Andrew "Dice" Clay mostly preaches to the converted these days, but his anachronistic Brooklyn mook persona is useful for lampooning the wired consumer culture. Photo by Ronda Churchill

You have to see him to believe it, but Andrew "Dice" Clay argues a halfway good case for why we need him today.

You remember the chain-smoking, trash-talking Brooklyn mook with the slicked-back hair and leather jacket? He may be anachronistic, but sometimes it takes an outsider to call us out.

"You just took it too far. Everything," he says. "Look what you've done to yourselves over a phone... You're 55. Why do you have to hear half a Led Zeppelin tune (as a ringtone) before you pick up the phone?"

But if you catch the end of Clay's long stretch at the Luxor this weekend, you will be reminded "The Diceman" is the creation of another person born Andrew Silverstein. He's the doting father of two sons -- he proves this by trotting them out and showing them to you -- who is said to be nothing like the character he inhabits onstage.

This is where it gets a bit confusing. Clay's current stage act blurs the two, and leaves the audience to sort it out.

Some routines only work in the Diceman guise. The original controversy surrounding Clay in the early '90s sort of divided on how you rolled with the concept of the Dice persona as a big goof. If you go with the notion that he's role-playing, the character is even funnier now, waving an unlit cigarette and throwing out his macho bull with hammy arms and receding hairline.

A long treatise on the joys of shoplifting is tailored to the character. He tells you the 7-Eleven wouldn't put the aspirin in such small bottles and charge $8.50 if you weren't supposed to pocket it. And that if you slip the shoe salesman a $20 when you send him back to check on a different size, he knows you won't be there with the first pair when he comes back.

Other routines would be funny to people who long ago decided they hate the Diceman for his foul attitude about women. If there were such a thing as a blindfolded comedy test, they would catch themselves laughing at bits that, in purist terms, are too smart for the original Dice to think about.

(Not that they will, with tickets at $86.05. You have to question the logic of filling half a theater with 500 or so fans at this price, when cheaper tickets might draw the curious to some of those empty seats. But that's his business.)

He cites impressionist Danny Gans as an example of "what Vegas can do." Before you come to town, he explains, you've never heard of Gans and never wanted to. Then you see the big video screen at the airport. Then you see the billboards outside the airport. Then you see the big sign in front of The Mirage. "By the time you get to your room, you're in a panic to see Danny Gans."

Granted, these moments are few and fall between the more purely Diceman moments. But there are enough of them that, by the end, the charitable will find the anti-female venom defanged by the silliness of him doing a Jerry Lewis imitation in front of his 11-year-old son Dillan.

And for those gents who come because they don't see the joke and actually believe what Dice has to tell them? Even they might see the absurdity of it by the time Clay does his version of the Las Vegas impressionist thing. "See, when I turn around, I'm gonna be Stallone. Not yet, I'm still me... Still me ... Still me.. but when I turn around ...."

Or the bit about masturbation that will forever spoil your ability to watch a Senor Wences-style hand puppet.

On the whole, the Luxor stint is more upbeat than the dreary, vaguely depressing 2002 show I caught at the Stardust. Mostly, Dice could stand a little self-editing, and not just on the hard-core raunch talk that sometimes loses the focus between funny and just plain gross.

He could lose the weird showcase of his two musician sons that leaves the audience unsure of how to react. He could have the lads provide the musical finale, instead of bringing on a separate grown-up band just to play two songs.

But the rock 'n' roll ending will remind longtime fans of the good old days, when he ended shows this way in front of huge arena audiences. And unless the comedian can convince everyone else he's worth a new look, longtime fans are the ones Clay needs to keep happy now.