He insisted that “the real acting award I should get is for what I’ve done in comedy for 40 years.” While I sat with him I remembered looking around at the audience in Vegas a week earlier. One fan was cackling with joy , and another had a look of horror and confusion on her face that screamed: “What exactly am I witnessing here?” I felt like both of them at once.

This weekend, Mr. Clay may take home an award as part of the “Star Is Born” ensemble at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Though he’s bringing the comedian Eleanor Kerrigan, a close friend, as his date, he’s hoping to meet a woman that night, as he did at the movie’s premiere, because he just doesn’t want to do the dating app thing that his sons have tried talking him into.

Of course, when he took the woman from the premiere out to Craig’s, a restaurant in West Hollywood, things ended awkwardly. “For two and a half hours I’m telling this girl I’m very regular and very grounded,” he said. “And when we leave, it’s bulb mania. The paparazzi was all over me. ‘Dice! Dice!’”

He ended up taking her to the Comedy Store that night so she could watch him do an impromptu set, as he sometimes does on Monday nights, because “I need to know if a girl can accept what I do.”

The only woman who couldn’t, he said, was his first wife. (He’s got a story about being served with those divorce papers while he was at an outdoor cafe with Mickey Rourke, if you’ve got the time.)

Whether or not he scores at the awards, Mr. Clay may come home, smoke a joint with Max and Dillon , and watch something on Netflix, which he signed up for a few months ago. The night before I visited, he and the boys were up until 5 a.m. watching Adam Sandler in “50 First Dates.”