Dennis miller weekend update sign off
With a 24/7 news cycle demanding instant punditry, is a biannual, hour-long, stand up special the proper forum for political humor anymore? If it is, it's going to have to get a whole lot funnier than what Carlin and Miller are offering. When fake news programs like The Daily Show and web sites like The Onion routinely cuts deeper than both men with headlines like "Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory", it bodes ill for their continued relevance in their current shape and formats. When both of these smart comics can't find a way to wrap their views in some sharply observant comedy that both scores its points and entertains, it's a poor commentary on their current satiric skills. Something similar happened in the other partisan direction with George Carlin's last special, Life Is Worth Losing, when Carlin (another comic hero of mine) unleashed several bitter and depressing volleys of doom and gloom over the state of the world with no jokes or ideas attached. In the second half of the show, Miller talks about his support for President Bush and while some former fans have disowned him for his unwillingness to join in with the rest of Hollywood's fervent opposition to the President, the problem isn't so much his "incorrect" politics - though for some, that is enough - but that it's not very funny and grinds the already meandering show to a halt. If you can get it better for free, why pay for cable or this DVD? Even if you missed his appearances, this is a mediocre compilation to catch up to. It also hurt watching the special when it aired because he did about half of the material on the Leno appearance meant to plug the special's debut and he delivered the jokes better there.
The largest problem is that instead of All In, he should've called it All the Stuff I've Recited On Leno Since My Last HBO Special because I recognized at least 3/4 of the material from his guest shots on The Tonight Show.
He gets in a few pointed shots in about environmentalists against drilling for oil in Alaska who will never bother to travel to this sacred pristine wilderness they're so concerned about and how global warming hysteria is overblown, but they're isolated high points in an otherwise lackluster show. wasn't empty sails right over the audience's collective head and it rarely gets much better. Performing in the EnormoDome theater at Caesar's Palace from which Celine Dion usually holds court (and pounds her chest like a French-Canadian King Kong), Miller is in immediate trouble when an early joke about how he was surprised that the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.
Dennis miller weekend update sign off series#
His previous HBO special, The Raw Feed - his first after ending his series - was oddly off-kilter despite having some bitingly funny bits about the post-9/11 world, but that was comic gold compared to the dreadfully flat, live-from-Las Vegas special, All In. While he started as a stand-up comedian, he's been oddly at his worst when called upon to hold the stage for an hour against an audience telling jokes old-school style. Between his six years as the anchorman on Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update and eight years of his Emmy-winning HBO show, Dennis Miller has built a solid reputation as erudite and literate comic talent based on his trademark "rants" and "Citizen Arcane" brand of obscurely-referenced humor.