ms. Swift, but the images were shared on other social media platforms and continued to spread despite those companies’ efforts to remove them.While X said it was working to remove the images, fans of the pop superstar flooded the platform in protest. They posted related keywords, along with the sentence “Protect Taylor Swift,” in an effort to drown out the explicit images and make them more difficult to find.Reality Defender, a cybersecurity company focused on detecting A.I., determined with 90 percent confidence that the images were created using a diffusion model, an A.I.-driven technology accessible through more than 100,000 apps and publicly available models, said Ben Colman, the company’s co-founder and chief executive.As the A.I. industry has boomed, companies have raced to release tools that enable users to create images, videos, text and audio recordings with simple prompts. The A.I. tools are wildly popular but have made it easier and cheaper than ever to create so-called deepfakes, which portray people doing or saying things they have never done.Researchers now fear that deepfakes are becoming a powerful disinformation force, enabling everyday internet users to create nonconsensual nude images or embarrassing portrayals of political candidates. Artificial intelligence was used to create fake robocalls of President Biden during the New Hampshire primary, and Ms. Swift was featured this month in deepfake ads hawking cookware.“It’s always been a dark undercurrent of the internet, nonconsensual pornography of various sorts,” said Oren Etzioni, a computer science professor at the University of Washington who works on deepfake detection. “Now it’s a new strain of it that’s particularly noxious.”“We are going to see a tsunami of these A.I.-generated explicit images. The people who generated this see this as a success,” Mr. Etzioni said.X said it had a zero-tolerance policy toward the content. “Our teams are actively removing all identified images and taking appropriate actions against the accounts responsible for posting them,” a representative said in a statement. “We’re closely monitoring the situation to ensure that any further violations are immediately addressed, and the content is removed.”X has seen an increase in problematic content including harassment, disinformation and hate speech since Elon Musk bought the service in 2022. He has loosened the website’s content rules and fired, laid off or accepted the resignations of staff members who worked to remove such content. The platform also reinstated accounts that had been previously banned for violating rules.Although many of the companies that produce generative A.I. tools ban their users from creating explicit imagery, people find ways to break the rules. “It’s an arms race, and it seems that whenever somebody comes up with a guardrail, someone else figures out how to jailbreak,” Mr. Etzioni said.The images originated in a channel on the messaging app Telegram that is dedicated to producing such images, according to 404 Media, a technology news site. But the deepfakes garnered broad attention after being posted on X and other social media services, where they spread rapidly.Some states have restricted pornographic and political deepfakes. But the restrictions have not had a strong impact, and there are no federal regulations of such deepfakes, Mr. Colman said. Platforms have tried to address deepfakes by asking users to report them, but that method has not worked, he added. By the time they are flagged, millions of users have already seen them.“The toothpaste is already out of the tube,” he said.Ms. Swift’s publicist, Tree Paine, did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Thursday.The deepfakes of Ms. Swift prompted renewed calls for action from lawmakers. Representative Joe Morelle, a Democrat from New York who introduced a bill last year that would make sharing such images a federal crime, said on X that the spread of the images was “appalling,” adding: “It’s happening to women everywhere, every day.”“I’ve repeatedly warned that AI could be used to generate non-consensual intimate imagery,” Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of the images on X. “This is a deplorable situation.”Representative Yvette D. Clarke, a Democrat from New York, said that advancements in artificial intelligence had made creating deepfakes easier and cheaper.“What’s happened to Taylor Swift is nothing new,” she said. More

