Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Dennis Miller's Anti-Anti-Trump Comedy


Kyle Smith at National Review offers a piece on Dennis Miller, whose comedy special, Dennis Miller: Fake News, Real Jokes, is appearing on Amazon Prime Video.

Other political comedians are of one mind about Donald Trump. Dennis Miller is of another. The president’s tweeting addiction? “I’m sorry but I find it hilarious,” Miller says. “I think since Trump doesn’t drink, lighting up a–holes on Twitter is his Cognac before bed.”

Stand-up comedians pride themselves on their independent minds, their supposed provocations and subversions. If everyone is “edgy” in the same way, though, isn’t the real free thinker the one who chooses to be different? Traffic is dense on the highway of comedy, but Miller is in a lane almost all by himself. Being your own man comes with a cost; Miller was once a mainstay of HBO, but not anymore. For breaking with orthodoxy, he gets treated as a comedy apostate. And this, in a church of apostasy. To put it in Miller-ese: The senior leadership of the Cool Kids Club ran away from him like he was a fast zombie with radioactive Ebola.

In Dennis Miller: Fake News, Real Jokes, which has just popped up without fanfare on Amazon Prime Video, Miller applies his trademark polysyllabic freestyle to the Great Awokening, the baroque period of political correctness. Consider the apoplexy that greeted North Carolina’s move to preserve the status quo for gender segregation in public bathrooms. North Carolinians “are all of the sudden Pol Pot, Torquemada, the worst people who ever lived,” Miller says. “It’s so funny to me; the progressives don’t even sense the irony of the fact that they all wanna go to Havana, Cuba, but none of ’em will connect through Charlotte, North Carolina.”

The case of Caitlyn Jenner is another area that makes progressives check themselves into the pop-culture psych ward. Miller says he’s happy for her “but can I get like a weekend to process this sort of stuff? ‘Who’s that, the decathlon champion Bruce Jenner, he’s on the cover of Vanity Fair in a camisole?’” It’s the way Caitlyn’s story causes progressives to bend over backwards until their spines snap that Miller finds hilarious. He cites an interview he read with Jessica Lange in which the interviewer compared her appearance to Caitlyn’s: “‘You’re so absolutely beautiful, you remind me of . . . Caitlyn Jenner.’ And Jessica Lange on the phone has to say, ‘I’m so flattered!’ And you know she’s thinking, ‘What are you, f—ing kidding me? I’m JESSICA LANGE! Did you see King Kong for God’s sakes?’”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/dennis-miller-comedy-special-fake-news-real-jokes-political-humor/ 

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