Miller's Un-Crossing

Dennis Miller, the only comic ever to get both an Emmy-winning show on HBO Late Night as well as a slot on the Monday Night Football crew, signed off of cable TV tonight in his last CNBC broadcast. His show, titled uncreatively "Dennis Miller" by CNBC, saw its ratings drop after the 2004 elections to just an average of 114,000 viewers nationwide. Our Austin Chronicle alternative weekly can boast more readers than that.

Miller ran through his usual standup routine on his last show, working too hard, then interviewed New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse, who was plugging her book on the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun,Becoming Justice Blackmun. Miller managed to use the word "heinous" twice during his interview, another example of his erudite broadcast vocabulary. You can watch until the end of the year and probably not find another use of heinous twice in one comedy program. At one point during ABC's Monday Night Football experiment with Miller on the team, a wireless Palm broadcast tracked his exotic language and esoteric references during the game. (The title of this blog post is a little nod to his excellence, a reference to a certain Cohen Brothers film that fell a little short of their potential, too.)

Now he's just lost his edge, drifting over into right-wing politics about the time the US invaded Iraq. On a recent appearance on the Daily Show, he said he'd lost ground because "people think I'm some kind of right-wing nut job, because I backed Bush on the war." My brother Bob's blog Wissewig chronicled that appearance, exceptional because Miller was funny once more.

Comics take a risk when they go jingo on us, either to the left or the right. But since the right seems to have a stunted sense of humor anyway, it looks like Miller's crossing-off of the CNBC list shows there's more risk of being un-funny — and so un-broadcasted — on the right.

Have a listen (MP3) to my own little rant about Miller's fall from funny.