I remember when Dice released The Day the Laughter Died, the follow-up to his nursery rhyme album, and it sounded like he was performing in a morgue.
Reading up about it, he was doing a late-night set and ad-libbing some new material, purposely in front of an audience he knew didn’t like him, to see if he could win them over.
He couldn’t, and just started being as obnoxious as possible. It ended up being pretty funny, especially during his “Hour Back, get it?” routine, where he told the same unfunny joke over and over and over again, to the point where you had to laugh from the sheer awkwardness of it all.