Upsetting Day: Dennis Miller's The Rant Zone

In 2001, Dennis Miller thought, "I bet I could make money by taking jokes I've written for other things and putting them in a book, with spaces in between to let people know when they should laugh," and somehow, a publishing company paid him money to do that. My only experiences with Dennis Miller are things I’ve learned from the popular podcast The Dogg Zone 9000, so I decided to see what Dennis was like in his own words, and I ended up more confused and terrified than Elmo at a Gwar concert!

Sorry, I might understand Dennis Miller a little too well now. Look out, everyone, put on a poncho or something because we're entering the rant zone!

The dust jacket of this book has two footnotes. Dennis Miller wants you to think he's smart so badly that he needs you to know he can quote Julius Cesar and Ozymandias more than he needs you to know he can make a coherent joke in his joke book.

The jacket also calls him "America's most trusted football analyst," and let me tell you right away: I do not trust this man. Especially after he opened the acknowledgments of his books by saying, "Much of the material in The Rant Zone originally appeared on my HBO show Dennis Miller Live." A show, I'm told, ran for seven years and was nominated for eleven Emmys, so these must be fantastic jokes! Jokes so nice you need to get paid for them twice.

It's pretty hard to translate a punch line made for live television to a book. If you've ever seen a Dane Cook routine, you know that for some comedians ninety percent of the joke is pointing, repeating yourself, and making weird noises. I'm guessing Dennis Miller jokes are also like that? If he hadn't provided me with a break in the paragraph for laughter, I would assume part of this book was missing. I would be calling the publisher like, "You forgot to print all of the punchlines!"

You have to turn the page for this to resolve, so I'm thrilled. This has to be good, more full of shit than a whale, large mammal, lots of potential for shit, love it, love it. What could make it more full of shit, though? A whale with a collection of antique gas station clam chowders he's just decided to shotgun? A whale with all you can eat pasta pass from Olive Garden that expires tomorrow and a severe case of constipation? Nothing is coming out, but you know he's not letting that pass go to waste. OR...

... a whale with no ass? No whale has an ass. They have an anus that can stretch to three and a half feet, but that doesn't make it an ass. Can you imagine if whales were swimming around the ocean with big juicy butts? They would rule us all. No one would get anything done. We'd be like lazy non-whites in a Dennis Miller joke, babe.

Dennis Miller says, "I don't want to go off on a rant here," a lot, but since this book is called The Rant Zone, and his previous book titles include "The Rants, Ranting Again, and I Rant, Therefore I Am, I'm going to guess that's his catchphrase. I like it. It's a pleasant callback to the days when a comedian could simply suggest that he gets no respect, and people would piss themselves with joy, which is undoubtedly the best emotion to piss yourself with.

Dennis Miller loves simplicity almost as much as he loves America. He's so American he would french kiss a bald eagle if he weren't far too American to ever do anything French. Some of his rants don't have any jokes in them at all. They're just full-on grandpa at the Fourth of July picnic rants about how hippies are ruining this country.

Did Dennis Miller find this joke in a time capsule from 1965 and decide this was its day to shine? By the early 2000s when this book was published, all of the hippies were firmly capitalists. This cannot have been a hot button issue that he needed to address for any reason other than to prove how edgy he would have been if only he were writing jokes forty years before. You know, the good old days of America, the best country in the WORLD.

Seriously, the man writes as if he thinks a big anthropomorphic apple pie will come to this house and suck him off if only he can convince the public that he's the most American boy on earth. Even when he rants about death he says that people in other countries don't fear death because they don't get to live in America, where it's SO GREAT.

Brilliant, Dennis. I don't know if he chose dingo shit because dingo is a funny word or because he thought it didn't count as racism if you made it a joke about Australia, a very modern country where the only people who eat dingo shit off a flat rock are doing it because someone on the internet is paying them very well to. Something that Dennis should love, because what's more American than entrepreneurship? The point is, that joke sucks more dingo shit than Grandma Bo-ba-la, Bo-ba-la, Bo-ba-la after she's read Fifty Shades of Grey while sitting on the heavy duty cycle, cha cha.

Dennis is also obsessed with jokes about people from other countries eating poop. It's a recurring theme in his work. It's the comedy button that he cannot stop pressing because, in his opinion, it produces solid gold every time.

Look, I understand comedy is not universal. Sense of humor tends to vary by time and location. There are some classics that will almost always hit like a kid falling over, or an old person falling over, or a teenager falling over and rolling down a hill, and then maybe he lands in a big pile of mud. One of the oldest known jokes is, "a dog walked into a tavern and said, 'I can't see a thing. I'll open this one.'" It's lost all context in this day and age, a lot like how we're supposed to feel about a nude tribesman eating nuts out of elephant shit. So I get some jokes just won't translate from 2001 to 2022. However, sometimes Dennis Miller makes references that feel like they're from another dimension.

See, now I need those footnotes. I googled it, and Maria Callas is a famous soprano, so I guess if she were in labor, she could scream very loud because sopranos have good lung capacity? What's the Lot's wife thing, though? Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt in the Bible. Did he mix up salt and sugar? Or does she have no sugar in her blood because she is salt? He already said the woman is psychotically aggressive; why even reiterate her bad mood with the low blood sugar thing? This sounds like someone programmed an AI to tell Dennis Miller jokes, and it refused and spat this out as its suicide note.

There are some jokes with references I at least half understand, but then the whole premise still confuses me. It's like every punchline requires a map of associations through Dennis Miller's mind, which is a place I want to visit as badly as the Wicked Witch of the West wants to share a Splash Mountain ride with the Kool-Aid Man, babe. I'm sorry, something terrible is happening to me.

First of all, this is making a lot of assumptions about our nation's oldest living man who still goes by the first name Kid. I don't believe that Kid Rock has ever stayed at a Holiday Inn. He was born rich. His dad owned multiple car dealerships. It's Hiltons and above for Kid Rock.

Then there's "if the Clinton's marriage were any more about convenience, they'd have to install a Slurpee machine and a Slim-Jim rack." Those are genuine improvements you could make in a marriage. Do you know how excited I would be if my husband brought home a Slurpee machine? That's every woman's dream! I would never divorce for fear of losing custody of the machine. Why, that Slurpee machine would make our marriage more impenetrable than the Oakland Raiders playing red rover with a bunch of french bulldog puppies. Oh no. He's so in my head, shit.

Ok, I have to end this article before Dennis Miller's sense of humor completely subsumes mine. I just have to figure out how? Maybe I can take some inspiration from Dennis Miller. Let me get some of the final wisdom he offers up in his book. You know it's got to be good if he saved it for his closer.

No, Dennis! Fuck. I'm thwarted again. That joke was less funny than Hannibal Lecter headlining the Friars Club Roast of Kierkegaard. Oh no, that made even less sense than the last one. I'm not even entirely sure what a Friars Club Roast is? I think I just wrote it because it's like an old-timey reference that sounds vaguely foody? And…and if Hannibal were there, it would be bad because he eats people like food. This article has gotten away from me horribly. I'm more in the woods than a horny Bigfoot fetishist on Valentine's day. Noooooooo.

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