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      in Television

      What to Watch This Weekend: Something Hot

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      Our TV critic recommends a wild and wide-ranging documentary series about the world of hot pepper enthusiasts.Johnny Scoville, a YouTube star and central figure in the documentary series “Superhot: The Spicy World of Pepper People.”HuluDocumentaries about niche subcultures abound: dog dancing, science fairs, yo-yos. Few if any include as much on-screen vomiting as the Hulu series “Superhot: The Spicy World of Pepper People,” but then, few cover quite as much ground.“Pepper” follows the overlapping pursuits of a handful of pepper enthusiasts, whose interests lie in the hottest of the hots, peppers that induce sweating, crying and retching within minutes. Some of the featured subjects are more into the horticultural side, while others are more into online public masochism. Many acknowledge the overlap between drug use and pepper-eating, that the thrill of spiciness has replaced more dangerous and illicit substances in their lives, that once they found peppers, capsaicin became their drug of choice.The try-hard glibness of a lot of the narration (voiced by Ben Schwartz) undercuts the show’s more intriguing ideas, as if “Pepper” didn’t always know what it has. This is, deeply, a show about social media, about being famous to 15 people, about the rush and reality of online connections. It is also about the ways in which consuming too much internet narrows your vision and imagination, until you forget that posting is not the same thing as existing. It’s a big world out there, filled almost entirely with people who have never heard of any of your heroes and never will.Much like the featured growers who combine strains to cultivate extreme heat, “Pepper” combines documentary and reality formats to keep its 10 episodes moving. Early on, the show’s most endearing heroine, a Chicago nurse, “comes out” to her co-worker pals about her pepper and hot sauce hobby. It’s a scene straight out of “Queer Eye” or any number of real estate shows, an awkward party where a teary sweetheart receives support. Another episode is knockoff “Top Chef,” with people vying for a chance to develop a hot sauce for a food chain. (I’m genuinely surprised this was not developed as its own stand-alone show.)The segments about competitive pepper-eating mirror every sport documentary, with sage champions eventually compensating for their relentlessness by turning to Buddhist philosophy to help with “managing desire.” When some growers become extra suspicious about thievery and back-stabbing, “Pepper” apes Netflix’s true crime aesthetics.“Pepper” opts for breadth instead of depth, and what it lacks in insight it makes up for in volume of people calling each other “brother.” This is a series with experts who joke about putting toilet paper in the freezer, so maybe it isn’t reasonable to expect some mention that humans have been fascinated by altered states and ritualized body mortification throughout history. Fair enough. There’s still more than enough heat here for a fun, edifying ride. (Again, though: lots and lots of throwing up.) More

