I suppose I am dating myself, but I honest-to-goodness remember a time when Dennis Miller was actually kind of funny:
Of course, that was a really long time ago.
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This post is in: Clown Shoes
I suppose I am dating myself, but I honest-to-goodness remember a time when Dennis Miller was actually kind of funny:
Of course, that was a really long time ago.
(via)
Comments are closed.
asiangrrlMN
That was a REALLY long time ago, John.
The Tim Channel
Me too! Unfortunately he went off the rails somewhere along the way and decided he could make a living working the right wing circuit. Probably pays as well as the bad lounge acts he would now be forced into if he quit pandering to the pugs.
Enjoy.
Geeno
It was, asiangrrlMN, but I also remember that time.
NSinNY
i’m certain there was never such a time. it’s like you’re saying you remember when gerbils were 18th century novels. it does not compute. nothing this bad ever could have emerged from anything even moderately good.
Tim
He lost his mind after 9/11.
He was mostly a jackass before that, with occasional flashes of funny. Now he’s just pathetic.
Joel
He can’t even make a captive audience laugh.
Time to take Dennis out to pasture with Joe Piscopo.
Zam
My dad once told me about that.
SBlitzer
I’ll never forget when Jon Stewart asked him: “Did you ever get the feeling that you just backed the wrong horse?”
Laura W
I used to adore him…his voice, his looks, his ‘tude and mannerisms.
Gak. Young love.
I’m gonna sit back and wait for more pithy “dating myself” jokes to start rolling in. Nice set up, John.
Edit: Where is the off button for that damn tape?
jenniebee
Yes, we call that the Dennis Miller Ratio.
Even when Dennis Miller was doing the news on SNL, approximately the same number of people thought he was funny as thought this was cool.
AhabTRuler
To be honest, I didn’t even make it past O’Reilly’s rambling and incoherent intro. But then, I have an extraordinarily low tolerance for vidiocy.
asiangrrlMN
@Geeno: Me, too, but then I’m an old geezer (ette) like John Cole.
I didn’t watch the video because Miller just makes me cringe these days.
Shinobi
I think this clip is a compelling argument for the euthanization of comedians who are past their prime.
wmd
WTF was that?
srsly.
JGabriel
John Cole @ Top:
In a galaxy far, far, away.
.
Dork
Miller went from funny, zoomed waaaaaaaayyyy past irrelevant, and is now firmly parked in offensive and assholish.
I would pay to see the crowd he draws for standup bits. Does even do standup anymore?
AkaDad
John dates himself for the sex.
shoutingattherain
Unfunny. Unwatchable. Unbarrassing.
I wonder when Miller became a tweaker?
Facebones
I really liked him on SNL. I even enjoyed him on Monday Night Football. I remember when the rants were funny. I even bought his book (a collection of rants from his HBO show). (I bought it with George Carlin’s Brain Droppings at Media Play. Both of those are dead and yet Miller chugs along.)
What the hell happened to him? I read somewhere (I think in Wolcott’s Media Mutant’s book) that he lost his mind after 9/11 and has since regained his sanity, but his financial options are limited to clowning for the Fox News crowd. I don’t think that’s true, but if it is it would rank as one of the great long cons.
John Cole
@AkaDad: Lulz.
RandyH
I think he used to be on SNL in the 80’s or something. Didn’t he do “Weekend Update?”
That was so long ago that I can’t be sure if it was even him. If so, that might have been when he was funny.
Rey
Geez, I forgot he was on SNL. This clip is so unfunny it’s painful. What happened to him?
Violet
I can’t bring myself to click on that video. Miller looks like he’s trying to jumpstart his own tongue. And what’s that growing out of his head? Is that the portal where O’Reilly dumps tomorrow’s right wing talking points?
If you’re dating yourself, at least you know what you’re getting.
