What a horrid human being Michelle Wolf is. I’m going to read up on her over the next couple of days and I will have a few brutally mean jokes about her by Wednesday.
— Dennis Miller (@DennisDMZ) April 29, 2018
I bet they’ll be meaner than Willa Cather after an absinthe bender with Gavrilo Princip, cha cha. https://t.co/hovKGymFFk
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) April 29, 2018
In the late 1980s, Dennis Miller was briefly (self-fashioned) as a kind of Thinking Man’s Comic.
He peppered his bits with deep cut historic and literary references that in retrospect I am *certain* he had a shallow understanding of if at all.
In fact, if you look at his stuff then *and* now, the references never traffic much in context so much as the brief dazzle that a comedian would reference William of Orange. Why? To what end and what relevance? Not important, since he’s name dropped 11 more in the time it took to ask yourself that. It’s as if he pulled them from the card catalog at random.
Intellectualism!
If you were a 14 year old boy at the time (which I was) his comedy was perfectly engineered to key into and congratulate yourself on that Superior Intellect that all 14 year old boys are certain they have.
Ideally, what happens to those boys (myself included) is that over time they have the good luck to get humbled out of that shit right quick by actual thinkers who do more than just build scarecrows out of easy references to back people off from challenging the true depth of their thinking.
I don’t know that Dennis has ever had that. He built a career in the middle off the parlor trick of the cheap gilded reference and then after 9⁄11 found some oxygen on the right as kind of store brand Christopher Hitchens. Say what you will about Hitch (but don’t, cuz we’d be here all day) but there was never any doubt that he was thoroughly versed in whatever he was right or wrong about. He’d done the reading. Miller doesn’t have that. It’s always been a kind of Three Card Monte with this twerp.
And that’s why this twitter exchange is so satisfying (and why I had to write so much about it this morning): Miller has been intellectually bankrupt for so long that even now when all of this could have been avoided with one of his trademark esoteric warning shots he’s got *nothing*. He never has.
—jason malmberg
Flommist Jason Malmberg is a simple man who believes in brown liquor and small dogs. He also makes art sometimes. Copyright © 2018 Jason Malmberg.
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