Nancy Pelosi's mother wears combat boots!

Involuntarily retired comedian Dennis Miller went on Hannity & Colmes the other night and, sounding like a drunk in a barroom who's behind on his alimony, let loose a rant against Nancy Pelosi, insulting her as if she was his ex-wife and he'd just spent the afternoon with her lawyers.

Miller takes the possibility that Pelosi might become Speaker of the House personally.

Not worth quoting.  Boils down to "Nancy Pelosi's stupid and she dresses funny and I don't like her."

Stop me if you've heard this one.  The way to kill a joke is try to explain why it's funny.  Analyzing humor is like dissecting a live frog to find out how it jumps.  As soon as you open it up, all the humor drains out.

Fortunately, that's not a concern when talking about Miller's jokes because there's no humor in them to start with.

As a self-appointed court jester to the Right, Miller has found a bad comedian's dream---an audience that doesn't care if he's funny.

A lot of desperate Republicans and their even more desperate media and blogging apologists have been trying to make Pelosi an issue in the campaign.  Possibly they're remembering how much mileage the Party got out of making Tip O'Neill the personification of tax and spend big government.

Pelosi's fair game.  If we had Newt and Tom DeLay to kick around, we'd kick them around.  Instead we have to make do with George Bush and whatever mangy characters the Republican Scandal of the Week has tossed up.

Those Tip ads were kind of funny.  There was a truth to them too.  The Democrats at the time were a little too comfortable with their deficits.  But the anti-Pelosi stuff is different.  The attacks on her are tinged with a peculiar hysteria that's all too easy to explain.

She's a woman with power and she represents San Francisco where everyone, you know, is gay, including the fishermen, dockworkers, Barry Bonds, and the 49ers' entire offensive line.  She's Right Wing men's two worst nightmares in one small, convenient package.  The idea of a woman with power causes their genitals to retract deep into their abdomens, and when they think about homosexuality they automatically see themselves naked in a prison shower, having just dropped the soap.

I don't know the depth of Miller's own insecurities, but he's a dutiful clown and not above playing to the homophobia and castration anxieties of his audience.  Although by now I ought to be used to the shamelessness of people like Miller who should know better, who do know better, I'm disgusted by his shamelessness.  Or I'd be disgusted if I wasn't so surprised by how completely unfunny he's become.

Not that Miller was ever a comedic genius.  He's never been much more than a smirk and a tone of voice.  He must have heard that Jack Benny once said that a comic says funny things and a comedian says things funny and thought that meant comics have to write actual jokes while comedians can get laughs telling people they have cancer if only they say it right and he decided to become a comedian because it was less work.

Good jokes, real jokes, are truth turned sideways.  They aren't generally true.  They are specifically true.  Most people are stupid, and everybody's stupid some of the time, but you don't get a laugh by calling someone stupid---that is, you don't once you've left the cafeteria at your junior high school for the last time---you get the laugh by showing just exactly how they are stupid.

If you want to call Nancy Pelosi stupid, you have to make it clear that she is stupid in a way that is peculiarly Nancy Pelosi stupid.  If you want to say she dresses in a funny way that reveals something ridiculous about herself, then just saying she dresses funny won't cut it.

Everything Miller said about Pelosi in his "monologue" another bad comedian could have said word for word about any Republican woman.  It applies to Lynne Cheney, Condi Rice, Ann Coulter, or Sue Kelly just as well as it does to Nancy Pelosi---that is, barely at all.

Miller's "satire" is a riff on Your mother wears Army boots!

It's the lowest and dumbest form of insult humor.

Whenever I hear him I ask myself, Does his audience really think this is funny?  If they do, where did they get the idea that this is humor?

Then I remember I know the answer.  They do think it's funny and they got the idea from being alive and semi-sentient for any part of the last 30 years.

This is what humor has been since the dawn of Saturday Night Live.

Actually, it's what humor has been since the dawn of time.  People have always gotten their biggest laughs at watching other people make fools of themselves.  Seeing other people get hurt has always made human beings roar.

It's the Mel Brooks axiom.  Tragedy is when I cut my finger.  Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.

But since SNL premiered, that's been the hippest form of humor.

Although Second City was a big influence on the original cast and writers of SNL, another big influence was the Harvard/National Lampoon. The Lampoon style took over when the cast began to move into movies.  The movie comedies that followed Animal House all accepted its worldview:

There's us, and there's them.  We're hip and cool, they're not.  They're just a pack of fools---the most foolish thing about them being their refusal to recognize that our being hip and cool makes us better than them---and anything ridiculous that happens to them they deserve and brought down on their own heads.