Mike in NC
As did Ron Silver and others. Miller once joked about giving Newt Gingrich a blowjob if he ran for president back around ’94 or ’95. Today he’d just do it for the enjoyment.
in canaduh
“she’s not here to defend herself” !!!
did someone slip some extasy in billo’s mug?
gnomedad
The law aside, it’s clear Sotomayor could be funnier that at least one white man.
r€nato
Dennis Miller’s shtick was stream-of-consciousness highly-obscure cultural self-references. You know, instead of making a reference to some Nirvana lyrics, he’d work a reference to Pride and Prejudice or some Picasso piece into a monologue. I found it very amusing because I like that sort of thing (at least, obscure cultural self-references). It had the aura of stand-up comedy for intellectuals and culture geeks. At least half his references went completely over my head and when I actually picked up on one I got a sort of head-buzz for being so damned smart and felt a little smug for getting the joke and knowing that most people with less than a college education just wouldn’t get it.
But that was about all he had going for him and it wore thin really, really quickly.
After that, all Miller had going for him was his hair.
Now he’s just an unfunny fucking asshole.
MikeJ
Possibly the saddest being Mamet.
geg6
Miller. Damn, what an ass. Not only did I used to think he was funny but I used brag that he was a yinzer. Shudder. Oh, well. Dennis never comes back here now and look where the ‘Burgh is now. We have another Lombardi trophy, we’re contending for the Stanley Cup, Netroots Nation will be here this summer, and they just announced today that the G-20 summit is being held here in September. Fuck Dennis Miller.
JGabriel
John Cole:
It was, coincidentally, the same time period in which Miller was actually kind of liberal. Why do people lose their mojo when they go conservative?
.
JK
Miller went from a “left-leaning, Dada-ist wisenheimer” to a “tell-it-like-it-is, right-wing blowhard.”
h/t slate
Walker
The same could be said for Chevy Chase. Except that no one gives Chevy a platform to embarrass himself with anymore.
jenniebee
OT, watching a Paula’s Home Cooking rerun right now, she’s talking about how much she loves Dijon mustard, using some right now in a shrimp mold.
Alert Red State.
UPDATE: Actually, Malkin ought to follow up on her Rachel Ray Dunkin’ Donuts expose with a full investigation of unAmerican tendencies on the Food Channel.
SLKRR
@RandyH:
Oh my God, you are making me feel really old. That was the Weekend Update I grew up on! Dennis Miller used to be funny back then. Of course, SNL used to be funny back then, too.
wobbly
September 11 was really bad, especially in Lower Manhattan,
All kinds of people freaked when that happened, including this minor comedian.
Let him be.
sgwhiteinfla
You think thats bad you should listen to his radio show. The guy has lost his damned mind. Honestly I think loosing the MNF gig did it to him more than 9-11 but that’s just my opinion.
Comrade Baron Elmo
“Americans are always asking why the rest of the world hates them. Well, the reason is Dennis Miller.”
–Elton John–
Laura W
@JGabriel:
And their humor? I was sitting here thinking about how angry he looks in that video, trying to remember if he was as angry and manically enraged as a liberal. Not so much as I recall. He’s just “off” now, in more ways than 12.
Grim biz, being a conservative. Cha-Cha.
JK
If you think SNL was funny when Dennis Miller was on, try SNL from 1975 to 1980.
Tymannosourus
Dennis Miller used to be hilarious and left of center. Circa 1995, he did a routine where he talked about the hypocrisy of abortion clinic bombers (saying they were aborting fetuses in the 200th trimester), and the need for women to vote people like Arlen Specter out of office.
I’m not making this up.
Lancelot Link
Dennis Miller ceased being funny when his jokewriter quit and he started to write his own material.
Gus
Every time someone says “remember when Dennis Miller was funny?” I have to say no. He never was. Obscure cultural references, pop and high do not make you funny. He was always annoying, pedantic, full of himself.
WereBear
Well, damn, it was long ago. And back then, it was kinda funny. More a case of “how many relatively obscure intellectual concepts can I cram into an out of context joke.” And he ranted moderately well.
But then, in My Humble Opinion, he made a cold-blooded business decision without thinking it entirely through. Such as a) his best style is the antithesis of what passes for humor in Republican land. The only way he was kinda funny was when he would bang together a Sartre reference with the Hadron Supercollider, and his new audience probably doesn’t know much about either of them, much less find them funny.
b) is more along the lines of Unintended Consequences. Fox must have looked like a solid gig, but he is ruined for many an alternate venue. Like the college circuit; it may be a comedown for someone who used to be on SNL, but it’s solid, reliable work that has kept many a wolf from many a funny door. I can’t see him appealing to much beyond Liberty University.
