Okay, look: I don't particularly like what Dennis Miller has become. If I had been granted more than 20 minutes for this interview, I would have challenged him on several of the points he brings up toward the end. He strikes me today as one of the blindest of Bush's many apologists. I don't know if he believes half the things he says anymore; he'd rather have history prove him wrong than be labeled a flip-flopper. He has already flip-flopped enough in his career.
But, there was a time, in those formative years before I discovered Bill Maher and before Jon Stewart became politicized, that I loved Dennis Miller. I didn't understand half his jokes, of course, but there was something about him and his HBO show that seemed so irreverent, so iconoclastic, that I just knew it had to funny. I watched every week. Then I stopped, and Miller seemingly went off into the wilderness, reappearing later as this arch neo-con, Bizarro World version of his former self. So when the opportunity came to profile him, the Old Me was excited, even as the Current Me thought the guy was a bit of a jagoff.
However, I'm not lying when I say he was nice and gracious and all that. And I think this was a fair profile -- best quotes ever, too.
Published in the VC Reporter, 6/22/06:
The man who loves to be hated
GOP golden boy and #Saturday Night Live# alum Dennis Miller on his monkey trick, the war in Iraq and why he won’t make fun of the president
by Matthew Singer
Dennis Miller isn’t what you might call a “national treasure.” He’s not one of those comedians blessed with the capacity to reach across a broad spectrum of people and weave himself into the cultural fabric, a la Johnny Carson or David Letterman or, hell, even Richard Pryor. His gift is for polarization — the ability to tell a joke that’ll leave half the audience in tears and the other half leaning over to the person next to them and asking, “Who’s Rudolf Nureyev?” To some, he’s a thinking-man’s comic, a beacon of intelligence and true wit in an era when morons barreling down hills in shopping carts pass for humor. Others just think he’s a pretentious asshole. And that’s basically how the opinions split. There’s little middle ground when it comes to Dennis Miller. And that’s how it was #before# he became a GOP golden boy.
So how does Miller feel about being a flashpoint for division in a country that is already deeply divided over #everything#? He’s totally fine with it.
“If you think you’re going to please the masses at some point with what I do, you’ve missed the point,” the 52-year-old admits from his home in Santa Barbara. “You got to be smart enough to see where your niche is and cultivate it. And my niche has never been mass appeal. Then again, I don’t want to turn into one of those angry comics who says, ‘I don’t give a shit who likes me.’ So if I can keep it at 50 percent, I’m happy. That means, out of two people I see in the street, one wants to shake my hand and one wants to punch me. I’m comfy there.”
Of course, Miller has reason to feel comfortable straddling the mean line. After all, it hasn’t kept him from getting work. High-profile work, too. In fact, since first entering public consciousness some 20 years ago, Miller has quietly assembled one of the most stacked résumés of any modern comedian: He has been a featured player on two iconic television shows; hosted HBO’s first standout original series; emceed multiple award shows; published four best-selling books; acted in feature films alongside Diane Lane, Michael Douglas and, in his turn as a leading man, the Crypt Keeper; been a sports analyst, a political pundit and an advertising spokesman; #and# he married a model. No matter the situation, Miller’s shtick has remained the same: obscure non sequiturs and grandiose verbiage wrapped around ridiculously complex metaphors and similes, punctuated by ’50s hepcat lingo (“babe,” “man,” “cha-cha”) and the occasional, strategically placed “fuck.” It’s a double-edged talent. Depending on the setting, he can come off as either wry and irreverent or smug and condescending — hence the alienating persona. But Miller says it’s not something he can turn off and on at will.
