Dennis Miller

At 70 years old, Dennis Miller has this physical status:

After college, Miller moved through several occupations, including a clerk at Giant Eagle deli, a janitor, a delivery man for a florist, and an ice cream scooper at the Village Dairy. Reflecting on his pre-comedy job history in a later discussion with Tom Snyder, he recalled leaving college and attending a real estate seminar at a "bad hotel," which consisted of a five-hour lecture without bathroom breaks. Near the end of the lecture, he was told that he would only be paid by commission, which made Miller say "I'm in Hell, I don't even know what I am going to do for a living here. I'm a nut case." Miller then worked as a delivery man for what he describes as "an all-gay florist." Leaving that job, he worked as an ice cream scooper. Miller recalled that he was twenty-one—five years out of high school and wearing a paper hat while working alongside teens excited about getting their driver's licenses. A spur to quit the ice cream scooping job was when the prettiest girl he had attended high school with came in and he was the one who had to take her order, which filled him with embarrassment. Miller later stated that at the time he feared that if he stayed in such jobs, his life would become a Franz Kafka novella, and it stiffened his resolve to start pursuing a comedy career.

Leaving the ice cream parlor, Miller joined the staff at Point Park's Recreation Room, where he was in charge of the bowling alley, video games, and running the air-hockey league. Air-hockey regulars nicknamed him "Clarence" after NHL Commissioner Clarence Campbell, or called him "Commish." When Miller's brother Jimmy was around, they referred to him as "Commush". A patron from that time recalled that Miller sat on pool tables telling jokes and honing his comedy to those in the rec room, which was the only place the commuters gathered. Miller and the other patrons closely followed the NFL at the time as it was the "era of the Super Steelers".

In 1979, after seeing a Robin Williams comedy special on HBO, Miller began to pursue his dream of being a stand-up comedian.

In Pittsburgh, Miller began a comedy career by performing at open-mic nights. He backed out of his first two attempts to perform at an open mic due to stage fright and anger with himself over the question of whether the drive to perform was a need for approval from others. When he finally made his début at the Oak's Lounge on Sleepy Hollow Road in Castle Shannon, most of Miller's family was in the audience to cheer him on.

In a later interview, Miller spoke of the stage presence he developed for his stand-up act to address his fears. (He emphasized that the comedy business will always be frightening as any error could spiral into the end of a career.) To compensate for his early fears, Miller said, "I got up there and acted like the guy I always wanted to be to get through it. ...It's a part of me, but it's not the real me." He kept his hands in his pockets to appear unfazed, or adjusted his cuffs during an audience laugh to give the appearance of indifference to approval. Miller pointed out that part of his act is to show a "hipper-than-thou" persona, but then purposely undermine it at regular intervals for comedic effect.

He began appearing onstage at the Oak's Lounge in Castle Shannon while working at the Giant Eagle deli in Kennedy. Miller lived without a car and without much money in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, hitching rides or taking buses. He continued to do stand-ups in Oakland and at places like Brandy's in the Strip District and the Portfolio on Craig Street, eventually saving up $1,000 which he used to try to fast-track his comedy career by moving to New York City. Once there, Miller had to bribe a landlord to give him a room for $200, then had to pay the security deposit of $250 and the first month's rent of $250. Thus, he spent $700 of his $1,000 savings on his first day in New York, for a sparse, bunker-like room.

While in New York he submitted a joke for a Playboy magazine contest for humor writing that was judged by an all-star panel including Rodney Dangerfield, Bill Cosby, David Brenner, Martin Mull, Art Buchwald, and Buck Henry. Of around 15,000 entries, Miller tied for second and his joke and picture appeared in the June 1979 issue of the magazine. Miller won $500 in Playboy's first annual humor competition with the following joke:

For the first year and a half of his comedy career, Miller had heavily relied on props during his act, but he felt this limited him and switched to using purely language.

Miller gained more exposure when he tried out for the New York Laff-Off Contest. The contest had 40 slots but 32 of them had already been filled by the top regulars who appeared at the three comedy venues sponsoring the competition. Some 350 people tried out for the remaining eight slots, some of whom had appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, The Merv Griffin Show, or The Mike Douglas Show. Many of the comedians Miller was up against had hours of crafted material, while he had fine-tuned around ten minutes. To his surprise and delight, Miller earned one of the remaining slots. For the competition itself he appeared at the Improv and received a standing ovation, moving him on to the finals. While he lost the Laff-Off, he was seen by dozens of talent agents, resulting in bookings at colleges and other clubs.

