“That’s all your music, isn’t it?” he asked after her set.
She was thrilled that somebody wasn’t coming up and saying, “Do you know anything from Cats?” Harry describes her singing style as “equal parts early Elton John, late Joanie Mitchell, a little bit of Stevie Wonder—the first record she ever bought was Songs in the Key of Life—and with a tinge of the classicism of Procol Harum.”
Eventally they got married, and now divide their time between Santa Monica and New Orleans. Sometimes when Judith has a gig, Harry accompanies her on the electric bass. And, in keeping with his eclectic taste in music and his keen sense of nepotism, he often plays her albums on Le Show.
Harry also does the voice of NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and went through a phase of counting—and recording for a radio montage—the number of times Brokaw said the word “tonight” in his newcasts. The record was 13. However, I started counting the number of times Harry used the expression “Ladies and gentlemen” on Le Show, and the record was 15. For example, he recalls asking a waitress, “Excuse me, what flavor ice creams do you have?” Adding, “And her reply, ladies and gentlemen, was ‘Today?’”
Another example: Reading an article in the Washington Post about a military intelligence expert: “He defended the administration’s pre-war position. ‘The idea that we didn’t have specific proof he was planning to give a biological agent to a terrorist group doesn’t really lead you to anything, because you wouldn’t expect to have that information even if it were true.’ Run that around your mind a little bit. ‘You wouldn’t expect to have that information even if it were true,’ ladies and gentlemen.”
Harry has a few “copyrighted features” on Le Show. I won a bet with Nancy that they’re not really copyrighted, and perhaps as a result of that bet, he recently introduced “Tales of Airport Security,” where he reads listeners’ accounts of such misadventures, calling it “a copyrighted feature of this broadcast, and when I say that, of course I am lying. That’s full disclosure, ladies and gentlemen.”
Sample tale: “Every time the female security guard swept her wand past my breasts, the wand would buzz. She sort of felt me up a few times, and I told her I was wearing an underwire bra. She took one last probing feel, and then it was determined I was telling the truth. Then came my lower abdomen. She instructed me to open up the top of my zipper. She then put her hand under my pants. Later, in flight, when I was digging in my purse for some lipstick, what should I find in my purse but somethng I use in my job as a supervisor of a department store restocking team—a box cutter.”
Another “copyrighted feature”—“If it ain’t copyrighted,” said Harry, “who knows the difference?”—is “Apologies of the Week,” ranging from the creator of a comic strip, Get Fuzzy, apologizing for suggesting that Pittsburgh smells bad, to the president of Serbia apologizing for evil committed during the war in Bosnia. From Brazil’s government apologizing to the country’s senior citizens for forcing them to show up at Social Security offices to prove they’re not dead, to Burger King apologizing to a woman who was ordered by a franchise employee to stop breast-feeding her baby or leave, because it made a customer uncomfortable.
“Yeah,” Harry observed, “it brings you down seeing somebody eating better than you at a Burger King.”
When Rush Limbaugh was outed as an addict to prescription painkillers and went to rehab, Harry did his version of Rush ranting there, which resulted in some hate mail. “Rush is doing a radio show in his head in detox,” he explained to me, “so first Bill Clinton calls him, in this nightmare—one of Rush’s trademark lines is, ‘With talent on loan from God’—then John Ashcroft calls him, and the first thing he says is, ‘Rush, this is John Ashcroft, God wants his talent back.’ That set them off.”
Limbaugh seems like a cartoon character, but Harry also does the voices of several actual cartoon characters on The Simpsons, though it’s possible that more Americans know who Ned Flanders is than John Ashcroft. Since Harry does both Mr. Burns and Smithers, I asked, “When you’re taping The Simpsons, do you just stand there and talk to yourself?”
“Yes,” he said, “and that happens a lot. When Hank [Azaria] plays Apu and Chief Wiggum, he’ll talk to himself, and when Dan [Castellaneta] plays Homer and his dad, he’ll talk to himself.”