“You get your deal of the cards and you play it. I don’t manufacture that. There are things I’m as dense as you can be on. The one thing I got is a reasonably deep reference drawer and a pretty quick retrieval system. That’s the same humor I’ve done all these years. If I see something, there’s sort of a bing-bang in my head, and I guess people have found that kind of funny to them. You know, ‘Look at that: When they’re talking about a Randy Moss play, he’s talking about #The Jetsons#’ robot maid. How the hell did that happen?’ ”
“I do think it’s a bit Balkanizing. But what are you gonna do?” he continues. “That’s what I got. Jay [Leno] got the ability to get everybody to laugh. I got this.”
Having a conversation with Dennis Miller is an intimidating proposition. It’s nerve-racking in the same way being a contestant on #Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?# is nerve-racking: You can never be completely prepared. But it’s not just the idea of facing off with that vaunted reference drawer that’s frightening. This is a guy who can spew bile with the best of them. Should the interview inadvertently spin off into a debate, he could probably eviscerate your argument and your self-confidence with a single densely worded sentence involving Gumby and the Treaty of Versailles. Then he’d cap it with his catchphrase — “That’s just my opinion, I could be wrong” — and slam the phone down, leaving you to wonder what the hell happened.
Well, that’s what it seems it would be like, anyway.
In reality, Miller isn’t nearly as confrontational — or pompous — as his reputation implies. Which isn’t to say the person he is on TV and onstage is at all a fabrication. When he speaks, you can almost hear that internal Rolodex spinning as he formulates a response. During the course of our chat, he does casually mention Arthur C. Clarke, Harry Carey, the Grateful Dead and Clement Attlee — Winston Churchill’s little-remembered successor — but he’s not trying to be esoteric. That’s really how he communicates.
But when he’s reminded of how far he has managed to stretch out his life as a performer, Miller’s circuitous speech gives way to blunt modesty.
“I don’t want to sound too evangelical about it, but I really do hit my knees and thank the powers that be that I’ve been allowed to do it so long,” he says. “It’s a lucky break. You’re in essence going into the marketplace with a monkey trick and trying to interest people in it. If you can get them to be interested for two decades, you just have to go, how unbelievably lucky did I get?”
As durable as that “monkey trick” has proven to be, it wasn’t particularly easy for Miller to find. Inspired by Bob Woodward — or, at least, Robert Redford’s portrayal of him in #All the President’s Men# — Miller initially majored in journalism at Point Park College in his hometown of Pittsburgh. He stayed with it long enough to earn his degree, but that’s pretty much as far as he went in the world of legitimate news reporting. “I remember the first job I went into, the guy said, ‘We’re going to pay you by the column inch.’ I remember thinking, ‘Jack, I gotta get out of here.’ I’m not going to get paid by the column inch. I gotta sit there with a fucking ruler to figure my check out?” Years later, Miller would make a living doing #illegitimate# news reporting, as anchor of “Weekend Update” on #Saturday Night Live#. But that’s the only connection Miller draws between his schooling and his future career. “Journalism is the who, what, where, why and when, if I remember from my classes,” he states correctly. “Comedy is everything else.”
Miller’s transition from half-hearted aspiring journalist to full-time comic did not follow a linear path. For a while after graduating from college, he meandered through a series of dead-end jobs — janitor, ice cream scooper — before building up the courage to give standup a try. That’s when it finally clicked. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1980s and hit the club circuit, eventually landing his first national television appearance on #Star Search#. There, he also encountered his first taste of the divisiveness his style of humor causes, as he lost to his direct comedic antithesis, the more family-friendly Sinbad.
Despite the embarrassment of losing to a guy in parachute pants, 1985 turned out to be Miller’s breakout year. While performing at the Comedy Store in Hollywood, he caught the eye of #Saturday Night Live# creator Lorne Michaels, who’d just been rehired as the show’s producer. Michaels snagged him to be part of the program’s third generation, and in its tenth season Miller made his debut, sporting a smart-ass grin, a charming high-pitched titter and a haircut that haunts him to this day. (“Occasionally, I’ll be sitting there, my kids’ll be watching something and I’ll be reading, and I look up peripherally and go, ‘Christ, is that me in a bad mullet?’ ”) He rarely appeared in sketches, but for the entirety of his six seasons, Miller #owned# “Weekend Update.” His cerebral approach reinvigorated the segment, which had been floundering since the breakup of the Dan Aykroyd-Jane Curtin tandem seven years earlier, and, in a way, presaged not only his own subsequent ventures but the current crop of TV satirists blurring the lines between comedy and journalism. Up until recently, Miller was the Cal Ripken of the mock news desk, holding the record for longest tenure in the position — 111 straight shows — before it was broken by current co-anchor Tina Fey.