And c) he’s gotten less funny. And that was a thin margin to begin with.
benjoya
yeah, he was great on the jack benny show
El Cid
Hey, don’t forget, Glenn Beck’s bringing his live comedy show to high definition digital theaters near you. Be sure and buy your tickets early, as I’m sure they’re likely to sell out, and gosh, you’ll be sorry you missed that!
geg6
Laura W: Grim business indeedy. I don’t understand why they want to so angry and upset over everything all the time, but it does seem a requirement to be a wingnut. Me? I prefer being a commie elitist fascist DFH. We like to laugh and be happy. A lot easier to do that now that we got us that Negro overlord running the show.
JK
What about Dennis Miller’s former SNL pal Victoria Jackson?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-yiRHNbfuw&feature=PlayList&p=1224372BD90E0D03&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=12
brent
Yeah, I am gonna disagree that Miller was ever funny. I always thought his bit with the obscure references was really just kind of stupid and pretentious. It was clear that he thought he was being incredibly clever but I always found it odd that anyone else would agree with him. But at least he seemed like a professional comedian of some sort. Not one that I would pay to go see, but his goal did seem to be to make people laugh. This recent stuff however is striking in the way that it seems to be designed to annoy liberals more than generate any actual laughs. Bizarre.
Laura W
@geg6:
Death and taxes is all I come up with tonight.
Bob
Before the reunification of East and West Germany, Miller said this:
Which is funny.
But my god he is dreadful today.
Dean
Comedians have a very short arc, really. From breaking out to reaching their apex is only about five years. From their apex, they get about 10% less funny every year. After a while, even the best ones just don’t make you laugh anymore.
Dennis Miller peaked around 1990. His HBO special “Black and White” was awesome. Nineteen years later, the Dennis Miller of today is about 13% as funny as the guy he was. Like many people trying to be funny while lacking an actual operating sense of humor, Miller just became cruel.
There is always a place in the Fox News era GOP for someone trying to make a living on cruelty.
Blue Raven
I admit it. I found Miller funny. I love it when my wide-ranging memory for trivia gets appealed to. I agreed with his rants more often than I didn’t. And then 9/11 happened, and the rest is “oh, gods, you stupid shit.”
Bubblegum Tate
@Tim:
Yeah, pretty much.
(I am that one person in a million who found the pre-9/11 Dennis Miller to be kinda funny, too.)
SLKRR
@JK:
That was before my time, but thankfully there are DVDs. That was the SNL golden age and the late 80s/early 90s was the silver age. The rest has been pretty much crap.
Kathy in St. Louis
It’s not just that Dennis isn’t that funny….though he really isn’t…..it’s also a matter of such total bullshit coming out of an Irish kisser like his.
Dennis, I don’t care how many of your friends were fireman on 9/11, give it a rest. You got on the wrong train….face it….that train took you to Nowheresville.
PaulW
I genuinely believe Dennis Miller sold his soul to George W. Bush.
I don’t know how much of his own material he writes, but you’d think he’d make up at least 50 percent of his stand-up and Rants stuff (sp?). I still have his first Rants book. He certainly had to have a right of veto before using that material on stage, it wasn’t like his ghost writers had a gun on him saying “here say crappy sh-t about Rush Limbaugh’s fat ass”. Before 2000 he was railing against both political extremes, but then Dubya came along and Miller quit railing against the Far Right and that as they say was that.
And I thought Miller was funny with the sub-referencing stuff. But I’m a librarian who excels at Trivial Pursuit, go figure.
Little Dreamer
My ex and I used to watch him every night when he had his own show (back when he was a liberal). I just realized how much time has gone by since then and how much has changed, wow.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
That was back when you were a Young Republican.
Now you’re an American.
Yunno, you grow.
Zuzu's Petals
I can think of exactly one Dennis Miller joke I still find funny, from around the time of the 2000 election:
Not saying he wrote it, just that he told it.
asiangrrlMN
@Blue Raven: I agree with this. I know a lot of stupid obscure shit, and I found him amusing. Now, he’s a blathering idiot.
