Comedic Style
Miller is known for his laid-back style (for example, calling people "babe" or referring to them as "cats") and acerbic, brooding sense of humor. His specialty is the rant—a stream-of-consciousness diatribe monologue in which he rails against whatever happens to be bothering him at the moment. Such rants typically begin with "Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but..." and end with "...of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." (During the first two seasons of Dennis Miller Live, his rants ended with "Aw, fuck it. Who wants pie?")
Miller's monologues and standup routines often feature elaborate similes and metaphors involving allusions to obscure people, places, and things. Miller has alluded to his own reputation for obscurity by titling one of his television specials Citizen Arcane. On his passion for language, he has remarked: "I've always loved the flirtatious tango of consonants and vowels, the sturdy dependability of nouns and capricious whimsy of verbs, the strutting pageantry of the adjective and the flitting evanescence of the adverb, all kept safe and orderly by those reliable little policemen, punctuation marks. Wow! Think I got my ass kicked in high school?"
He was voted number 21 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time.
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Famous quotes containing the word style:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)