Newly famous, Miller left the halls of NBC Studios in 1992 in search of greener pastures. Unlike most #SNL# alumni, he did not attempt to transition into a film career. Instead, he gravitated toward a field he seemed more qualified for: late night talk show host. His first foray into the medium, the syndicated #Dennis Miller Show#, had an edgier feel than its big-time counterparts, with weightier content and more offbeat guests. Naturally, it was yanked off the air within months.
Not surprisingly, Miller found greater success when he translated the format to cable. #Dennis Miller Live# premiered on HBO in 1994, and it was an immediate revelation. Unleashed from the restraints of network television, Miller was free to explore whatever topic rattled him and travel whatever roads his hyperactive synapses happened to lead him down. And he could swear. That creative autonomy allowed Miller to do his thing without having to worry about pandering to the mainstream and let the people who “got it” come to #him#. It also helped him create what would become his trademark, The Rant, a pointed, free-flowing diatribe that set the theme of each episode. Thanks largely to that part of the program, the show developed a sizable cult following and contributed to HBO establishing itself as an artistic powerhouse, winning the network its first Emmy; the show would take home five in all by the end of its nine-year run.
At the height of #Live#’s popularity, Miller suddenly became a hot show business commodity. MTV recruited him to preside over its Video Music Awards two years in a row; Internet services, telephone companies and M&Ms hired him as their pitchman. He published four collections of his Rants, released a comedy album and did two standup specials. He even made inroads as an actor, most, er, “memorably” as the wisecracking, vampire-slaying hero in the uber-campy #Tales from the Crypt presents Bordello of Blood#. “A week out from the beginning of general filming, one of the minor Baldwins fell out of that role,” he explains. “Sylvester Stallone was dating the female lead, Angie Everhart, and I made him laugh. So when [director] Joel Silver said, ‘I’m screwed, I’ve lost my minor Baldwin,’ I think Sly said, ‘Hey, Dennis Miller makes me laugh, put him in.’”
Even more bizarre than that, in 2000 Miller scored one of the most coveted gigs in broadcasting: color commentator on #Monday Night Football#. To say the reaction to him was mixed would be an understatement. Miller did display a remarkably deep well of knowledge about the game; unfortunately, he also displayed his previously noted deep well of knowledge about everything else as well. For more open-minded viewers, he was a breath of fresh air. But most NFL fans did not appreciate having their brains overloaded with references to #A Tale of Two Cities#, Italian nuclear physicists and Boutrous-Boutrous Ghali while watching a halfback option play, and ABC canned him after two seasons.
Miller’s short-lived turn as a sportscaster is probably the most glaring example of his knack for drawing in one side of a crowd while turning away the other. But even in that case, Miller didn’t really fit the description of a “lightning rod.” For the majority of his career, whether or not you liked Dennis Miller came down to a matter of taste. Now, however, it has more to do with which box is checked on your voter registration card.
Although Miller always gave off the vibe of being a hip cynic who didn’t subscribe to any political party, his snarky attitude suggested that he was, for the most part, a liberal. During the Clinton years, for example, while he didn’t spare the president much ridicule, he saved his harshest words for Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, comparing his rise to power to that of the Nazis. And when the current regime first took over, his criticism was just as sharp. So after September 11, 2001, when he began talking like a card-carrying Republican — lambasting wimpy Democrats, defending the war in Iraq and unabashedly praising George W. Bush — his fans assumed he’d gone and lost his damn mind. But Miller insists he always had a visible conservative streak in him; the attack on the World Trade Center merely amplified it. He says he still tilts left on many social issues, like abortion and gay marriage. When it comes to defense, however, Miller makes it clear that he stands on the right side of the aisle.