JK
More obnoxious stupidity from Dennis Miller
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viR4cMHizPA
tripletee (formerly tBone)
The Dennis Miller of 1995 would have eviscerated assholes like O’Reilly and Hannity, repeatedly and with great relish, in the Rants segment of his HBO show. Now he’s reduced to blowing them, repeatedly and with great relish, in order to cling to a meager sliver of airtime when he can pretend he’s still somehow relevant. Fuck you, Dennis.
geg6
Blue Raven: That’s exactly why I was proud he came from the ‘Burgh. I loved that he appealed to my vast memory for obscure and often useless knowledge and references. We try not to mention where Miller is from anymore. Too embarrassing.
ChrisB
Those of you who did not watch that clip were smarter than I. There is nothing worthwhile about it. Nothing even worthy of snark or ridicule. Just . . . bad.
merelycurious
This is the Dennis Miller I found funny and interesting.
TR
I’m with John — I remember when Dennis Miller was funny. I still think his “Black and White” special was hilarious.
John O
I actually paid some money to see Dennis once, in a galaxy far, far away, so much did I enjoy his schtick.
So I’ve given a lot of thought to his Fall, and all I can come up with is this: Bedwetter.
Little Dreamer
@ChrisB:
Yes, there is actually something worthwhile in that clip, it shows exactly the type of venal person Bill O’Reilly considers a good and upstanding guy.
Fulcanelli
Dennis Miller was at one time good for a chuckle or two, but I think back then he was fakin’ it for a paycheck.
It was easy money for a comedian to crack on right wingers and conservatives in general, between the illogical contradictions they swear to as gospel truth and the weapons-grade stupid that erupts out of their pie holes, you have the perfect target-rich environment for a wanna-be funny man.
But (sigh) 9/11 changed everything. He shit his drawers and he’s being himself now, a smug, pathetic opportunist who smelled money in jingoistic patriotism and cracking on people who didn’t shit their pants and want to give up their rights to a right-wing government just because of a terrorist attack. He’s an unphunny phucking phony.
And here’s Why Conservatives Aren’t Funny.
The Grand Panjandrum
Up next Dennis Miller doing his Step-N-Fetchit impersonation to mock Barack Obama.
Laertes
He wasn’t bad on SNL, though I preferred Norm Macdonald’s style.
Is it unusual for the Weekend Update anchor to do absolutely nothing else on the show? I don’t recall Macdonald performing in lots of other sketches, but Chevy Chase, Kevin Nealon, and Amy Poehler, to pick three other WE Anchors mostly at random, certainly did.
I’m just wondering if it indicates a lack of versatility on Miller’s part or if it’s routine for WE Anchors to otherwise stay off the set.
Comrade Jake
I caught a bit of his radio show recently and he was referring to the Iranian President as “Aquavelvajad”. I thought that was mildly funny.
TR
Miller claims that his political U-turn was sparked by how horrified he was to hear liberals call Rudy Guiliani “a Nazi.”
Of course, since Miller himself used that same term to mock Gingrich, it’s a bullshit excuse. He saw where the money was after 9/11 and rode for it.
Fulcanelli
Damn link…
angulimala
one of the definitive tenets of Christianity is tolerance.
And the first thing Jesus was tolerant of was waterboarding. Seriously, I hear archaeologists found an early version of Mark and the woman being stoned was not a prostitute but a Roman Interrogator who waterboarded Zealots. Some pipsquek scribe changed it and gave us the version we know today. The original proves the Fundies are right: Jesus forgives torture but not dirty dirty sex.
Dan Brown has a book coming out about it … right after his next book “The Obama Code” which explains the secret TRUE meaning of “empathy” as well as many other scary details, like how Obama is really the direct descendant of Mohamed.
JasonF
I love this clip just because it’s great music, but I would absolutely kill to see Miller’s interview with that first guest.
Fulcanelli
@angulimala:
Fixt.
angulimala
Frankly, I think that is a bullshit excuse as well. Plenty of comedians are making plenty of money mocking the boneheads on the right. John Stewart and Colbert aren’t exactly starving artists.