I sent Harry a report that Fox News had threatened legal action after an episode of The Simpsons on Fox Entertainment poked fun at the channel by featuring a “Fox News Crawl” at the bottom of the screen, reading: “Pointless news crawls up 37% . . . Do Democrats cause cancer? Find out at foxnews.com . . . Rupert Murdoch: Terrific dancer . . . Dow down 5000 points . . . Study: 92% of Democrats are gay . . . JFK posthumously joins Republican Party . . . Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple . . . Dan Quayle: Awesome . . . Ashcroft Declares breast of chicken sandwich ‘obscene’ . . . Hillary Clinton embarrasses self, nation . . . Bible says Jesus favored capital-gains cut . . . Stay tuned for Hannity and Idiot . . . Only dorks watch CNN . . . Jimmy Carter: Old, wrinkly, useless . . . Brad Pitt + Albert Einstein = Dick Cheney . . . Right wing of chicken . . .”
“Somebody asked me about this story,” Harry told me, “and it sounded like utter hogwash to me—except for the part about misleading people into thinking the crawl was real—[Orson Welles’] War of the Worlds rule and all. I’ve advocated that Rupert do many things to himself, but suing wasn’t one of them.”
According to Simpsons creator Matt Groening, “Fox fought against it and said they would sue the show. We called their bluff because we didn’t think Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. So, we got away with it. But now Fox has a new rule that we can’t do those little fake news crawls on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it’s real news.”
Fox crawled out of the lawsuit but, Harry asked on the air, “What if there had been a suit?” And he proceeded to present the trial, with Nancy Grace from Court TV as prosecutor, F. Lee Bailey as defense attorney and Lance Ito (from O. J. Simpson’s trial) as judge. Rupert Murdoch testified, “The fact that I brought this action against myself is proof enough to the average man that I do care about my news network’s good name.”
Harry is obviously not afraid to bite the hand that feeds him. Nor is he afraid to poke fun at the power structure that nauseates him.
“I’d always known about the Bohemian Grove, growing up in California and being a political junkie,” he said. “The Grove is a retreat for the richest, most powerful white men in America, who go every summer for a week-long romp where they act like college sophomores on an unlimited budget. Teddy Bear’s Picnic [the film he wrote and directed] is basically a comedy about grown-ups with too much power and what happens when the secrecy of their yearly romp is threatened.”
Coincidentally, he was invited to be a guest at one of their big shows. I asked how he differentiates between him performing at the Bohemian Grove and Al Franken writing jokes for the Democrats.
“It was just sort of Quixotic orneriness,” he said, referring to the material he chose to do at the Grove. “But I wasn’t there being their court jester. I wasn’t there to pander to whatever their brand of politics might have been at that particular gathering. Al is, of course, literally a Democratic court jester. Basically, the jest is going away. You can call people idiots and morons and fatsos just for a certain period of time before it stops being ironic in any sense.
“The other thing is, nobody at the Grove at that time was a candidate for anything that I was endorsing. Franken clearly wears his endorsements where his wit should be. I’m a satirist. My job is to make fun of all of them. People who supposedly practice the art of satire and then retire to the councils of power to write jokes for their leaders—people like Al Franken—really ought to have their satirist cards revoked.”
[Author’s note: Franken has since stated he was “seriously thinking about” running for senator in Minnesota; I think he’d be a worthy successor to Paul Wellstone.]
&nb
sp; Harry’s philosophy of comedy is, “Comedy is good, reality is better.” His all-time favorite example:
“Well, I would say my object of idolatry in that regard would be the tape of Richard Nixon just before he makes his resignation speech. You can’t beat that. [In Nixon’s voice] ‘Ollie there, he’s always trying to take another picture of me, but he’s always trying to get one of me picking my nose. You wouldn’t do that, would you, Ollie? That’s enough now.’ Just the lunacy of him kidding around with this crew that you can actually see on the tape, they don’t know what to make of this, and a guy who entered a field where one of the primary qualifications is the ability to make charming small talk, and then at this climactic, penultimate moment in Nixon’s fall, what does he choose to do but walk in and make this insane small talk? That to me is one of the great comic choices ever.”