“It’s the same stuff I tell my kid about a bully on the playground,” he says. “If my kid got punched out by a bully or hassled for his money, the first day I’d say, ‘Walk away from bullies. It’s a no-win.’ Then the second day — I’d probably go up to the third or fourth — I’d say, ‘Son, it’s just not worth your time. Sticks and stones, just spin and get out of there.’ You get up around the fifth time you hear about it, you probably have to say, ‘You know, you might have to kick him in the balls.’ ”
Indications of Miller’s ideological shift began surfacing during the final months of #Dennis Miller Live#, when his opening monologues changed from stinging indictments of American greed and hypocrisy to fiercely nationalistic stump-speeches calling for the government to rip the head off the Islamic world. After the show’s cancellation in 2002, practically all of Miller’s media appearances cemented his newfound conservatism. He appeared on #The Tonight Show# in February 2003 and delivered a tirade against France and their opposition to the Bush administration’s military operations in the Middle East. “I would call the French scumbags,” he snapped, “but that, of course, would be a disservice to bags filled with scum.” That same year, he penned an op-ed piece for #The Wall Street Journal# blasting Norman Mailer for criticizing the invasion of Iraq, declared Michael Moore to be “everything I detest in a human being” and, at a charity event in Las Vegas, jostled with Elton John, who cited Miller as an example of why the world hates the United States.
By that point, Miller had ascended to the top of the GOP’s thin celebrity A-list. He became a star attraction at Republican fundraisers and was even invited for a ride in Air Force One. Some even encouraged him to run for the senate in California, a notion he (mostly) laughed off.
Then, in perhaps the coup de grace, he joined the Fox News Channel as a commentator on #Hannity & Colmes#. Not that it had anything to do with his political views. “That whole thing about Fox having an agenda that they delineate to you everyday, as a former employee, I couldn’t get through to [Fox News Channel CEO] Roger Ailes to get my daily thing if I had told him I had discovered the secret to immortality. It doesn’t work that way. I was getting no memos. Nobody told me what to say.” On the contrary, Miller contends his decision to slide under Rupert Murdoch’s umbrella was practical, not political. “Fox is the state of the art right now, whether you want to say it or not. They beat everybody’s brains in in the one thing that matters, and that’s the amount of people who want to cue up each night and watch them. It’s a brilliant organization.”
Alas, Miller’s stint at Fox was brief. In 2004, he was offered the chance to once again host his own show — on CNBC, a station known more for its around-the-clock financial reports than its entertainment programming. He leapt at the opportunity, but not without a tinge of skepticism. “When they came up to me and said, ‘We want you to do a comedy-variety show on the stock market channel,’ I remember thinking, ‘Well, this could end up as bloody wreckage on the carrier deck, but I’ll give it a try,’ ” Miller says. “I’m kind of a pragmatist about show biz — I need gigs.” On the surface, the format sounded not incredibly dissimilar from #Dennis Miller Live#: Each episode would feature a topical rant, interviews and a dissection of the daily news. (And a monkey sidekick.) But when the plainly titled #Dennis Miller# premiered that January, viewers discovered an attitude different from the take-no-prisoners HBO days. This was, after all, the “new” Dennis Miller. His humor was still as barbed and arcane as ever, but it now came with a caveat: No Bush jokes. “I’m going to give him a pass,” he told the Associated Press at the time. “I take care of my friends.”