I think if he were in it for the money he would have gotten off the train when their numbers went under 50%. The fact that he’s staying on at 25% should indicate that he is where he is because, however misguided, he actually believes his own bullshit.
Seriously, saying he did it for the money might have made sense in 03 or 04. By 09 it’s just dumb.
Little Dreamer
@angulimala:
You’re about as funny as Dennis Miller.
Arlie
Wow, Bill O’Reilly actually sounds smart and even-handed next to Dennis Miller.
TR
No, I doubt that. People might accept one radical political conversion, but if you go from left to right to left again, it’s blatantly obvious that you’re just a shill.
Plus, the left is crowded with skilled political comedians, but he pretty much has the right all to himself. The Half Hour Comedy Hour died within days, and that Red Eye show on Fox News has withered too. Miller’s smart enough to know that it’s better to be the main comedy option for 25% of the country rather than compete against a tough field for the other 75%, especially when most liberals wrote him off ages ago.
eric
“Dude, you just offed yahweh. We’ve been waiting 2000 years for this guy….”
renewing my request for any video of SNL skit of clarence thomas hearings,…thanks
for the older crowd, as much as we lament the decline of SNL, you gotta admit that the last 30 minutes of the 90 minute shows were often BRUTAL notwithstanding the great cast.,
eric
Quicksand
@Dean:
With rare exceptions, of course — with George Carlin having been the Nolan Ryan of comedy.
eric
@Quicksand: i think roger clemens is the better analogy. i think there were some PEDs involved ;)
eric
The Moar You Know
Dennis Miller is an asshole.
Thanks, I just needed to say that.
Trollhattan
Miller had his moments anchoring the SNL news and had pretty good stage presence, but when Dana Carvey came on set as Dennis Miller, in front of Dennis Miller, he pretty much blew Miller’s schtick out of the borscht (or something like that).
Since then of course, Miller found the giantist shark evah that he could jump all on his own accord. I last saw him on TDS, sometime after the ’06 midterms, and about all he could joke about was how much Nancy Pelosi blinked. Killer stuff, and Republicans are all still emulating it.
joshers
You’re all wrong. Dennis Miller lost his mojo when he chopped the mullet. It’s a fact.
merrinc
I still have the Rants on my iPod. It’s hard to believe that the same guy who wrote Race, Homosexuality, and the Religious Right is the same guy who went on Leno last October and explained that he would be voting for McCain because we owed it to him for being a POW.
Miller’s always been pedantic and arrogant but I don’t think he was ever a liberal. He always struck me as more of a libertarian. And as a friend of mine says, libertarians always seem to make sense at first. Then about 5 minutes into their political theories, you realize they are completely fucking insane.
Joel
@Dean: This would explain the convergence of Dennis Miller’s comedy with Andrew Dice Clay’s. Despite the lower starting point of the latter, Miller and the Diceman are about on par with each other.
angulimala
@Little Dreamer
Ouch. Seriously, I know I can miss but I didn’t think it was that horrible.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
+10 points for the modified Carlin quote.
Dennis Miller used to be funny at times but now he’s a Republican. Game over.
kth
I was still on the bus when they hired him to co-host Monday Night Football. I still think it was a great idea (not necessarily Miller, but some outsider), though Miller never really got the rhythm down. His bits had a way of getting cut off by the play-by-play. Oddly, Rush Limbaugh openly lobbied for himself to get that job, since Miller is probably a big admirer of Rush now.
Miller might have been able to save the funny if he had become a one-issue, GWoT Republican like Ron Silver. But judging from the O’Reilly video (or indeed from the fact that Miller is an O’Reilly semi-regular), he’s bought the whole platform.
PB
You’re all wrong. Dennis Miller lost his mojo when he chopped the mullet. It’s a fact.
angulimala
TR:
Or an entertainer, which Miller is.
1)There is always a market for the ex-enemy who saw the light and left the darkness.
2) Partisan lefties might not forgive him but the world is not divided between partisan lefties and partisan righties. There is a large bunch of people (50% of the country) who would forget all that shit if he just was funny again.
Seriously, I think Miller is just becoming a cranky old dude. I don’t think its a cynical thing about money at all.
