WASHINGTON — From “Saturday Night Live” to “Monday Night Football,” Dennis Miller has done it all in show business, maintaining his singularly articulate style no matter the format.
His latest venture, “The Dennis Miller Option,” initially launched as a sports show on April 25 before expanding to cover all topics over two episodes a week on Podcast One.
“When you’re doing free association about the events of the world, it is an eternity to take a week off. … Stuff happens quickly now, my friend, so we’ve moved up to two a week,” Miller told WTOP. “People were sending me emails saying, ‘I like listening to you, I miss the radio show, but I don’t like sports.’ So I said to the guy in charge, ‘Let’s just go to a generic one.’ If we get to sports periodically, fine. If not, fine, we can talk about the events of the world.”
The biweekly schedule comes as a welcome respite from the daily grind of his syndicated radio program “The Dennis Miller Show,” which launched in 2007 and wrapped in 2015.
“Sisyphean task,” Miller said. “I did eight years of three hours a day, and while I enjoyed it immensely, I noticed toward the end that I was just fried. I was being too curt on the air with callers, and I thought, ‘Geez, I like to have a bit of an attitude, but I’d say I’m officially being snippy here.’ So after eight years, three hours a day, five days a week, I was just a little fried.”
How does he enjoy the podcasting format?
“It seems so easy comparatively,” Miller said. “You can pretape a podcast. … Once you have that three-hour-a-day show, you’re anchored until you have a week off. You get off, you have your lunch, then you start thinking, ‘What do I talk about in the morning?’ Then you go to bed because you’ve gotta get up at 6. It’s all-encompassing. I find the podcast infinitely easier.”
Who’s his favorite guest so far?
“Dana Carvey on any format, along with Marty Short, is probably the easiest interview you do in your life,” Miller said. “You say, ‘Hi, Dana, how are you?’ Then he and around 15 of his famous friends that he does the voices of talk for an hour, then you go, ‘Thanks, Dana. Goodbye!’ … You can zone out if you want, because Dana knows exactly how to kill.”
Miller met Carvey on “Saturday Night Live” (1985-1991), where he followed in the footsteps of Chevy Chase and Jane Curtin anchoring news parodies at the desk of “Weekend Update.”
“What a great gig,” Miller said. “[With] guys like Phil [Hartman], [Jon] Lovitz, Mike Myers and Dana, you were always going to be the third or fourth lead. … So I used to try to stay out of sketches and put it all into ‘Weekend Update.’ … I remember thinking, ‘Just get a good rock ‘n’ roll song to start it with … swing as hard as you can for 10 minutes … then get out of there. Then people will say, ‘I dug him on update and I didn’t see him flop in anything else.'”
He was also the unofficial gateway to break in new cast members.
“My job was to act like Louis Gossett Jr. in ‘An Officer and a Gentleman,’ the drill instructor. I remember it being David Spade, Rob Schneider, Chris Farley, [Chris] Rock and Adam Sandler. … I’d slap them around, give them a nickname, rough them up and tell them they had no career. … They’ve all gone by me at the speed of light and made a zillion dollars in box office!”
As for Miller, he went on to play a radio host in Spade’s big-screen comedy “Joe Dirt” (2001).
“It was the first time my kids knew I was in show business,” Miller said. “They had never seen any of my stuff, but ‘Joe Dirt’ they were genuinely impressed by. … David called and said, ‘I’m doing this movie about a kid with a mullet who gets hit by a meteorite that turns out to be a turd.’ I said, ‘Not interested.’ … He said, ‘I only need you two days.’ … I said, ‘I’ll come in for one day.’ So, I shot my entire part just me and Spade in a fake radio studio, just me ad-libbing.”
When it comes to actual interviewing, Miller believes in a “less is more” approach. Larry King told WTOP he never prepared questions, while Dick Cavett joked he learned the hard way about preparing too many questions, as if Elizabeth Taylor would say, “I opened this trunk and you’ll never believe what was in it,” and Cavett would reply, “What’s your favorite hobby?'”
“Anytime anybody tells you they had Elizabeth Taylor on the couch and wanted to open her trunk, you should page Dr. Freud,” Miller joked. “I would lean more toward Larry. … It’s pretty easy to say, ‘Hi,’ be nice to people, ‘What are you doing?’ Then ask a couple questions, then go into the wrap and fill 20 minutes. I wouldn’t overthink it too much [or] it looks so unrelaxed.”
He does, however, have one pet peeve when watching other hosts.
“I don’t like it when I can hear them say, ‘Oh, oh,’ trying to get in,” Miller said. “You’re thinking, ‘Why don’t you just let them finish? You asked them something!’ I don’t like when the host tries to get immediately back in and help them with their answer. I think Larry was great at that. He’d ask you a question and — until you got boring — he’d let you run with it.”
Miller gained his own TV hosting experience on HBO’s “Dennis Miller Live” (1994-2002).
“On the radio, I was in a bath robe when I did it and on HBO I was in a pair of jeans with a bath robe over the jeans, so it wasn’t much of a difference,” Miller joked. “I look back on the HBO show and I remember I left a navy blue sports coat at the show. … I’d interchange the shirts, but out of the 215 shows, I probably wore that navy blue jacket for at least 150. … I must admit that being in your own home and wearing a bath robe to work was the optimum.”
He branched out further as a color commentator on ABC’s “Monday Night Football” (2000-2001), joining the booth with Al Michaels and Dan Fouts for a short-lived experiment.
“I remember John Madden left Fox and I called Dan Fouts and said, ‘We’re going to get fired this afternoon.’ He said, ‘But we got picked up for a third season.’ I said, ‘I don’t care, Madden hasn’t left Fox to sit at home in the Dakota on the Upper West Side and drink frappuccinos. … I guarantee he is coming here.’ So we got fired that afternoon. … I did two years, Tony [Kornheiser] did three … and I think O.J. [Simpson] did one, so we’re up on the Juice.”
In all seriousness, he completely understands the decision.
“I would have fired me, too,” Miller said. “It’s John Madden! He is the greatest color announcer who ever did it and Al Michaels was the greatest play-by-play. They had a super team there. As a matter of fact, if I’m ever in L.A. on any given night and I want to do stand-up comedy and I go into the improv and John Madden’s on stage, they better haul his as** off, too. That’s the way the world works. But my two years there, when I look back on it, I had a lot of fun.”
Win or lose, he is never bothered by the doubters.
“I was caught in a culture fruckus. It seemed like around 55 percent of the country hated my guts and 45 [percent] liked me, but you know what? As you get a little older, you can’t wake up every morning and start cruising the internet to find your self worth,” Miller said. “I had fun! For them to offer me ‘Monday Night Football,’ I said, ‘Sure, I’m gonna try this.’ I can’t look back and say I was devastated. I wasn’t. When they whack you, they whack you. It’s showbiz.”
He applies the same mentality to his recent political commentary.
“Half the country is gonna hate you either way,” Miller said. “I’m socially liberal; conservatives don’t like that. I’m fiscally conservative and on the War on Terror, I’m conservative; and liberals don’t want to know about that. You’re always gonna piss somebody off. All I know is that I’ve been lucky enough for 35 years that I’ve had a gig in a very, very risky, tricky business. … I’m doing the best I can. Some people hate it, some people like it, what are you gonna do?”
Find out more on the podcast website. Listen to our full conversation with Dennis Miller below:
