Rants

by Dennis Miller (Bantam/Doubleday/Dell Audio)
by Ryk McIntyre

This is good, this is a very good thing. Fifteen slices of steely, socio-savant wit from one of Outraged Comedy’s best. Did anyone ever tell Dennis Miller he’s funny when he’s angry?

The ranting runs from “The Religious Right,” wherein Mr. Miller equates doctor-shooting pro-lifers with Barney Fife (exhorting them to “put the bullet back in your shirt pocket!”), to “Political Correctness,” to “Fame,” to “What Men Want From Women” (which runs a cruder line than his usual style), and reaches it’s finest meld of biting satire and earnest plea on “Parenting.” The other tracks are all as good, except for the closer, “The Tabloids,” which comes off a tad sopohmoric (don’t know how… it just does). Generally, there’s a lesson or an affirmation of common sense in every rant. And unlike a lot of other critics, some of his offer answers, but none of them carved into the answer.

The album is not stand-up comedy per se, as all fifteen tracks include a musical or spoken intro, somewhere the phrase, “and I don’t want to get off on a Rant here, but…” and usually ending, “…but that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.” You’d almost think it was set up for radio, although language content wouldn’t let this get within the static range of FCC rules. What’s best is that pretty much all the tracks deliver no-nonsense viewpoints couched in the whirr and hum of Dennis Miller’s train of joke/thought, which is very similar to a Cray Computer on a wild cultural sub-reference program, as he spares no political identity or agenda with his slightly-just-too-cool-for-them delivery, punctuated by that happy cackle of his. Listen for it.