Laura W
Oh yay.
Keith is gonna give us his take on Dennis.
yummy.
DrPresident
I used to love his HBO show back in the 90s, never missed an episode. His rants were funny. What happened to him?
Little Dreamer
@angulimala:
He’s an entertainer? Hmmm, he’s not very entertaining.
bedtimeforbonzo
Miller always struck me as a one-trick pony. His self-styled stream-of-conscious highly-obscure rants were funny at first largely because of how unusual they were. And his stint as the “Weekend Update” anchor was highly forgettable. Always much too smug for my tastes.
Also, I don’t get how a person goes from hard left to hard right on the political spectrum — or vice versa. Just doesn’t seem genuine, and I think it says something about the person’s convictions.
Meanwhile, watching O’Reilly blank Miller’s blank can even be nauseating while channel surfing.
Dating myself: Miller, right before my time there, attended Point Park College (now University). As a Pittsburgher, John may know this.
I graduated, Class of 1984; Miller did not. He went on to make big bucks; I did not.
D-Chance.
Miller was NEVER funny.
He wasn’t funny when he was on SNL.
He wasn’t funny when he was the toast of the Liberal Set and raking in awards for his HBO gig.
He isn’t funny now in his “9-Eleven changed everything” world.
Any comedian who spends more time laughing at his own material than his audience is… not… funny.
Of the many comedians whom I ask, “How did he/she ever make a career out of this?”, Miller ranks near the top.
Jim-Bob
Wow, even BillO tried to walk back from the cliff there.
Miller is comedy cancer. Actually, since I once saw a tumor that looked like an outline of Homer Simpson, I’d have to say that cancer is funnier than Dennis Miller.
bedtimeforbonzo
Miller, btw, was a Journalism and Communications major, like yours truly.
I will give Miller and any comedian who manages to make the big time major props for perseverance. They all put in lots and lots of time at low-paying, unglamorous, small-time comedy clubs. I found this out firsthand when I’d regularly accompany a close schoolmate — Billy Martin, now a head writer for Bill Maher, a favorite of mine — to the Pittsburgh Comedy Club and a place in nearby Oakland, the name of which I forget. Billy would always introduce me as his manager Chad Gotter (my name is Tony Gott) and still owes me an old corduroy sport coat that he borrowed/swiped long ago.
hal
Dennis Miller’s audition tape:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=124152&title=Headlines—Gridirony
Phenobarbarella
You know….I once tried dating myself, with mixed results. On balance, I’d have to say that I’m not the most spontaneous date in the world, but to balance that out, I usually know when to keep my opinions to myself.
Oh, and I always put out.
Bill H
Dennis Miller was the first reason I stopped watching MNF, and as a football fanatic, that took some doing. There have been several reasons since then, chiefly ESPN, but Dennis Miller was the first.
Laura W
@hal: That was awfully funny. And Stewart looks like he’s 12 there. Who knew having your own cable comedy show could age you 30 years in just nine? (Not to imply that he is not totally hot at his current age with the gray hair and all. Just older hotter.)
Chuck
Miller was a wry pretentious satirist who was sometimes accidentally funny.
This latest performance was sad. It’s like watching a breakdown. He looks like he was going to dash back to his hotel room after the interview to knock down the other half of the bottle.
Laura W
@Chuck: Exactly the point I was trying to make up in #38 about him being manic and “off”. You said it much more clearly.
tc125231
Wile E. Quixote
I remember a routine he did during the early ’90s, after the ’92 presidential election where he compared Dan Quayle to James Stockdale and just savaged Quayle and the Republicans, saying that Quayle’s head was emptier than a Jack in the Box in Seattle (this was after Jack in the Box had run their extremely unsuccessful e-coli burger promotion). It’s depressing, Bill Hicks is dead and Dennis Miller just keeps on chugging along, which proves either that there is no God, or that there is and he’s a real dick.
Wile E. Quixote
@Joel
When it comes to Piscopo and Miller I think that something more along the lines of an Old Yeller style ending would be more appropriate.
GregB
Miller has always been a pretentious dildo. He was barely funny back in the 80’s and 90’s.
