One Hand Jerking (16 page)

“Final question: Is there something you'd like to apologize for?”

“There are a bunch of performances I want to apologize for, but I'm not gonna single them out in case somebody happened to have liked them, and then they feel betrayed by me.”

Full disclosure: Several years ago, Dennis Miller called and invited me to be a writer on his HBO series. He requested that I send him some jokes and a rant. I did. Never heard back. After a few weeks, I wrote to ask if he'd made a decision.
Again, rudely ignored. Although I needed the money, and rationalized that I was on common ground with Miller on many issues, I actually felt relieved not to get the job.

I would've had to change my lifestyle—working at home in my Venice Beach cottage—plus I would have been writing for someone whose personality is snide (“Lenny Bruce was a heroin addict, and I could care less about heroin addicts”) and whose humor has a streak of meanspiritedness, increasingly tainted by reactionary intolerance, with early tremors such as his disdain for the ACLU. A staff writer confided that Miller considered me too radical.

I still respected him for apologizing publicly to a sick child whose photo he had made fun of the previous week. And, more recently, I thought it was courageous of him to perform before an audience of 1,500 at Davies Symphony Hall in ultra-liberal San Francisco. Miller himself was shocked that anybody had shown up, and he admitted on stage, “I thought I was
persona non grata
in San Francisco.”

James Sullivan, pop culture critic for the
San Francisco Chronicle
, wrote: “Once the arcane-reference comic darling of the cynical eggheads of the adult counterculture, the 50-year-old professional cynic has made a hard right turn of late that has some corners of his constituency up in arms. He is now considered a Bush administration apologist (‘I guess I'm seen as a hawk now,' he commented), which made his first local appearance in years a litmus test of sorts for a man some Southern California power brokers would like to coerce into a Senate run. . . .”

Miller's material ranged from a defense of Operation Iraqi Freedom—poking fun at the left's fixation on the administration's failure to rally international support—to recasting the film title
Fitzcarraldo
as a verb in an old routine about Post Office inertia, which prompted me to pose the following query to Sullivan:

“So many comedians rely on easy joke references that will be recognized by the largest common denominator, and since there's nothing intrinsically funny about them, the audience applauds rather than laughs because they're really applauding themselves for recognizing the reference. On the other hand, Dennis Miller is infamous for his obscure references that will be recognized by fewer folks, but the result seems to be the same. What comment do you have on this phenomenon?”

His response: “I'd say that Miller's fans tend to think of themselves as smarter than the average bear, if you know what I mean. Certain fans of all kinds of entertainment pride themselves on being the ones ‘in the know,' the ones who have done a little cultural research beyond whatever new video release is on sale this week at Target. There are cult bands and cult movies and cult TV shows. And
Dennis Miller is a cult comedian, albeit one who has managed to develop a considerable national audience. . . .”

In May 2003, the
Wall Street Journal
invited Miller to write an opinion piece reacting to Norman Mailer's commentary in the
London Times
the previous week. Mailer had written, “With their dominance in sport, at work and at home eroded, Bush thought white American men needed to know they were still good at something. That's where Iraq came in. . . . The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half-gone in baseball. . . . On the other hand, the good white American male still had the Armed Forces.”

Miller attempted to skewer Mailer with pedantic insults while missing his point with a politically correct sermon: “You know something, the only ‘race' that really occurred to me during the war was our Army's sprint to Baghdad. Conversely, Mr. Mailer appears to see just race in our armed forces, right down to the ‘Super-Marines,' as he calls them. It seems that Mr. Mailer notices color in people even when they're wearing camouflage. He then goes on to speak about racial subsets in the world of sports. Now, when I watch baseball, football and basketball, I see uniforms and skills. Mr. Mailer evidently sees races and nationalities. . . .

“And as Mr. Mailer's prostate gradually supplants his ego as the largest gland in his body, he's going to have to realize, as is the case with all young lions who inevitably morph into Bert Lahr, that his alleged profundities are now being perceived as the early predictors of dementia. . . .”

Does Miller's allusion to “young lions” indicate that he thinks Irwin Shaw wrote
The Naked and the Dead
? A few days later, the
Journal
published Mailer's response:

Talking Presidents, the toy company that manufactures talking action figures at $30 each, is now marketing a Dennis Miller doll, to go along with the George W. Bush doll (“You're working hard to put food on your family”), the Bill Clinton doll (“It depends upon what the meaning of the word
is
is”), the Donald Rumsfeld doll (“I believe what I said yesterday—I don't know what I said, but I know what I think and I assume that's what I said”) and the Ann Coulter doll (“Swing voters are more appropriately known as the ‘idiot voters' because they have no set of philosophical principles—by the age of 14, you're either a conservative or a liberal if you have an IQ above a toaster”).

Anyway, Miller supplied comments for his doll in both family-suitable and explicit-language versions. Here are some of its 21 utterances:

“The world should remember that the United States does have a long fuse, but at the end of the day, it is connected to a
big
friggin' bomb!”

“And quit bringing up our forefathers and saying they were civil libertarians. Our founding fathers would've never tolerated
any
of this crap. For God sakes, they were blowing people's heads off because they put a tax on their breakfast beverage. And it wasn't even coffee.”

“Of course, that's just my opinion—I could be wrong.”

“The only way we were gonna get the French to go into Iraq is to tell them we thought there were truffles in there.”

“Guess what, folks—that's the news, and I am outa here.”

