The stand-up vet was set to bring a new perspective to New England this weekend, before it was announced that his trip to the East Coast had been cancelled.
Only two days before comedy legend Dennis Miller was set to make an appearance at Medford’s Chevalier Theatre on Saturday (April 27), it’s been made clear, via Facebook and Ticketmaster event pages, that the show has been cancelled.
And that pretty much sucks, since Miller has been re-tooling his comedic perspective to include more relatable humor — about getting older, his life as a parent, and his career in general — as opposed to the politically driven material he’s delivered for a number of years.
At 65, the Saturday Night Live alum isn’t looking to get into rumbles, and quite frankly, he finds that the politically-charged material that he delivered for a large chunk of his career has really become more of a downer than an exciting brand of humor. He’s bringing back the type of meta material that he started his career on, as he wants to revisit the type of comedy that got genuine laughs, as opposed to what he considers “appreciation” or “approval” of comedy in today’s political climate.
“As I get older, I find out that it is so fractious, that in an odd way, whereas people used to like the back and forth of differing opinions, that now it is literally a buzzkill for comedy,” Miller tells Vanyaland. “So I’m doing more jokes about everyday life, without going back to ‘what part of the chicken is the McNugget?’ But I think I have to tell more jokes about life on the road, life as a parent, and life as you get older and more general observations about the culture as opposed to the all the Hatfields and McCoys stuff.”
Seeing the outspoken former Fox personality, who called a Wednesday night spot on The O’Reilly Factor home for five years, divert from his focus on current events may surprise you, but while Miller doesn’t wish any ill will against his former employers, he feels freed up since the end of his tenure with the network to return to talking about more relatable subjects, instead of the more divisive topics.
“Once Bill [O’Reilly] moved on, I moved on, and therefore, it’s not the expectation I have anymore. I would like to get back to going on Kimmel and Fallon, and things like that to do jokes,” says Miller. “For five years, I had a very good gig on Wednesday nights, right in the sweet spot, and now that that’s ended, I’m a little more freed up to not talk about the events of the day, but rather more meta subjects as far as comedy goes.”
While he’s changing his perspective in terms of the material he delivers on stage, the former Monday Night Football color commentator is quick to admit that he isn’t worried about being dated, nor does he hesitate to admit that at this point in his career — some 40-plus years in — he isn’t “as prone to work as hard” as he did when he was first starting out. But he’s not looking to change minds as much as he wants to make people laugh again.
“All of this isn’t a Sisyphean task where I’m going to keep pushing the boulder up the hill,” says Miller. “The comedian in me just wants to tinker with these more accessible, regular jokes like when I first started out. I’m not at a point in my career where I feel like I have to remount it, and I’m not as hungry, agile, or indefatigable as I was when I first started, but I just think it’ll be a fun exercise to try it this way for awhile.”