Dennis Miller is a comedian who was Weekend Update anchor on
Saturday Night Live from 1985
note during the show's 11th season, which was so fraught with mediocre writing and acting that NBC nearly had the show cancelled. Dennis Miller's turn as a Weekend Update anchor was the reason why season 11 was tolerable to 1991, making him the first long-running Weekend Update anchor (with
Tina Fey and
Seth Meyers soon following). After his stint on
SNL, Miller hosted his own HBO show
Dennis Miller Live from 1994-2002, and was a color commentator on
Monday Night Football from 2000 to 2001. Since 2007 he's hosted his own radio show called
The Dennis Miller Show.
His comedy is very snarky and includes lots of obscure references and big words. Early in the
Turn of the Millennium his political views, previously considered to be mostly to the left, shifted significantly more to the conservative side of the spectrum.
Tropes associated with Dennis Miller include:
- Badass Longhair: His mullet in the '80s (which he still more-or-less has now).
- Catch Phrase: On Weekend Update he would begin with, "Good evening, and what can I tell you?" and end with "Guess what, folks? That's the news, and I am outta here." On Dennis Miller Live his rants would begin with "Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but..." and end with "Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong."
- Deadpan Snarker: To an almost insane degree.
- Pittsburgh
- Rant Comedy: The rant was a Once per Episode feature of Dennis Miller Live.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness and Sophisticated as Hell: He mixes obscure references and big words with lots of slang, and when uncensored, cursing.
- Verbal Tic: "Babe."
- Viewers Are Geniuses: One of the main reasons why Miller is a Love It or Hate It comedian. Other shows have made fun of this, such as The Simpsons (season ten's "They Saved Lisa's Brain," where Comic Book Guy's "C:/DOS. C:/DOS/Run, Run/DOS/Run" shirt is only considered funny to one person out of a million (which is called "The Dennis Miller Ratio") and Family Guy (the Cold Open to "Peter Griffin: Husband, Father, Brother?" has Peter watching a monologue to Dennis Miller Live filled with obscure vocabulary and historical references — and Peter responding with "What the hell does 'rant' mean?")
- Subverted once by Janeane Garofalo on his HBO show. She talked about doing a photo shoot and wanting it to be like Kim Deal of the The Pixies, and he didn't get the reference, saying "I've never felt older."
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