I love some of these movies, but when you think about them, you see the same dynamic at work.  Animal House, Stripes, Caddyshack, you name it---in all of them a small circle of cool is identified.  Those within that circle are charmed; those outside it are victims and buffoons and villains and, most importantly, targets.

The plots are the same too.  The villains and buffoons oppose the desires of the cool kids, and that's enough justification for the cool kids to do anything to clear the villains and buffoons from their path.

(Of course, there's much more going on in the best of these movies, as MoXmas points out in this comment.)

Humor is simply a weapon.  The point of a joke is to knock the other guy down.

It's easy to see how this can appeal to the weak and insecure and how people who already tend to think of everything in terms of winning and losing, power, dominance, and submission would adopt it as their personal favorite brand of humor.

To a mind that thinks that all issues of right and wrong should be decided by Trial by Combat, winning is the same as being right, and when the weapon of choice is comedy you win by making the other guy look ridiculous any way you can.

There's more going on with Rush and Ann Coulter, maybe more going on with Miller, but it's no wonder that their audience thinks that making fun of the sick and disabled and mocking grieving widows and wishing Supreme Court justices would die is funny.

It does what humor is supposed to do, make them feel superior and make their political opponents, the villains and buffoons, appear, in their eyes anyway, ridiculous.

You think Nancy Pelosi would be a good Speaker of the House?

Oh yeah?  Well she's stupid!

Har har!

And she dresses funny too!

Har har har!

We win that one, suckers!
____________________________

The Heretik on the right way to spell Pelosi, the way Aretha would, baby---R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

Recommended re-runs:  TBogg reviews The Dennis Miller Show.  Scott Lemieux puts Miller in context.  And Blue Girl was up late one night and flipping through the channels on her TV accidentally caught some of Miller's Vegas act in which Miller tried to get yuks by pointing out that Senator Robert Byrd is old.

Comments

[MoXmas]

I would add, though, that all of the movies you cite put the hip and cool heros in the position of powerless underdog. Essentially, hip and cool and knowing more are the only weapons they have against a system that is aligned against them. When they do get brief chances, they are then revealed as better in the system than those who run the system. Winning the golf round in CADDYSHACK; kicking the ass of the Russian Army in STRIPES; and "Senator Bluto Blutarsky".

That said, there is also an Ivy League sense that even these "outcasts" are only outsiders from the limited communities presented in the film. In fact, the amount class consciousness can almost be prefectly tracked in reverse order to the connection of a Murray brother. ANINAL HOUSE had none -- and was primarily written by Chris Miller (who had been an Alpha Delta Phi at Dartmouth) so there was basically no sense of class, just hierarchy. CADDYSHACK had huge class issues, between the working class caddies and the upper class schmucks -- and the nouveau riche Rodney Dangerfield character. STRIPES was somewhere in the middle.

Which, to me, fits the ongoing weirdness of radical republicasn presenting themselves as underdogs and outsiders. Because if you were brought up to think that the world divided itself into groups of "cool guys" and "dicks", who would want to be a dick? And since the dicks are always in charge, if you think of yourself as cool, you have to adopt an outsider guise.

(See also: Ann Coulter writing about being a Deadhead.)

[Lance]

Mo, excellent points. But these guys do think of themselves as outsiders. According to them, the world is run by Liberals.

And one of these days I'm going to get around to writing up my Animal House is a Republican movie post. But, quickly, Dean Wormer is the Liberal in that movie.

[The Heretik]

Some day trackbacks will work again at Typepad sites. But yeah, what you said. Someone will be laughing soon enough. And it probably won't be Dennis Miller.

[Exiled in New Jersey]

You hit on something there, Lance. In the past couple of weeks I fell upon 'Ghostbusters' for the first time since I took my daughter to see it way back in 1984. All your ingredients are there: the Bill Murray wink to let us know he is cool, the portrait of authority in the form of Wm. Atherton as a prig and with tones of homesexuality about him, Rick Moranis as this stupid white-collar working slob who happens to be an accountant. It's all there in spades, and Murray gets the girl in the end. Remember the ad campaign? 'Coming to save the world this summer." I laughed along with my eight-year old back then. I barely cracked a smile now. The only really genuine laugh came when Ackroyd told of his fear of the Pillsbury doughboy.

A couple of days later I rewatched the real genius of Albert Brooks in Lost in America. It came out the year after the Ivan Reitman blockbuster, and never really found a niche, but this is comedy that does not hurt, where we laugh at Brooks and Julie Hagerty being funny without knowing it, especially in the scene where Brooks tries to convince casino manager Garry Marshall to return the money wife Hagerty lost.

