Dennis Miller and the Mystery of the Incomprehensible Tweet

There are certain celebrities who never trend on Twitter or Facebook for good reasons. Dennis Miller is one of these buffoons. If you see the Saturday Night Live alum being buzzed about on social media you can safely assume that it’s not because he’s landed a plum role in a big-budget upcoming movie or won an award. 

No, if Dennis Miller is trending it’s invariably because he said and did something unusually stupid and oblivious even by his very lenient standards. As I wrote in a perpetually timely blog post, we laugh at Miller, not with him these days. A dude who once cultivated a persona as the fastest, hippest, smartest man in the room now behaves like an out of touch boomer ranting incoherently at the young kids with the Youtube on the Myspace with the Twitters and the Justin Biebers. 

The Tweet that got grandpa Dennis the wrong kind of online buzz was an exquisitely nonsensical one-liner reading, “The young, Jedi B-Team that is the White House Press Corps have been Groupon comp Lyfted back to their real jobs being overly astounded by the new tailgate kick plates in unctuous Chevy Truck commercials.” 

Where do you even begin with a joke like that? Is it even a joke? Miller is what I would call a cadence comedian, in that he has such a distinctive, predictable rhythm that he does not necessarily have to say something funny to get laughs. 

Jackie Mason is a good example of a cadence comedian. So was the late Brody Stevens. Of course it did not hurt that he had good jokes and strong material; he could make you not just laugh but howl not by what he said, necessarily but rather HOW he said it. 

Miller’s tweet makes no sense unless you read it in Miller’s snarky, sarcastic, smug and belittling comic voice. The thing is that even if you do read this tweet in Miller’s cadence it still does not make a goddamn lick of sense. 

Ha! Fox got jokes! Dennis Miller, less so.

The infamous tweet was quickly and predictably “ratioed”, which means that it attracts vastly more replies than it does re-tweets or likes. That means that the public is engaging with this tweet not to share it, or to show love but rather to make fun of it, to dunk mercilessly on it for the benefit of everyone else deriving malicious joy in other’s idiocy. Miller’s tweet attracted over ten times as many replies as re-tweets; the urge to make fun of Miller proved irresistible. 

Miller’s tweet has the structure and cadence of a joke without being a joke. More specifically it has the structure and cadence of a Dennis Miller joke but doesn’t have a point of view, perspective, punchline, set-up or basically anything that would make something a joke and not a string of incoherent nonsense from someone seemingly deep into the process of losing his faculties. 

The tweet is ostensibly a slam on the White House press corps, which he devastatingly characterizes as “young”, sarcastically refers to as “Jedis” and then insults as a b-team before that nonsense part about them being Lyfted and Grouponed and “their real jobs being overly astounded by the new tailgate kick plates in unctuous Chevy Truck commercials.” 

I suppose he’s saying that these silly kids are actors and lightweights unlike the intellectual titans they deal with at the White House, and not heavyweight, substantive actors either. 

I had to Google “tailgate kick plates” because I had no fucking idea what Miller was talking about the first, and second, and third, and fourth, and fifth time I read that tweet. Knowing what tailgate kick plates are does not make the “joke” any funnier or comprehensible. 

Reading Miller’s tweet made me confused but it also made me feel vaguely sorry for Miller. He may be a soulless, boot-licking hack. He may be a tool of the Trump administration. He may be a sad exercise in self-parody. He may be downright pathetic. But also, well, there is no but, the dude is just sad and lost in a way that merits our pity as well as our mocking laughter. 

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