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April 21, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:08:13

Dennis Miller | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 47

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	I look at people in Hollywood and I think they're a little haunted by their good fortune.
	So they're trying to legitimize themselves now by being, you know, professorial and I've got some wisdom here and you're thinking you're the fifth lead on Full House.
	You know?
	Hey, hey, and welcome.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special with our guest, Dennis Miller.
	Dennis, by the way, is the host of the Dennis Miller Option, which is available for free.
	You can listen or subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts on the Westwood One Podcast Network.
	We'll start talking with Dennis in just one second.
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	Well, Dennis Miller, thanks so much for showing up to the Sunday special.
	You look surprised to be here a little bit.
	I watched the Matt Walsh episode and... Why?
	Well, I didn't know enough about him.
	I hear his name come up, but I also wanted to see the lay of the land.
	And it was beautiful because he was so heartfelt about his religious beliefs.
	And when he would lean in to make a point to you, one of these heat lamps over his head would perfectly frame his head like a halo.
	And I said, this is Walsh speaking in encyclical.
	That laugh right there would just frame his head perfectly.
	So for people who have fallen out of touch with you, what have you been doing lately?
	I want to go back all the way in a second to the beginnings of your career, from birth to now, to get the whole life story.
	But what are you up to these days?
	Um, I go out on the road and do my stand-up.
	I just did a special, um, called, uh, Fake News, Real Jokes.
	That was my ninth special.
	I go out with Mark Stein periodically.
	We go out and have, uh, it's a little less comedy, but it doesn't turn into a think piece either.
	It's kind of funny, but, uh, we take questions from the audience and that.
	But as far as a television show, I, I, I live up north and I'm not exactly into man now anyway, so it sort of dovetails.
	At 65 years old, I'm not one of these people who always wanted to hustle it into the barn.
	I worked hard my whole life.
	I'd like to travel a little.
	I'm trying to read everything that P.G.
	Woodhouse wrote.
	That's a task in itself.
	And I like to go hiking and that.
	So when people say to me, now, what are you doing now?
	It's enjoying the fruits of busting my tail in the mining town that is Hollywood for the last 35 years.
	So quick question about that special.
	So the special is great.
	I watched it last night, actually.
	And you know, it didn't get distribution at someplace like Netflix.
	You said you're not in demand.
	Why do you think that is, that you're not in demand?
	Well, you know what?
	You can do the thing about your political beliefs, but I don't.
	I think that sounds whiny.
	You make a choice to talk out loud and let the chips fall where they may.
	If I had to say, I'm 65, I don't want to bang that drum again, but did you, I mean, who gets really infrequently, you know, do you get super hot when you're 65 years old?
	I've had a beautiful run.
	I think things are in a suitable denouement.
	It's not like, it's not like I can't do anything, but I, my choices are limited to some degree, but it seems to me that it's completely where it should be.
	Like I said, what do I have in common with a 65 or with a 25-year-old kid?
	You know, if I sit down with many 25-year-old kids who are friends of my son's, then they're also nice.
	But when I watch somebody like AOC, I'll abbreviate the, I guess that's the new lexicon, But when I watch her, I think, well, this is so obviously ill-informed.
	But they're enamored of her vivacity, the fact she'll use social media.
	It's not a fact-based exchange they have with her.
	They just like the fact that she's flipping the table on the old school.
	So I get all that, and I think, well, why would I appeal to them?
	I don't want to be the buzzkill that comes in and, you know, does that, you know, Falcon and the Snowman discussion, you know, between the dad and the kid at lunch where you're I don't want to turn this into sort of a nostalgia play, are you grousing about the young, but I look at AOC in the same way that I look at some of the comedians that I see working today, and that is enthusiasm over skill.
	Do you get that impression also, that there's a real draw toward the enthusiastic and the authentic as opposed to the craft, like actually working through things?
	Well, the craft, I think, is... Listen, there's some guys who are beautiful technicians, and they literally would do syllable counts and peel it back.
	But the main directive, obviously, with comedy has always been getting laughs.
	Now, you can go out and do it in a myriad of ways.
	There are physical comedians, there are, you know, intellectual comedians.
	You see some guys and you think, wow, that's so smart.