And where did he go? For a ride in George W. Bush's limousine, and in Air Force One, referring to himself as “a Rat Pack of one for the president in Hollywood.” Miller has morphed himself from “Bush can't walk and fart at the same time” to “George W. is a genius.” He promises that on his new CNBC show, he won't aim any barbs at Bush.

“I like him,” he says. “I'm going to give him a pass. I take care of my friends.”

Miller says that his political perspective changed when he kept hearing people comparing Bush with Adolf Hitler, and he didn't think that was fair.

“People say I've slid to the right,” he explains. “Well, can you blame me? One of the biggest malfeasances of the left right now is the mislabeling of Hitler. Quit saying Bush is Hitler.
Hitler
is Hitler. That's the quintessential evil in the history of the universe, and we're throwing it around on
MoveOn.org
to win a contest. That's grotesque to me.”

Out of 1,500 entries in the MoveOn political ad competition, there were only two that made the Hitler/Bush comparison (just an example of Miller sacrificing
perspective for the sake of agenda), so if Tony Blair was George Bush's poodle, then Dennis Miller is his mynah bird. And yet, paradoxically enough, I'm now convinced that Dennis Miller is correct. There's a
vast
difference between Hitler and Bush. Hitler was elected.

Robin Williams, Penn and Teller, Margaret Cho, and Tom and Dick Smothers were among the signers of a petition addressed to New York Governor George Pataki. It stated: “A pardon now is too late to save Lenny Bruce. But a posthumous pardon would set the record straight and thereby demonstrate New York's commitment to freedom—free speech, free press, free thinking.” In 1964, Bruce had been convicted of obscenity for his performance at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village.

The petition—also endorsed by First Amendment scholars, lawyers and Bruce's daughter, Kitty—was submitted at a press conference by the coauthors of
The Trials of Lenny Bruce
, Ronald Collins and David Skover, in May 2003. In July, Pataki was still giving this blatant no-brainer “serious consideration.” Finally, in December, he granted the posthumous pardon. But Lenny would have been simultaneously outraged by the hypocrisy and amused by the irony that the governor had pardoned him in the context of justifying the invasion of Iraq.

“Freedom of speech is one of the great American liberties,” Pataki said, “and I hope this pardon serves as a reminder of the precious freedoms we are fighting to preserve as we continue to wage the war on terrorism.”

Pataki's pandering monument to opportunism was merely the tip of a satirical iceberg. In the words of former drug czar William Bennett, “Hypocrisy is better than having no values at all.”

In 1959, I published an interview with Lenny Bruce in
The Realist
. It had been conducted totally by mail. Here's a sampling:

A. What's the bribe? Eternal lfe? A cure for cancer? $45,000,000? What's the difference what I take? I'd still be selling out.

A. What a horrible thought. If there is any sadism in my work, I hope I—well, if there is, I wish someone would whip me with a large belt that has a brass buckle.

A. A comedian is one who performs words or actions of his own creation, usually before a group of people in a place of assembly, and these words or actions should cause the people assembled to laugh at a minimum of, on the average, one laugh every 15 seconds—or let's be liberal to escape the hue and cry of the injured and say one laugh every 25 seconds—he should get a laugh every 25 seconds for a period of not less than 45 minutes, and accomplish this feat with consistency 18 out of 20 shows. . . . Now understand, I'm discussing comedy here as a craft—not as an aesthetic, altruistic art form. The comedian I'm discussing now is not Christ's jester, Timothy; this comedian gets paid, so his first loyalty is to the club owner, and he must make money for the owner. If he can upgrade the moral standards of his community and still get laughs, he is a
fine
craftsman.

When Lenny came to New York for a midnight show at Town Hall, he called me that afternoon, and we met for the first time at the Hotel America. He was staying there with Eric Miller, a black guitarist who worked with him in certain routines. In “How to Relax Colored People at a Party,” Lenny would play the part of a “first-plateau liberal” trying to make conversation with Miller, playing the part of an entertainer at an otherwise all-white party. Lenny's character would spout one racial cliche after another. A critic had blasted him for “the insulting way in which he rididuled races and creeds.”

Miller lamented, “They just don't understand.”

At this point in his career, Lenny was still using the euphemism
frig
on stage. Although his irreverence was already being translated into “sick comic” by the media, he had not yet been branded “filthy.” I handed him the new issue of
The Realist
featuring my interview with psychologist Albert Ellis, who described “the campaign which I have been waging, with remarkable lack of success, for many years, in favor of the proper usage of the word
fuck
. My premise is that sexual
intercourse, copulation, fucking or whatever you wish to call it, is normally, under almost all circumstances, a damned good thing. Therefore, we should rarely use it in a negative, condemnatory manner. Instead of denouncing someone by calling him “a fucking bastard,” we should say, of course, that he is an “unfucking villain” (since
bastard
, too, is not necessarily a negative state and should not only be used pejoratively).”

“I can see this scrawled on subway posters,” I said. “
Unfuck You
!”

I didn't want to insult the readers' intelligence by resorting to asterisks or dashes, as other magazines did, but my printer wouldn't set in type that portion of the interview unless I brought a note from my lawyer. Lenny was amazed that I could get away with publishing it.

“Are you telling me this is legal to sell on the newsstands?”

“Absolutely. The Supreme Court's definition of obscenity is that it has to be material which appeals to your prurient interest—”

Lenny magically produced an unabridged dictionary from the suitcase on his bed, and he looked up the word
prurient
. “Itching,” he mused. “What does that
mean
, that they can bust a novelty-store owner for selling itching powder along with the dribble glass and the whoopie cushion?”