“As a thoroughgoing news junkie,” I asked, “you must know too much. So are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?”
“Whose future?”
“The future of civilization, I suppose.”
“There’s that famous quip of Gandhi: ‘When you speak of Western civilization, I think it would be a good idea.’ Ultimately, you know, we’re gonna be destroyed.”
“You mean as individuals?”
“No, as a race. The planet will get eaten up by some process in the solar system, or in the universe, and the thing regenerates, so in the sense that I think a lot of liberals’ pessimism translates as panic, I don’t have that. I think I’m intellectually pessimistic and emotionally optimistic. I think the worst is gonna happen, probably, but in terms of my own behavior, in terms of the way I live my life, I don’t act that way. A necessary distinction can be mainly to get up in the morning, if you see clearly what’s going on. It’s also the distinction between the individual and the larger—the two can have difference trajectories.”
“So since we’re gonna be totally destroyed anyway,” I asked, “it doesn’t make any difference whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic?”
“I don’t think the universe cares what your attitude is. Most choices you make are based on intellectually what you know and think, and on the other hand—I don’t know, I always try to puzzle this out because I know that in terms of my behavior, I’ve always behaved as if I were optimistic, at least about me and the people around me. For example, I never, ever, as a child of the Cold War, aside from maybe an hour during the Cuban missile crisis, I never believed that we were gonna get blown up, never believed that was gonna be nuclear war, I never lived under the ‘shadow of the bomb.’
“Certainly, it’s not because I believe in the competence of most people, because I don’t, I believe the opposite. That’s where comedy comes from, is showing how fucked up people are. But it just didn’t seem, on an emotional basis—obviously I knew what the dangers were—and you know, I have taken some joy in reminding people in the recent period when people are walking around as if this is the greatest threat that’s ever faced the U.S., well, you know, 20 years ago, what, 20,000 missiles were aimed on a 3-minute warning system at the U.S. We got through that. In the forefront of my mind, whatever I’m facing in my time is so much less horrific than what my parents had and their familes faced in their time that it’s a joke.”
“Final question: Is there something you’d like to apologize for?”
“There are a bunch of performances I want to apologize for, but I’m not gonna single them out in case somebody happened to have liked them, and then they feel betrayed by me.”
THE TRANSFORMATION OF DENNIS MILLER
Full disclosure: Several years ago, Dennis Miller called and invited me to be a writer on his HBO series. He requested that I send him some jokes and a rant. I did. Never heard back. After a few weeks, I wrote to ask if he’d made a decision. Again, rudely ignored. Although I needed the money, and rationalized that I was on common ground with Miller on many issues, I actually felt relieved not to get the job.
I would’ve had to change my lifestyle—working at home in my Venice Beach cottage—plus I would have been writing for someone whose personality is snide (“Lenny Bruce was a heroin addict, and I could care less about heroin addicts”) and whose humor has a streak of meanspiritedness, increasingly tainted by reactionary intolerance, with early tremors such as his disdain for the ACLU. A staff writer confided that Miller considered me too radical.
I still respected him for apologizing publicly to a sick child whose photo he had made fun of the previous week. And, more recently, I thought it was courageous of him to perform before an audience of 1,500 at Davies Symphony Hall in ultra-liberal San Francisco. Miller himself was shocked that anybody had shown up, and he admitted on stage, “I thought I was persona non grata in San Francisco.”
James Sullivan, pop culture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote: “Once the arcane-reference comic darling of the cynical eggheads of the adult counterculture, the 50-year-old professional cynic has made a hard right turn of late that has some corners of his constituency up in arms. He is now considered a Bush administration apologist (‘I guess I’m seen as a hawk now,’ he commented), which made his first local appearance in years a litmus test of sorts for a man some Southern California power brokers would like to coerce into a Senate run. . . .”
