Just Joking

James Thurber once said, “The wit makes fun of other persons, the satirist makes fun of the world, the humorist makes fun of himself.” Dennis Miller is a bit of all three. In “Ranting Again,” a collection of 46 “rants” originally delivered on “Dennis Miller Live,” he takes on politics, parenthood and pop culture, exposing the inanity of civilized society while being a party to it.

Miller’s signature style is putting together unconnected subjects and getting a joke out of the weird juxtapositions--and it works here. Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) is “a waste of an apostrophe. . . . Allowing this guy to chair an ethics committee is like having Kevorkian teach you the Heimlich maneuver.” Our country is so bogged down in procedure, “we make Radar O’Reilly look like Henry David Thoreau. . . . it’s no wonder we’re in a malaise that makes a bout of Epstein-Barr seem like a Laker Girl doing the Watusi after four triple lattes with a Dexatrim chaser.” It’s the same effect that the Beat poets use. Witness Gregory Corso in “Marriage,” who tells himself “[b]ut I should get married I should be good” and then gets up from his “big papa chair / saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!”

The Beats used this technique to ridicule and reject mainstream values and social norms. Miller was raised in Pittsburgh, Pa., by his mother, a dietitian, after his father left the family. A journalism major at Point Park College in Pittsburgh, he became well-known as the “Weekend Update” anchor on “Saturday Night Live.” The “angry white guy” shtick perfected there is the basis for his rants, and he makes good use of his middle-class background and worldwide perspective.

Miller’s zingers about addiction are tinged with a been-there, done-that hipness. “Look,” he says, “if you’re someone I know and you’re getting sober and you think you wronged me once and feel compelled to track me down so you can make amends . . . don’t, OK? You’re not doing it for me, you’re doing it for you. And if you absolutely must make amends with me, at least wait until I’m drunk so I won’t remember any of it the next day.”

Miller might be sober, but he plays it both ways, still acting the bad boy rebel yet telling a comforting (and conservative) story of life in the burbs, where he has found himself happily married, with children. He pans the single life: “For me, dating was like a casting call for ‘America’s Most Wanted.’ I once dated a girl who was so twisted, her personalities formed their own softball league.” On online dating, he connects screwing around to an identity crisis: “I don’t want to burst your bubble, Spanky-dot-com, but, uh, y’know all those succulent Hawaiian Tropic chicks you think you’re trading fantasies with are actually 50-year-old fat guys.” It’s as if Miller had taken to heart Corso’s sentiment, “But I should get married I should be good” but has an easier time of it than Corso, implying that wedded bliss is sexy: “Marriage is a never-ending series of one-night stands. And I’m on the biggest hot streak of my life.” He dedicates the book to his wife, Carolyn, and his two sons, Holden and Marlon, whom he calls “the most important thing I have ever done or will do.”

He has, he admits, become his parents. He includes surprisingly fuddy-duddy rants about Generation X’s nonconformity. He sees body piercing as a “powerful, compelling visual statement that says ‘Gee . . . what can I do to make myself even more unemployable?’ ”

Miller anticipates the criticism that ranting is not analogous to spinning a funny riff about his own “me-monkey” life. “I have a nice home, I provide for my family, but I’m not a pig about it. . . . Just the other day I was lounging around my Olympic-sized pool shaped like a middle finger and filled with Evian water and . . . I realized that the Third World orphan I pay to walk my solid gold dog is late, but do I have him killed? No I don’t.” The reader wonders whether this narcissistic humor is meant to mock Miller’s celebrityhood, or to call attention to it.

Miller is positively gleeful--and nonpartisan--when hitting the Beltway below the belt for moral transgressions: “The dogs who bark the loudest about family values--Dole, Gingrich, Gramm--all left their first wives. . . . Newt Gingrich had an affair while married to his first wife, who had been his high school math teacher, a woman he divorced while she was recuperating from cancer surgery, and then he had to be pursued for adequate child support. Talk about the putz calling the kettle black.” Of our president, he says, “We as Americans are inexplicably attracted and attached to this guy. . . . But we keep sticking with him, hoping he’ll eventually change. . . . In a nutshell . . . we’re all Hillary.”

Miller’s in-your-face satire at first seems an up-to-date mix of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. He says, “There are already a lot of gays in the military. I mean, you don’t get that many men all living together to be that neat and tidy just by discipline alone. . . . Lately the heterosexuals have been the ones, uh, shall we say, firing their weapons at unauthorized targets. . . . Where else can you be raped by your commanding officer and then be court-martialed because while it was happening you didn’t call him sir?”

Playing it both ways can appear Zelig-like, and at times Miller comes off more like an actor playing roles than an individualistic social commentator with a soul. The old “personal as political” creed becomes the perfect baby boomer persona. (“In Washington recently, a special 12-person committee was formed to address the problem of teenage pregnancy. . . . There used to be a two-person committee that handled that, it was called parents.”)

Unfortunately, as in his best-selling “Rants,” Miller’s annoying “Of course, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong” ends each piece, 46 times too many. Though in the preface he states that “The Rants” originally appeared on his HBO show, thanking many for assistance, he’s ambiguous about how much of this work he has written and how much was produced by his show’s writers. One guesses this was a collaboration and feels justified, in a book dripping with cynicism, to voice a little cynicism too. Still, a humor book should be judged mostly on whether it’s funny, and “Ranting Again” is a scream.