One of Dennis Miller's weekly rants previously featured on his now defunct HBO show made several remarks about his college experience.
"Co-ed dorms are a joke for adolescent males. In no other time in their life are so many horny guys close to so many single girls . who want absolutely nothing to do with you," he said.
But whether or not the comedian will take advantage of the campus setting for his show at the Center for the Arts this Friday at 8 p.m. is anyone's guess. Miller has built his career on irreverent and occasionally offbeat humor since his early days as the anchor for Weekend Update on "Saturday Night Live."
Miller's return to the stand-up circuit comes as a result of two major television networks giving him the axe this year. Miller ended his two-year stint as one of the sports announcers for Monday Night Football after ABC decided to bring John Madden back into the fold. But he's far from bitter; Miller welcomes it as a relief.
"I liked the job in the booth, but the travel was brutal. Being away from your family three to four days of the week was tough," said Miller, who, like most comedians, is much more toned down off-camera. "I knew as soon as Madden left Fox, we (Miller and co-announcer Dan Fouts) were gone. I'm a big boy, I can take the showbiz stuff."
Although Miller's colorful commentary on Monday Night Football, which included references to Sisyphus and F. Scott Fitzgerald, might have gone over the heads of some of the viewers, it always had a home on his show on HBO, "Dennis Miller Live." While the Emmy award-winning program has ended its run after nine years, Miller's association with the cable channel is not over.
"I'm going to shoot a special next year and I have to try the material out in front of people," said Miller, as an explanation for his stand-up tour. "That's next February. It's just going to be an hour of stand-up. This is me going back to the microphone and talking about the world."
Speaking of which, the lack of Miller's oft-famous weekly rant from television has done nothing to change his pointed opinions on current events. Concerning the proposed American forays into Iraq, Miller commented,
"I don't like Iraq. I don't like the way they treat their own people. And I don't like the fact that they might be able to send somebody here and blow up something in one of our cities. I think you only have to go back to the mid-30s, ignoring warnings from Germany. You have to learn from the past, and if you repeat it, you're stupid."
And reflecting on the United Nation's opinion, Miller said,
"If the UN were on the frontlines of being blown up, they'd be right there with us. If some (UN member nations) had it together enough to be a superpower, they'd be under scrutiny. But they're not, so their own ineptitude as nation states serve them well."
Not surprisingly, Miller traces his interest in the news back to his tenure on Weekend Update, which he anchored from 1985 to 1991. For Miller, it was a matter of keeping up with both the news and "the trash of current events," or the oddball stories that fell through the headlines.
Looking back at the current state of his alma mater, Miller is satisfied with the long-running "SNL" segment and although Jimmy Fallon is "not his cup of tea," he's happy with Tina Fey as his co-anchor.
Lorne Michaels, executive producer for "Saturday Night Live," had given Miller his first television gig after watching him perform stand-up in a Los Angeles comedy club. While Miller already had a notable reputation as a comic, it wasn't something he planned on establishing as a full-time occupation.
During his undergraduate career at Point Park College in Pittsburgh, Penn., Miller wasn't critiquing the news but actually learning how to write about it. Except a future in journalism never appeared too bright for him.
"Increasingly, I saw that it paid absolutely nothing," quips Miller. "And I remember thinking I don't want to be broke for the rest of my life. With comedy, at least I was following my instinct. My instinct definitely wasn't to get paid an eighth of a penny by the column-inch. I just think that I'd end up as a cranky guy, pissed off at people."
But comedy was also a creative outlet for Miller, which was odd for him since, as he insists, he was the quiet guy during his school days.
"There's like one dork and one cool guy (in college) that bracket the rest of the herd. I was the herd. Stand-up seemed to be the thing in my life where I stood out and tried to assume the limelight, which was odd for me at first. It's hard, but I was working at a deli at the time. It was no harder than being at a deli till you're sixty."