While he was working in New York City, Hustler Magazine listed Miller in a piece called "The 10 Funniest People in America You'll Never See on TV".

While in New York City, Miller supported himself by working day jobs such as bartender and payroll clerk, and by night made the rounds of New York clubs The Comic Strip, The Improvisation, and Catch a Rising Star. After about a year, he returned to Pittsburgh.

Radio career

In January 2007, Miller signed a deal with Westwood One (later acquired by Dial Global, which rebranded itself as Westwood One) to launch The Dennis Miller Show, a weekday three-hour talk radio program. The program debuted on March 26, 2007, and ran through February 27, 2015. The show's website provided a live stream of the broadcast. The site also made archives of all shows available in MP3 format. The live feed was free, but a subscription to the Dennis Miller Zone (DMZ) was required in order to access archived broadcasts. The show aired on 250+ stations, airing on tape delay on some of those stations between 6–9 pm ET and 9 pm-12 am ET. Salem stations also aired a "best of" Miller show on Saturdays. His on-air sidekick "Salman" (David S. Weiss) also wrote for Dennis Miller Live. His producer Christian Bladt previously appeared on-camera as dozens of different characters during the "Daily Rorschach" segment on his CNBC television show.

Miller's program included serious discussions about American culture, current events, politics, and their place in the global context. The show was infused with Miller's sarcasm, which is often characterized by obscure pop culture references. For example, each hour of the show opened with an arcane reference. The first hour's opening phrase was a combination of dialogue from the film Thank You for Smoking and a U.S. space program slogan coined by Alan Shepard: "What's up, Hiroshi? Let's light this candle!" Miller's other opening phrases for his second and third hours respectively were "Come to me my babies, let me quell your pain", (Powers Boothe as Jim Jones in Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones) and "ABC – Always be closing if you want the knife set" (from Glengarry Glen Ross).

Most shows featured three guests (one per hour), mostly from the world of politics and entertainment, as well as calls from listeners. Guests included fellow comedians and SNL alumni (such as Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz), pundits and authors such as Ann Coulter, Aaron Klein and Mark Steyn (while the show's guest list leaned right of center, there were several liberals who appeared on the show, such as Dennis Kucinich and Alan Dershowitz), Presidential candidates, several sports commentators, and some "regulars" like columnists and conservatives Debra Saunders, Charles Krauthammer, Victor Davis Hanson, John Bolton, Bill Kristol, and Jerome Corsi along with entertainers such as singer Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits and actor Orson Bean. Miller generally took calls every hour, and in addition to comments about culture and politics, Miller encouraged humorous callers and often commented on their comedic delivery. A segment on Fridays was set aside for "Dennis Ex Machina", his term for a segment without a guest, where he allowed phone calls on any topic.

In a 2007 interview Miller said he felt that his radio show of all his work best represented his actual unvarnished views, saying "This time, if I'm fired, they will be firing the real Dennis Miller."

According to Talkers Magazine, as of spring 2011, Miller's show had an estimated 2,250,000 weekly listeners. Miller and Dial Global signed an agreement in early 2012 to continue his show for three years. Miller ended the radio show after his contract expired on March 27, 2015.

Miller periodically performs stand-up at the Orleans Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. In recent appearances, he has done a mix of his old and new material, with some political jokes as well.

He has authored four books based on his stand-up comedy and television monologues: The Rants (1996), Ranting Again (1999), I Rant, Therefore I Am (2000), and The Rant Zone (2001).

Miller has appeared in several films, in both comedic and non-comedic roles. His movie credits include Madhouse, Disclosure, The Net, Never Talk to Strangers, Bordello of Blood, What Happens in Vegas and Murder at 1600. He played the Howard Stern-like talk-radio host Zander Kelly in Joe Dirt (2001) and appeared as himself in Thank You for Smoking (2006).

Miller guest hosted the Slammy Awards episode of WWE Raw on December 14, 2009.

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