Maher vs. Miller

Over at Pandagon, Ezra Klein wonders why Bill Maher's and Dennis Miller's careers have been running in reverse parallel directions, or, more specifically, how Maher has become a lot funnier and more entertaining since leaving the show that made him famous, while Miller has done the precise opposite. The interesting thing about this dynamic is the way that their political trajectories have crossed: Maher used to lean towards the Republicans, supporting Bob Dole as late as 1996, and Miller definitely used to be a liberal; witness some of the latter's red-meat anti-Nixon wisecracks on SNL.

How has Maher managed to improve? For one thing, being on HBO offers a lot of freedom. I've noticed recently that the channels I watch are almost exclusively HBO plus sports and news channels, and not much else (exceptions: The Daily Show, The Simpsons, and the World Poker Tour). In terms of entertainment, no channel can even hold a candle to HBO. The ability to curse on air attracts the best and most free-thinking, avant-garde writers. They attract experimentalist actors and producers, and the cycle continues.

So Maher benefits from a liberty he clearly never had at ABC. Also, he isn't expected to do a show that competes with Letterman or Leno, which is good news, because ass-kissing celebrity interviews are just not his shtick. What else? Maher's writers are great, and he's simply sharper and more on his game than he's ever been before; some of that, I think, stems from a desire to show the Disney execs what fools they were to cancel his show.

But the real reason that Maher looks so good in this comparison is Dennis Miller's decline into unfunny crankhood. Have you ever seen his show? Probably not. His "jokes" are nothing but RNC talking points delivered in Miller's ironic cadences and trademark inability to pronounce in one try the words on his teleprompter. He has recurring features in which a chimpanzee in some hilarious (yes, hil-fucking-arious) costume parades around on screen. His audiences think that there's comedy involved in saying that John Kerry can speak French, which makes it unlikely for them to get any of the sort of esoteric references that launched Miller's career. It's not entirely his fault: the move from HBO to CNBC has had predictable consequences; also, it's both piteous and pitiful to watch any performer, who has become a shell of his former self, obstinately refusing either to fade away or acknowledge that something's amiss.

But a lot of this is Miller's conscious doing, for which he deserves no empathy. Anyone who begins what is ostensibly a news/political-chat-show-plus-jokes by declaring that "Bush is my guy, so he'll get a pass from me" is doomed not only to fail, but to suck hard. The lifeblood of any comedy worth the name is irony, and irony cannot co-exist with a total surrender of one's critical faculties. Bill Maher never would have done this.

I say this with love: a serious drug addiction might be the best thing that could happen to Miller's career at this point. It would at least force him to re-evaluate his priorities.