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      in Movies

      Gypsy Rose Blanchard and the Big Shift in True Crime

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      Not long ago, true crime storytellers had little in the way of first-person footage captured in real time to rely on. Now, as much of our daily lives are documented, the genre is transforming.There’s a moment near the end of the 2017 documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest” where Gypsy Rose Blanchard is filming her boyfriend at the time, Nicholas Godejohn, as he lies nude in a hotel room bed. A day earlier, Godejohn had stabbed to death Gypsy’s mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. The killing was part of a plot the couple hatched to free Gypsy, who was then 23, from her mother’s grip so they could be together. In the short video, we hear Gypsy make a playful sexual comment amid her copious, distinctive giggling.Dee Dee Blanchard had abused and controlled her daughter, mentally and physically, for decades. It was believed by many to be a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy — a form of child abuse in which a caregiver might induce illness to draw public sympathy, care, concern and material gifts — and the saga captured the collective interest.The snippet is the first time we see it unfolding through Gypsy’s eyes, and the point of view serves as a glimmer of what would become one of the biggest shifts in true crime storytelling.Stories like these were once conveyed through re-enactments, dramatizations and interviews with police officers, journalists, medical professionals, family and friends. If there were primary sources, those were typically scans of photos of happy families or of grisly crime scenes underpinned by voice-over narration, exemplified on shows like “20/20,” “Dateline,” “Snapped,” “Forensic Files” and “48 hours.” Home video cameras, which became popular in the 1980s, certainly changed the true crime landscape, but those recordings were generally sparse and supplemental. In rare instances, viewers might hear directly from the perpetrators or victims in interviews often conducted years after the fact.Dee Dee Blanchard, right, with her daughter, Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who endured decades of physical and mental abuse by her mother. via The Blanchard Family/LifetimeNow we have reams of first-person digital footage, which means that viewers, more than ever, are privy to the perspectives of those directly involved, often during the period in which the crimes took place, closing the distance and making the intermediaries less essential. The case of Gypsy Rose Blanchard encapsulates the trajectory of this phenomenon. Her saga, for example, received the scripted treatment with “The Act,” a 2019 limited series on Hulu, for which Patricia Arquette won an Emmy. But those looking for a definitive, unvarnished, visceral take on the events now have options and direct channels, rendering that series as almost an afterthought.The rise of social media has, of course, accelerated this dynamic. Blanchard and Godejohn’s relationship was almost exclusively online before the murder, and Facebook posts and text messages between them were used in court by prosecutors to incriminate them. Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison; Gypsy received 10 years, of which she served about seven.She was released on Dec. 28, 2023, and the following day she posted a selfie to Instagram with the caption “First selfie of freedom,” which has gotten more than 6.5 million likes. Online, she’s been promoting her new Lifetime series, “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.” “This docuseries chronicles my quest to expose the hidden parts of my life that have never been revealed until now,” we hear her say from prison.Blanchard and her husband married in 2022 while she was still in prison. via Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Ryan AndersonShe has quickly become a social media celebrity, with more than eight million Instagram followers and nearly 10 million on TikTok. Since her release, she has shared lighthearted videos like one with her husband, Ryan Anderson (they married in 2022 while she was in prison), at “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” on Broadway and more serious ones, like a video in which she explains Munchausen syndrome by proxy.Technology’s influence on modern criminal investigations has become foundational in many documentaries from recent years.In the two-part HBO documentary “I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter” (2019), the story is largely told through the thousands of text messages exchanged between two teenagers, Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy III, from 2012 to 2014. The text messages led up to the exact moment of Roy’s suicide. Selfie videos that Roy had posted online are also shown. Carter spent about a year in prison for her role in his death. The documentary (by Erin Lee Carr, who also directed “Mommy Dead and Dearest”) left me “spinning in circles, turning over thoughts about accountability, coercion and the nebulous boundaries of technology,” as I wrote last year.One of the highest profile murder trials in the United States in recent years — that of the disgraced lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who shot and killed his wife, Maggie, and son Paul in 2021 — ultimately rested on a staggering recording captured moments before the murders. That video, on Paul’s phone, placed the patriarch at the scene of the crime, sealing his fate: two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.Alex Murdaugh, center, as seen in the Netflix docuseries “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal.” His murder trial was among the most talked about in recent years.NetflixThe use of that footage, along with abundant smartphone video that brought viewers into the world of the Murdaughs, in documentaries like Netflix’s two-season “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal,” would have been unimaginable not long ago.But perhaps no recent offering illustrates this shift like HBO’s docuseries “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God.” Members of the group Love Has Won live-streamed their days and nights; they filmed and posted untold hours of preachments and online manifestoes to YouTube and Instagram Live. Much of the three-episode series comprises this footage, and in turn viewers watch Amy Carlson, who called herself “Mother God,” slowly deteriorate over the course of months from the perspective of the people who were worshiping her.It’s a vantage point so unnerving and haunting, it dissolves the line between storytelling and voyeurism. When the group films her corpse, which they cart across numerous state lines, camping with it along the way, we see all that, too, through the eyes of the devotees. Several of the followers continue to promote her teachings online.Amy Carlson, center, who led a group called Love Has Won, as seen in the HBO docuseries “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God.”HBOIt was clear this month in the comments on Blanchard’s Instagram that many were uncomfortable with her re-emerging as a social media presence. Some found it odd that she would participate so heavily and publicly immediately after her release. Others thought it was in bad taste for her to celebrate her freedom while Godejohn serves a life sentence.The greatest criticism of the true crime genre is that horrors are being repackaged as guilty-pleasure entertainment, allowing viewers to get close — but not too close — to terrible things. And perhaps the best defense of true crime is that it allows viewers to process the scary underbelly of our world safely. It is a strange dance between knowledge, observation and entertainment.Either way, the fourth wall is cracking, and perhaps the discomfort this might cause has been a long time coming. More

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      in Music

      That Spotify Daylist That Really ‘Gets’ You? It Was Written by A.I.

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      The music-streaming platform’s new “daylist” feature serves users three personalized playlists a day, with titles ranging from quirky to bewildering.Have your Sunday scaries ever given way to a “Nervous Ocean Monday Morning”? Does the weekend truly begin on Friday, or on a “Wild and Free Chaotic Thursday Afternoon”? How should one dress for a “Paranormal Dark Cabaret Evening”?Those odd strings of words are titles of “daylists,” a newish offering from the music-streaming giant Spotify. The feature provides users three new algorithmically generated playlists a day, each with an ultra-specific title that practically begs to be screencapped and posted.The often baffling titles have recently captured the attention of social media, propelling the service to fresh popularity about four months after its September debut. In post after post, users seem amused by the feature’s ability to see right through them.“Spotify called me out a little bit with this daylist,” one X user wrote of her own playlist. Its title: “Midwest Emo Flannel Tuesday Early Morning.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Music