Ever since his Cheneyite conversion he’s as funny as hell to laugh at.
-G
ed
Miller was funny. Arguably the best Weekend Update anchor evar.
I’m so old, I can remember when Jay Leno was funny. Really. He was. He killed in the mid 80s.
Beauzeaux
Gotta agree with GregB. Dennis Miller was never funny. My first impression of him was that he took the entire concept of smugness and inflated it far beyond the edge of the known universe. That impression was confirmed and reconfirmed every time I saw him. There was something extremely unfunny in watching a man be terribly, terribly pleased with how clever he was being.
Allan
You mock him now, but when he and Victoria Jackson’s love-child emerges as the Anti-Christ, you won’t be laughing anymore. Then you’ll bow. You’ll grovel before him and you’ll like it.
At least that’s how his nightly dream goes…
Brett
Part of it is certainly age. I saw one of his stand-up shows a couple months back, and the first thing I thought when he came on stage was, “Man, he looks kinda decrepit.” Then he proceeded to bust out this long-ass, unfunny story about the time he met Frank Sinatra with his wife in Las Vegas, and all I was thinking was “Half your audience probably has no idea who Sinatra is, while the other half just think of him as music that their parents and grandparents listened to Back In The Day. ”
Another part is that while he was always a bit of a libertarian, after 9/11 he really sort of jumped on to the Bush-Republican Bandwagon. Not in terms of believing in every Bush policy, but in being around Bush, being on his A-List, getting to ride on Air Force One, and becoming sort of a Republican-Favored Humorist. Of course, now that that era’s over, he’s just an old man with some occasionally funny jokes (fewer and fewer, no doubt, because of his age).
Phoebe
A long long time ago, I asked someone older and wiser what “smug” meant, and he pointed at the expression on Dennis Miller’s face, on a bus stop shelter poster.
Nuada
I don’t know, I thought he was sort of funny, pre-9/11. Not from his stint on SNL’s “Weekend Update”, which I was really too young for, or his trademark high-brow stream of consciousness bit, which I saw but never really liked.
But on his HBO show, he had this rotuine he did called “the Big Board”. It was basically him coming up with funny things to say about pictures that appeared on a TV screen next to him. He had more than a few moments there;
A picture of several bodies in a car trunk: “The Columbian Witness Protection Program”.
A picture of a series of birdhouses: “The Republican Party’s Low-Income Housing Program”.
A picture of Newt Gingrich standing next to a black guy: (As Newt) “Hello?!? There is a black guy standing next to me! Is someone going to do something about this”?!?
Then there was the night he took a picture of some nameless buerocrat with a UN-style translator plugged into both ears and started singing Celine Dionne’s “My Heart Will Go On”. Now “Titanic” was the biggest movie in the world back then but the crowd gave a very tepid response. So Miller goes, “That’s it??? Holy Sh*t, I got two more of those in there”! A similar picture came up again and Miller sang the song again, actually getting a better reaction, as the crowd was amused by the sheer absurdity. The third time the picture came up the crowd went crazy, the joke bombing became funnier than the joke itself.
He seemed to have a lot of his best moments poking fun at Pope John Paul II. In fact, he once rebounded from a failed joke by embracing the screen once he realized a “Pope Joke” was next, saying, “come on baby, bring me back”.
A picture of Pope John Paul II looking very stern: (As the Pope) “Don’t Screw”!
A picture of Pope John Paul II looking somewhat confused as he stood at the balcony above St. Peter’s Square: (As the Pope) “Okay, I’m a little hung-over, can someone start me off with the first line of the ‘Our Father'”?
A picture of Pope John Paul II with Fidel Castro, taken during the former’s visit to Cuba: “One is the leader of a small Communist Country…the other the leader of 800 million Catholics. But they are together this fall and they fighting crime. Every Tuesday night on the WB…..it’s ‘Holy Smokes'”!
I can’t believe I remembered all that just off the top of my head. And I can’t believe what a d*ick Miller has become.
Dan
Isn’t that flower in the teeth bit kind of a low rent blackface bit?
JR
With the possible exceptions of Woody Harrelson and Bob Uecker, who retained any measurable quantity of funniness after doing a movie with Wesley Snipes?