	But for the most part, it's all about the prime directive of getting laughs.
	I've noticed the change is more tectonic In that it's turned everybody's comedy act almost into an impersonator act.
	Like impressionists used to do, they'd go, what if Jack Nicholson was working at the Burger King?
	And I was always bridal, I had that, I lacked that gene where I could go with that, where I'd say, time out, he's one of the highest paid actors in the world, why is he working at a fast food place?
	You know, I could even go there.
	But they do it and then at the end people applaud.
	And that's sort of what humor is now.
	Like people will make a bold statement and get applause instead of big laughs.
	That's weird to me.
	It's sort of a short-circuited the primal thing that it's an involuntary gesture where somebody says something funny and you don't have to intellectualize it.
	You just find yourself.
	And that's the cool part of it.
	Now it's people going, Hmm.
	And so that's a big change for comedy.
	The term that I've heard used about this is claptor, that people are not actually laughing anymore, they're just, they're clapping and this is the Hannah Gadsby version of comedy where you have think pieces now about why for thousands of years we've actually been getting the entire concept of comedy wrong.
	It's not that we're supposed to laugh at things, it's supposed to, if we laugh at things it's actually bad.
	We're supposed to think about things and then the thinking is the humor.
	It seems to me that we are reshifting the entire nature of humanity around what a bunch of very politically driven people want it to be because I mean I'm old enough to remember when Jay Leno was on television and trying to be funny and now you've got people on TV in late night who I don't even know if they're trying to be funny anymore.
	I mean legitimately.
	I think that Fallon may be the only late night host who's even making an occasional attempt to be funny.
	I don't know what your opinion is of the Well, I think Jimmy's a great entertainer, and I like that about him.
	I think that you have to understand, if you want to... At some point, you would lose those jobs if you... Look, look how good Jimmy is at it.
	Jimmy Fallon.
	I've been on Jimmy Kimmel.
	He was nice to me, so I don't have an axe to grind there.
	I disagree with him on many things, but he's also great at it in his own way.
	But Jimmy's the entertainer to me.
	Look how much trouble he got in for a simple...
	hair fluff with Donald Trump.
	It's almost over for him at that point.
	Really, he's had the rally.
	There is an individual's choice at some point to keep a great job.
	Now, listen, you can say you should make your statement, you should speak your mind.
	If you're a 45-year-old Jimmy Fallon, who seems like a delightful guy, the times I've met him over the years, good kid, makes me laugh offstage, deadly funny.
	He's got the catbird seed.
	He hosts what Johnny Carson used to do.
	They didn't even make him leave from New York.
	He loves New York.
	He's probably knocking off $30 million a year all in.
	And they say to you, well, listen, no more pro-Trump stuff.
	They won't even state it, but it's like the old mob hit movies where they compartmentalize it.
	They'll have to deal with you with extreme prejudice.
	You would eventually not have that gig.
	It's just the truth.
	Jimmy could not go out there now and espouse anything on that side.
	I think at that point it's – with Deion Sanders, whenever he does NFL football, somebody won't, like, stretch out for a pass.
	They'll, like, short-arm it so they don't get lit up, and Deion Sanders will go, business decision!
	And that's the purest thing of – at some point you have to understand the hierarchy would whack you if you went out every night and did a – And this is where I feel like contrary to your own perception of yourself, I think that there probably is a growing market for somebody like you actually saying things that are both funny and somewhat conservative simply because if you look at Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy, like I remember when he used to do the sports thing on Kevin and Bean on 106.7 like I remember when he used to do the sports thing on Kevin and Bean on 106.7 out here
	And when he was doing his show with Adam Carolla on Comedy Central and the humor came first and now he's the Pope of late night, right?
	He gets up there and he's going to rail about Obamacare and cry on TV about Obamacare.
	And I just think to myself, well, isn't like, where's the other side of this equation?
	Where are the, every funny comedian seems to be He has to check that box for a cloaking mechanism.
	it, that's not enough.
	You have to at least make overtures toward being politically woke if you're going to survive in this.
	Even guys I like, like I think John Mulaney is really funny.
	I think Mulaney, he will have to at some point in his show just dump on a certain portion of the country so that he can get his woke cred in order so that he can go about doing his normal business.
	I mean, isn't that leaving half the country out of the equation?