      Female Rappers in the Spotlight Make Room for Motherhood

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      As their influence and success continue to grow, artists including Sexyy Red and Cardi B are destigmatizing motherhood for hip-hop performers.When the rapper Sexyy Red realized she was pregnant with her second child this summer, just after her singles “Pound Town” and “SkeeYee” broke through on the charts and dominated TikTok, her excitement was met with hesitancy by some members of her team.She said some people in her camp were supportive. Others advised her to have an abortion, counsel she rejected. “I’m not never going to let nobody tell me what to do with my body,” she said during a video call in December.Sexyy, born Janae Wherry, publicly announced her pregnancy via an Instagram post on the heels of the release of “Rich Baby Daddy,” a hit collaboration with Drake and SZA. Now in her final trimester, she often performs in belly-hugging unitards as she twerks and raps her hits, taking her 3-year-old son, Chuckyy, on the road with help from her mother.Women in music, and particularly in the male-dominated battle zone of hip-hop, have long been advised to terminate pregnancies, or at least to recede from the spotlight until their babies were delivered, told that showcasing pregnancy and motherhood would make them seem weak, unappealing or unfocused on their highly competitive careers. Male-led rap crews and record labels have traditionally put their might behind one female M.C. at a time, creating pressure for women to not cede their moment for anything, including starting a family.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Movies

      Marie Irvine, Makeup Artist to Marilyn Monroe, Dies at 99

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      Late in Ms. Monroe’s life, Ms. Irvine was her go-to makeup artist in New York City. Earlier this month, she became a TikTok sensation.Marie Irvine was 99 years old when a chapter in her long-ago career became a TikTok sensation. During a crucial period late in Marilyn Monroe’s life, Ms. Irvine had been her makeup artist in New York City. When a TikTok star learned her story, it blew up the internet.In 1958, Life magazine commissioned Richard Avedon to reimagine Ms. Monroe as the screen and stage sirens Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Theda Bara, Jean Harlow and Lillian Russell. It was Ms. Irvine who assisted with her makeup — turning her into Ms. Russell’s candy-box pinup, and Ms. Dietrich’s steamy Lola Lola from the film “The Blue Angel.”It ran in the Dec. 22 issue of the magazine, with a piece written by Ms. Monroe’s husband at the time, the playwright Arthur Miller, with the headline, “My Wife Marilyn.” He described the photos “as a kind of history of our mass fantasy, so far as seductresses are concerned.”And when Ms. Monroe, having been sewn into her skintight sequined gown, sang a breathless “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy at a Democratic fund-raiser at Madison Square Garden in May of 1962, it was Ms. Irvine who prepared her beforehand in Ms. Monroe’s apartment on East 57th Street, and then rushed to the Garden later with the star’s drop earrings, because she had left them behind.Erin Parsons, a 45-year-old makeup artist and TikTok star with a passion for vintage makeup and Ms. Monroe, had read of Ms. Irvine’s small part in these iconic moments, and she tracked her down to learn more. And when she posted about her search on Jan. 8, her video went viral.More than a million people have viewed it, and it has accrued more than 1,600 comments. One woman was particularly moved by the $125 fee Ms. Irvine had charged for her services on the night of the Garden event, the equivalent of more than $1,200 today. (Ms. Parsons had a photo of the bill, an artifact which sold at auction for $1,152, and showed it in her video.)“We stan a queen that knows what her skills were worth!” the commenter wrote. “I bow down.”Ms. Irvine circa 1967. She helped transform Marilyn Monroe into stars like Marlene Dietrich and Jean Harlow for Richard Avedon’s famous Life magazine shoot in 1958.Courtesy Horan family, via Charlotte BentleyMs. Irvine died a week after Ms. Parsons’ post, on Jan. 15, at a care facility in Sarasota, Fla. Her daughter, Jane Bentley Sullivan, announced her death.Ms. Irvine was not the architect of Ms. Monroe’s signature look. Her sleepy, bedroom gaze, articulated by the swoop of her liquid eyeliner; her bright red moue; and that beauty mark were the star’s own creations, conceived with her longtime West Coast-based makeup artist, Whitey Snyder. Her fans and fetishists, from Norman Mailer to Ms. Parsons’ audience, knew that she used a secret blend of three shades of lipstick and a gloss made with Vaseline. Mr. Mailer spends a page describing it in his 1973 biography, “Marilyn.”Ms. Irvine met Ms. Monroe because she was an on-call makeup artist to Mr. Avedon in the 1950s, and he hired Ms. Irvine to help with the Life magazine project. It took three months to complete, largely because of Ms. Monroe’s erratic schedule.“We could shoot it only when Marilyn felt like it,” Ms. Irvine told an interviewer in 2014. “Sometimes it was in the middle of the night with a short notice. One time it was such a short notice, that I couldn’t find a babysitter so Marilyn said, ‘Bring your baby to the set.’”(That was Ms. Sullivan, who was 9 months old at the time.)“So it was like a family atmosphere,” Ms. Irvine added. “She told me how much she wanted a baby.”Ms. Irvine was self-effacing and discreet. Her earliest clients were society figures, like Thelma Foy, the daughter of Walter Chrysler, the automobile magnate, a swan who often appeared in Vogue and on an annual list of the 10 best-dressed women in the United States. When Ms. Foy became ill with leukemia, Ms. Irvine’s role shifted from preparing her for photo shoots to helping her hide the ravages of cancer. Ms. Foy died of the disease in 1957, in her early 50s.Marie Irvine was born on Dec. 16, 1924, in Pawling, N.Y., in Dutchess County, the only child of William and Theresa (Brendlin) Irvine. She attended a one-room schoolhouse through grade school. She moved to New York City in her late teens and trained to be a secretary at the Katharine Gibbs School — otherwise known as Katie Gibbs to generations of white-gloved young women — but found the prospect of secretarial work too boring.She found a job at Elizabeth Arden, at the flagship salon with the distinctive red door at 691 Fifth Avenue that served the ladies of the carriage trade, where she became a beauty adviser and color specialist for the company.Toward the end of World War II, Ms. Irvine met a naval officer at Delmonico’s restaurant when he was on leave; they married in 1947. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Sullivan, Ms. Irvine is survived by a son, who requested anonymity for himself and his father, whose name he shares, and two grandchildren. Ms. Irvine’s husband died in 1994.When her daughter was born in 1957, Ms. Irvine left Elizabeth Arden and became a freelance makeup artist, working for photographers like Mr. Avedon, Irving Penn, John Rawlings and Harold Krieger. She did commercial work, too, notably coating the actors who played the Jolly Green Giant, the mascot created to sell canned vegetables, in layers of green greasepaint.In the late ’60s, Ms. Irvine and her family moved from Queens to Essex County, N.J. Her husband, general counsel for a security firm, did not want his wife to continue working, so she retired — and learned to drive at 44.Once she left the fashion world behind, she rarely spoke of it.Ms. Parsons, the TikTok star, had many questions for Ms. Irvine that she was unable to answer before her death. She hoped the former makeup artist could illuminate the histories of the sort of esoterica that transfix Monroe obsessives: For instance, did Robert Champion, a hairdresser who was at the Garden when Ms. Monroe sang, really touch up her makeup and blot her lips with a tissue (an artifact that belongs to the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Museum in Orlando, Fla.)? Did Ms. Irvine recognize a gold lipstick tube that once belonged to Ms. Monroe that Ms. Parsons had won at auction for $15,625?Ms. Irvine was pleased she’d had her own moment of fame, though she wished, as she told her daughter, that the attention came when she had more energy to pursue it.“I told her that the important thing was that it had happened at all,” Ms. Sullivan said. “She was an original and one of a kind laboring in obscurity to create many beautiful images with the pioneering photographers of the 20th century. After all, how many 99-year-olds who attended one-room schoolhouses go on to be TikTok stars?” More