While the show didn’t exactly crash and burn the minute it left the runway, Miller admits he did get off to a slow start. By the time he found his footing, though, it was too late, and CNBC pulled the plug after a year and a half due to low ratings. It’s hard to determine if Miller’s freshly minted neo-con image cost him much of his built-in audience, or if the marketplace in general had finally just tired of his “monkey trick.” Regardless, in May 2005, Miller found himself on an extended leave from television, something he hadn’t really experienced since Lorne Michaels plucked him out of the Comedy Store two decades earlier. But despite the relative failure of #Dennis Miller#, its namesake has been around the block enough times to not get too screwed up about it. “Listen, the top rung of show biz pain is not even within light years of the bottom rung of real-life pain. It’s show biz. Nobody’s got a gun to your head.”
Since Miller last had a regular platform to comment from, a lot has happened: Republicans have been besieged with scandals, the Iraq War has continued to spiral out of control and the inept response to Hurricane Katrina permanently damaged what credibility the administration had left. As a result, the Bush bandwagon has largely emptied. But Miller indicates he is still onboard. He disagrees with the president’s wishy-washy stance on immigration (“I don’t think it makes you racist to say, ‘Hey, can we maybe put a checkpoint in here and there, just to check who’s coming in?’ What kind of country do you have if you never check anything?”) and confesses he sometimes finds his stubbornness in certain areas to be a bit off-putting. But in regards to the war on terror, Miller remains firmly behind his “friend.”
“In a world of conjecture,” he explains, “there’s only one true litmus test for me to say if our approach to the last five years is a reasonable one. I’m not saying perfect, I’m saying a reasonable one. And that is: Have we had another event on domestic soil? And we haven’t. Some people are never going to give that up to Bush. They just hate Bush’s guts. But I can tell you, if John Kerry was my president and nothing was happening, if Al Gore was my president now and nothing was happening at home, I’d give kudos to the guy. And George Bush #is# my president and nothing is happening at home … That’s a pretty surprising thing, and I gotta give him credit for it. He’s in charge.”
Today, Miller is, ostensibly, unemployed. He can still sell out theaters throughout the country with his standup, and that’s primarily what he’s been doing for the past year. But for a comedian accustomed to speaking from a national stage, being without a steady, large-scale forum is a killer. If his personal history is any indication, it won’t be much longer before Miller concludes his vacation from the airwaves. He’s certainly working on it: In a few weeks, he’s going to lunch with Roger Ailes to discuss possibly getting another shot at Fox News, hopefully something more long-term this time around. It definitely wouldn’t help win back whatever percentage of his fan base he lost once he embraced the right wing, but it could energize those who stuck with him — and maybe those who’ve come around since.
“I know some people hate it and think it’s the dark empire, but I don’t think that way,” he says of the infamous news channel. “I look at [Bill] O’Reilly, and there are nights where I just shake my head up and down and say, ‘God, that is so spot-on.’ Then there are other nights where I watch and I go, ‘Not quite in conjunction with that.’ But I don’t get off at the end of the show and think he’s evil or that he’s great. I think the world takes all this shit a little [too] seriously now.”
Of course, the perception of being evil is not altogether bad for business. Fox doesn’t dominate the Nielsens just because its viewers appreciate their “unique” way of distributing information. A lot of it has to do with the fact that a large chunk of the population absolutely #detests# them — and watches because of it. Humans are attracted to that which they despise as strongly as that which they claim to love. Miller knows this. It is probably the key to his entire career. Indifference is a death sentence; hatred is a fountain of youth. And if Miller has proven adept at anything in the last 20 years, it’s getting people to hate him.
And he’s more than fine with that.
“When I know somebody has to watch me and they hate my guts, I feel like I’ve won on about five levels,” he reveals. “When you think about a guy sitting at home who thinks you’re a punk and he’s steaming, yet he can’t turn you off — can you imagine what a victory that is?” He laughs in that famous high-pitched giggle. “I mean, fans are nice, but to know you have somebody who consistently has to watch you because he hates your guts … that’s beautiful.”
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