Just for the record, I think Murray made amends with Groundhog Day nine years later, along with Harold Ramis who directed.

[Jennifer]

Lance, I've told you this before so bear with me... when I went through the 2nd City (in Chicago proper), they always stressed playing to the level of your intelligence. Don't go for the easy *dick joke*. Also, do not assume you are too hip for the room. Assume your audience is right up there with you and will be able to grasp your comedic pearls of wisdom. The only time they said to go with dick jokes was if you were playing in the suburbs. They said the burbs were filled with frat boys who only wanted to hear dick jokes and didn't want to have to think for their laughs. Miller seems to have left his intelligence at home (as have all of the other right wing talking heads)and is now playing to a different crowd. His crowd wants the dick jokes and he is not disappointing.

No offense meant to the frat boys who play to their intelligence and no offense meant to the truly funny dick joke...

[Shakespeare's Sister]

He's never been much more than a smirk and a tone of voice.

Mmm, but what more there was, was predicated on a presumption of intelligence. Miller's riffs used to be rife with esoteric references and ten-dollar words. I can quite clearly remember his hosting a comedy show on HBO I saw when I was about 13, and going to my parents' encyclopedias to look up who "Menachem Begin" was, so I could get one of his jokes.

The saddest commentary on both Miller and his newfound audience is that now his best references are Bewitched, Rain Man, and Mary Kay.

[grasshopper]

When I was nursing my dad in Chicago, a few weeks ago, I happened to see television for the first time in years; it was definitely the first time in a few election cycles since I'd seen political commercials that were intended as real, not spoofs. The vitriol connecting a candidate as a "friend of Nancy's" or one who voted on the immigration bill "the same as Nancy" or that this person was "a Nancy Pelosi Wannabe" should have made me laugh. The voice-over was so overwrought with tones of impending doom, it must have been mimicking a horror movie unfamiliar to me. But the commercials did not make me laugh; the effort to foment such rabid hatred shocked me. The viciousness disturbed me.
That's what you get for not watching TV in this country: so innocent of the predatory outrage directed every day at anyone who might be different that your sensibility grows too rarefied to cope. The commercials that failed to make me laugh did not frighten me, but they did hurt me. Usually, I clicked the power off in tears.

[KC45s]

I wonder if Miller remembers his old routines where he mocked southerners. "I just did a tour of the Deep South. Those people are anything but deep." And so on. Perhaps 9/11 changed that, too.

But, seriously, folks. I am jealous of Miller. Rather than settle into hosting cable awards shows and a steady stream of character parts in second-rate movies, he chose to become the conservative movement's official funny man. Smart guy. First, there's no competition for the job. Second, it's easy when you just have to insult people and don't even have to be as funny as Don Rickles. Third, working for conservatives is where the money's at. The guy is in his fifties. It's time to save for retirement. If someone came up to me and said we'll pay you, and all you have to do is have more charisma than Colmes, I mean, hey, sign me up, and I'll spin plates, too.

Miller started out doing a kid's show on local TV. I have a feeling that his knowledge of how to aim at half-developed intellects is going to help with this new gig. Fox viewers could finally get that complex separation of powers thing now that an experienced sock puppet man is around to explain it....

[Mike Schilling]

he chose to become the conservative movement's official funny man. Smart guy. First, there's no competition for the job.

What is P. J. O'Rourke up to these days, anyway?

[Dennis Perrin]

Hey Lance -- looking fwd to your "Animal House" critique. And as far as the National Lampoon's mean "elitist" tone goes, here's my reaction to a recent NY Times book review on that very topic, which includes a dissection of P.J. O'Rourke, stepfather to Dennis Miller, among others.

[Ken Rasak]

To me, the through-line from Chevy Chase to Dennis Miller is smug self-satisfaction. They don't need an external audience to appreciate their humor; their internal one gives them all of the validation they could ever need or want.

[CJColucci]

What? The 49ers' offensive line ISN'T gay? Then there has to be another explanation for the team's inability to run the ball or protect the quarterback.

[matt christman]

In the "we're cool, they drool" vein, there's a billboard off of the highway leading from Milwaukee to Waukesha county (the commuting route of choice for pissed off, middle aged white-flight douchebags) for the local right wing talk radio station: it shows a huge, stylized, star spangled elephant with its foot on top of an overturned, tiny donkey with the message: Don't be STUPID, Be Right!

And I will hear no more words against Ghostbusters.

[blue girl]

And I will hear no more words against Ghostbusters.

I'm with you Matt C. And if they keep it up, we're gonna have to slime 'em.