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      in Television

      Hickory Dickory Dock. It’s Andrew Dice Clay on TikTok.

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      In his feed on the app, the stand-up offers to help bewildered passers-by or pose for a photo. It’s an approach to fame and persona that puts his comedy in a new light.The first shot is a crooked view of a sparse Christmas tree on a narrow median in Manhattan traffic. The second is a confused man walking his dog. Then the camera swivels to show us none other than Andrew Dice Clay, tentatively muttering in a “Guys and Dolls” accent, “You wanted a picture in front of the tree with me?”The man with the dog doesn’t recognize him, his glance shifting from discomfort to pity. “I’ll take a picture of you,” he says condescendingly. Then we return to Clay stammering: “I thought you wanted one? No?”This 14-second-long video is a disarming slice of life, a minor comic humiliation staged with impromptu precision. It’s part of an oddly delightful project undertaken by Clay, the notorious comedian, now in his 60s. He still performs blustery leather-jacketed stand-up (he plays Carnegie Hall on Feb. 15), but he’s portrayed in a very different light in his social media posts: a self-deprecating series of vignettes that clash with his image while also bringing him back to his forgotten roots.

      @andrewdiceclay What Just Happened. #andrewdiceclay #comedian #comedy #newyork #christmas #tree ♬ original sound – Andrew Dice Clay We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More