http://www.salon.com
Feb. 9, 2004
I Like to Watch
Dennis Miller's monkey business.
By Heather Havrilesky
It's Miller time (again)
Dennis Miller has a chimp on his desk and a button that replays Howard
Dean's
now-infamous "Hooah!" from the night of the Iowa caucuses, but he wants us
to
know that on his new show, he won't be relying on irony or snide gimmicks
to
make his deathly serious points. "It will not be Dennis Miller's
Ironypalooza
business as usual," he enunciates emphatically. "Excoriation has been my
milieu
up to this point, but on this show, I'm going to be a smartass with the
smart*****, and heartfelt with the sincere people. I hope you'll
eventually
come to think of this show as an ombudsman: fair and insistent."
Yes, Miller admits, he's less liberal and far more outraged than he was
before.
"9/11 changed me," he says. "Quite frankly I'm shocked that it apparently
didn't change everyone out there." According to Miller's logic, we may
have
been open-minded, even-handed folks on the 10th of September, but on the
morning of the 11th, we all earned the right to surrender to our least
enlightened selves, to fall prey to our worst impulses, to vent enough
spleen
with such righteous outrage that it almost matches the fury of our
fundamentalist oppressors.
Miller's worst impulses include a resident chimp, a live-show format
without an
audience, a watered-down "Weekend Update" that resorts to jokes about
Dean's
sanity and Kucinich's creepy looks for its weak laughs, and a "Varsity"
panel
so awkward and unprofessional that the words "Junior Varsity" spring to
mind
more often than the chimp presses the "Hooah!" button.
Since Miller is relentlessly self-serious and wildly overconfident, he
confuses
his worst impulses with really bold, daring choices. Thus, the opening
current-events segment wins only scattered laughs, not only because it's
not
that funny but also because those are members of his staff laughing. You
see,
Miller refuses to ****p in "tourists" to fill his audience, so instead, two
or
three producers and network executives guffaw loudly, and we're meant to
think
the key grip and the gaffer just can't get enough of Miller's love. And
that's
bold? Aside from the obvious fact that executives constitute more of a
fraudience than honeymooning couples from Michigan ever could, when paired
with
mediocre jokes that I'm betting are all written by Miller himself (and if
they're not, he should replace his entire writing staff), you've got one
of the
most painful, awkward segments of television ever produced.
"Kraft Foods says it will eliminate good jobs, 6,000 of them, due to more
than
a year's worth of disappointing losses," Miller quips. One nervous chuckle
can
be heard, faintly. "All right, who's not eating Velveeta. Is it you?! You
slackers! Eat your damn Velveeta!" The studio is deathly silent. I don't
think
I'm the only one longing for some good old-fa****oned tourist laughter
about
now.
Another bold choice? Invite rambling pundits and TV amateurs to be guests
on
your show, perch them on bar stools a couple of inches from each other,
and do
little to herd them toward a discernible point. "For the most part, I'll
let
people talk until they're talked out," Miller explains, and you just know
there's a Big Idea behind it. "I think talk show guests sometimes bank on
the
host's intercession to save them. I say let them finish, see what's next,
what's on the other side of all that bluster. Also, I believe constantly
trying
to break into their answer with my next question is a particularly
precious
form of preening that I hope to avoid."
No preening? No live audience? Guests talking until they're talked out?
Someone
needs to remind Miller that this is television. Getting all thoughtful and
self-conscious about what makes most talk shows ring false is all well and
good, but it doesn't necessarily produce a more entertaining show. Thanks
to
Miller's ill-considered purist impulses, we find him cringing his way
through
weak jokes in an empty studio, or wringing his hands as Naomi Wolf and
David
Horowitz attack each other in 5,000 words or less, sidestepping any
recognizable issue or topic for minutes at a time.
In short, Miller has changed. Despite his talk of pragmatism, he's evolved
into
exactly the kind of semi-intellectual who's so boxed in by ideas, he can
no
longer entertain. Miller says he would like his show to be the
headquarters of
a "common-sense revolution." Unfortunately, that revolution's not likely
to
begin until Miller himself demonstrates a little common sense.
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