Miller’s material ranged from a defense of Operation Iraqi Freedom—poking fun at the left’s fixation on the administration’s failure to rally international support—to recasting the film title Fitzcarraldo as a verb in an old routine about Post Office inertia, which prompted me to pose the following query to Sullivan:
“So many comedians rely on easy joke references that will be recognized by the largest common denominator, and since there’s nothing intrinsically funny about them, the audience applauds rather than laughs because they’re really applauding themselves for recognizing the reference. On the other hand, Dennis Miller is infamous for his obscure references that will be recognized by fewer folks, but the result seems to be the same. What comment do you have on this phenomenon?”
His response: “I’d say that Miller’s fans tend to think of themselves as smarter than the average bear, if you know what I mean. Certain fans of all kinds of entertainment pride themselves on being the ones ‘in the know,’ the ones who have done a little cultural research beyond whatever new video release is on sale this week at Target. There are cult bands and cult movies and cult TV shows. And Dennis Miller is a cult comedian, albeit one who has managed to develop a considerable national audience. . . .”
In May 2003, the Wall Street Journal invited Miller to write an opinion piece reacting to Norman Mailer’s commentary in the London Times the previous week. Mailer had written, “With their dominance in sport, at work and at home eroded, Bush thought white American men needed to know they were still good at something. That’s where Iraq came in. . . . The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half-gone in baseball. . . . On the other hand, the good white American male still had the Armed Forces.”
Miller attempted to skewer Mailer with pedantic insults while missing his point with a politically correct sermon: “You know something, the only ‘race’ that really occurred to me during the war was our Army’s sprint to Baghdad. Conversely, Mr. Mailer appears to see just race in our armed forces, right down to the ‘Super-Marines,’ as he calls them. It seems that Mr. Mailer notices color in people even when they’re wearing camouflage. He then goes on to speak about racial subsets in the world of sports. Now, when I watch baseball, football and basketball, I see uniforms and skills. Mr. Mailer evidently sees races and nationalities. . . .
“And as Mr. Mailer’s prostate gradually supplants his ego as the largest gland in his body, he’s going to have to realize, as is the case with all young lions who inevitably morph into Bert Lahr, that his alleged profundities are now being perceived as the early predictors of dementia. . . .”
Does Miller’s allusion to “young lions” indi
cate that he thinks Irwin Shaw wrote The Naked and the Dead? A few days later, the Journal published Mailer’s response:Dear Dennis,
Just because the two big guys who flanked you on Monday Night Football took away your balls and left you with a giggle in replacement doesn’t mean you have to suck up to the Wall Street Journal. But thanks for appreciating my fine use of ‘keen.’ Keen up, then, to my piece and read it again without panic. You’re too good to become squalid and kiss-ass for so little.
Cheers, blessings,
Norman Mailer
Talking Presidents, the toy company that manufactures talking action figures at $30 each, is now marketing a Dennis Miller doll, to go along with the George W. Bush doll (“You’re working hard to put food on your family”), the Bill Clinton doll (“It depends upon what the meaning of the word is is”), the Donald Rumsfeld doll (“I believe what I said yesterday—I don’t know what I said, but I know what I think and I assume that’s what I said”) and the Ann Coulter doll (“Swing voters are more appropriately known as the ‘idiot voters’ because they have no set of philosophical principles—by the age of 14, you’re either a conservative or a liberal if you have an IQ above a toaster”).
Anyway, Miller supplied comments for his doll in both family-suitable and explicit-language versions. Here are some of its 21 utterances:
“The world should remember that the United States does have a long fuse, but at the end of the day, it is connected to a big friggin’ bomb!”
“And quit bringing up our forefathers and saying they were civil libertarians. Our founding fathers would’ve never tolerated any of this crap. For God sakes, they were blowing people’s heads off because they put a tax on their breakfast beverage. And it wasn’t even coffee.”
“Of course, that’s just my opinion—I could be wrong.”
“The only way we were gonna get the French to go into Iraq is to tell them we thought there were truffles in there.”
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