With the exception of Bill Cosby, no comic has fallen further than Andrew Dice Clay. Less than two decades after selling out Madison Square Garden, he was performing in the back room of a sushi restaurant in Las Vegas. To critics, he was a joke, shorthand for hateful stand-up peddling sexism and homophobia. “He will always be vilified,” Chuck Klosterman wrote in his 2013 book, “I Wear the Black Hat,” arguing against the possibility of career rehabilitation, “and dying won’t help.”

And yet there he was in a Midtown hotel room on Tuesday, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he flipped open a Zippo lighter with a lucky horseshoe on it, boasting about the set he was going to perform on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in a few hours. “When I come on Fallon, it will be like Babe Ruth,” he said, enunciating consonants as if he were angry with them. “I owe it to the public to just devastate.”

At 58, Mr. Clay is making an unlikely comeback. After a series of cameos on “Entourage,” he earned admiring reviews playing tough guys in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine” and the HBO series “Vinyl.” On Sunday, there’s the premiere of the Showtime series “Dice,” a “Curb Your Enthusiasm”-style portrait of him. There has even been a small reconsideration of his legacy, a sense among some comics and critics that beneath his blustery poses is a daring artist with an experimental instinct.

Andrew Dice Clay was never a comic so much as an elaborately manufactured character invented by Andrew Clay Silverstein, a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who got his start with an act in which an impression of Jerry Lewis from “The Nutty Professor” transformed into John Travolta from “Grease.” This nerd-to-stud transition earned him a spot on “The Joe Franklin Show,” but he knew it wouldn’t get him where he wanted: Hollywood. So in the early 1980s, he invented Dice, a name he stumbled upon while browsing his bar mitzvah photo album and spotting a picture of a classmate who played dice in the playground.