‘can you believe I’ve heard of x historical figure and are now saying their name? i’m a smart!’

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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