I don't really get this New York Observer article. Writer Tom Scocca talks about YouTube's influence on pop culture. How some things that we thought were good (or bad) years ago can be seen in a new light now. How incidents like the famous World Cup head butt can be uploaded a minute after it happens and viewed over and over and over again, something that would have been unheard of 10 or 20 years ago. All that's well and good, but he claims that YouTube also shows that Dennis Miller wasn't funny in 1992.
Um, yeah, actually, he was.
Now, I'm not going to defend Miller's recent work. I thought his declaration that he wasn't going to joke about Bush on his talk show disturbing, plus there was that whole Monday Night Football fiasco (though I liked him on that, but I'm not a football fan, I'm the audience they were trying to woo with that move). But the NYO uses as "evidence" this clip of Miller interviewing the Pixies after a performance on his show. You're going to judge whether a comedian is funny by what he says in the 30 seconds after a band plays? Then Carson, Letterman, and Conan aren't funny either.
I submit as evidence that Miller was funny his standup work, his Weekend Update spots on SNL, and his guest appearances on other talk shows. He's had many lines over the years that I still quote to friends.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-30-2006 @ 3:22AM
bgdc said...
his "off white album" is hilarious 15 years after it was recorded. He's changed...a lot. He had kids and realized money could be made being a neocon b!tch. Sad as he really was awesome once.
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7-30-2006 @ 10:36AM
Jim said...
I don't want to go off on a rant here, but ...
Dennis Miller is funny. Always has been, always will be.
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7-30-2006 @ 3:07PM
Malcontent said...
I thought the left-leaning Dennis Miller was hilarious when I saw him perform at my college in 1989, and I think the right-leaning Dennis Miller is still hilarious today.
Sounds like just another intellectually bankrupt critic who doesn't like the evolution of Miller's politics.
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7-30-2006 @ 11:12PM
The Gipper said...
As a conservative, I found Miller funny 15 years and hillarious now. Left wingers just cant stand that his politics evolved away from them. They loved his sharp wit until he aimed it at them. The have the same lovehate relationship with John Stossel. When Stossel went after corporations, they couldn't stop throwing emmys at him. Now he goes after the gov't, they hate him.
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7-31-2006 @ 12:51AM
bgdc said...
Dennis miller lost his teeth. He was awesome once. That he will not tear into Bush is utterly unforgivable. He has sacred cows now. I have no use for ANY comedian with sacred cows...
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7-31-2006 @ 2:17PM
Karen said...
His book "The Rants" was also funny. But now he's just sad. And the sadness began with his Monday Night Football gig, in which he tried SO hard to show off how much smarter he was than everyone else. As someone who really IS smarter than most everyone else, I can tell you that a lot of his "intellectual" jibes were just plain wrong (there was one that was based on the premise that the Plantagenet succession was complex, when it was actually quite linear and straightforward--I think he just wanted to prove he knew the word "Plantagenet").
Now that he's abandoned his earlier liberal bent, he displays the flaws of all conservatives--an inability to laugh at himself, which precludes us being able to laugh at him either. Except, I guess, other conservatives.
He's a bore.
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8-08-2006 @ 1:02AM
Thomas Vincze said...
This is the guy who used to ridicule the NRA every chance he got. After 9/11 he transformed into another militant chickenhawk. He's totally embraced the neo-con philosophy. I say give the guy an AK-47 and a flak jacket and drop him off in Falluja. But being a neo-con he hasn't the balls to back up his new militancy so he'll advocate others do the work.
I find this guy repulsive. A radical left winger who shit his pants on 9/11 and became a neo-con.
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