The Career Arc of Dennis Miller

I've been getting a lot of mail recently regarding the Mr. Food joke from the last blog post. Most of you wanted to know who the hell Mr. Food was, and the rest wondered why I thought mentioning Mr. Food would be funny.

Well, to answer the first question: Mr. Food is a guy who comes on your local newscast, traditionally in the noontime hour, to teach people ways to grill things they would not typically grill or how to cook up something good and quick and tasty. Anyhow, the guy is headquartered in one place and distributes his segments throughout America.

I remember how disappointed I was when I found out that Mr. Food did not live and work in Alabama. It was an eye-opening experience for me. Why would he attempt to deceive us? If we so happened to want his recipe-of-the-day, he'd tell you to send a self-addressed stamped envelope to him, Mr. Food, "RIGHT HERE AT THE STATION." You're not at the station, you prick.

To the second question: Obscure jokes can be funny, but only because you can't understand them. Look at Dennis Miller. He built his career on telling jokes that only a few people outside of Liberia could understand. A few people would laugh, others would pretend to be laughing even though they didn't know who Zeke Zanzibar was. This is the first stage of Dennis Miller's career arc.

After a while, it became funny when he used jokes no one could understand, simply because no one understood them. At the height of his powers, sometime around the Off-White Album, Miller could have made up an obscure reference and people would have laughed, as long as they thought it was an obscure reference, usually enveloped in what he called a "rant." I'm sure this kind of humor is called something, and maybe only Dennis Miller and William F. Buckley, Jr. knows of the correct terminology; but the word would define a joke that isn't about the punch line but about the joke itself, the delivery and the person's attitude on stage. I'm going to make up a phrase to describe it: Postmodern Jive.

That's the second stage.

The third stage came when he went on Monday Night Football and when you watched you thought, "Hmph, that's not all that funny anymore." The act wore thin, I guess. You could predict what he was going to say and how he was going to say it. Steve Martin quit before he had this problem. He just couldn't take the act anywhere new. Postmodern Jive has its limitations.

Of course, I only used one obscure reference, and I did it more to amuse myself than anyone else. Maybe self-amusement is all I've got these days.