	He has to check that box for a cloaking mechanism.
	If he doesn't, everything else in his act will be shot through the prism of, is he not woken up?
	It's So yeah, is it easier to strew it throughout so you look woke for an hour and you're doing some type of jokes?
	Or is it better just in the middle like a sorbet you cleanse your palate with, just come out with a thing and hold up a picture of Trump with horns and a trident?
	You know, you can work both ends of that, but in the middle you've laid... It's odd to me how it's demanded that you establish that.
	I won't do that.
	There are times I think Trump's a buffoon.
	There are other times I think Trump's great at what he does.
	He's an infinitely better president in my eyes than he was a host of The Apprentice.
	There were times I'd watch him on The Apprentice and say, This is so stilted and weird and awkward and ego-driven.
	But there are days I watch him as the president, and I think, you know, when I see those union guys being let into the Oval Office and him just saying, God, take some pictures.
	And the guy starts crying, thinking about his dad, who's the, you know, the boilermaker who never got anywhere near that.
	I always think, wow, in an odd way, The most patrician of these guys.
	I shouldn't say patrician, but the billionaire guy comes in and he has a stranglehold on what the hoi polloi mean.
	I'm fascinated by that.
	I think it was all those years of him in a hard hat walking through construction sites with the power tie on, but he also has to cohabitate with all these cats who are throwing the building up where he has nothing.
	Something gave him these proletariat chops, which I admire about him.
	You know, whenever they say, just this morning, Ben, well I shouldn't let you ask questions, Bob wants to rant here, but I saw again this morning that a couple of Democratic candidates, Castro, I forget his name, is it Julian?
	Yeah, Julian Castro.
	Julian Castro.
	Somebody else that Trump reminds him of the Third Reich.
	Yeah, Beto.
	Yeah, Beto.
	And I always look at this stuff and I think, oh, for God's sakes, do you not see that you're not being clever about how you're playing this guy?
	If you do hate him, if you do hate what he wants, if you want him out, to throw down the Hitler thing.
	And then here's even the backup plan on that.
	If you say, Well, listen, when you say he's Hitler-like, obviously my flash card in my head is the systematic liquidation of six million of his fellow human beings.
	I haven't seen anything like that from Trump.
	And they'll say, oh, of course I didn't mean that.
	And you'll say, well, what other Hitler peccadillo were you seizing on?
	You know, the shitty mustache, the bad house painter reviews on Angie's List, of course when you sing.
	So again, this morning, even today, you've got Beto O'Rourke positing himself as a young hipster.
	A young hipster does not come in and say the man in the Oval Office right now, to me, it's such an awkward, clumsy overplay, is like Adolf Hitler.
	It's so stupid to me.
	I think when you say eventually people will come around, I think that they might have to, because I always think they have to come out of this fevered state where they go, wait, if I want to beat this guy, I've got to stop giving him freebies by calling him Adolf Hitler.
	And then he proves himself not Hitler and other people are going, I'll vote for him.
	I mean, this has been kind of my view of what this political moment originally was in the first place, which is they called Mitt Romney Hitler.
	I mean, Joe Biden went out there and suggested that Mitt Romney, the most anodyne human being who has yet to walk the earth, was going to put black people back in chains.
	And then I think the Republican Party and a lot of people in the middle of the country, they just said, you know what?
	Giant middle finger.
	Giant middle finger with orange hair.
	Let's do this thing, man.
	And they just voted for Trump in the primaries as that.
	And that's the moment we live in.
	Mitt wouldn't step up.
	How unrequited people felt.
	Even if they liked him, they thought, well, listen, I have this guy over for a toddy, but for God's sakes, you're going to need a dock fighter in there.
	You remember, I look back at Mitt Romney and I think, I remember him saying that our biggest geopolitical threat was Russia.
	It's so funny to me that Obama did the hipster thing, attention, 1998, you know, and I thought they're just ridiculing this man.
	And then the moment, five minutes after Trump won that election, and they're up in that, they can't believe it, up in Hillary land.
	They immediately trigger the doomsday machine, which is Russia's back.
	Blame him for Russia.
	And I thought, it is so crazy how they shift those things.
	I keep waiting for a younger candidate on the Democratic side to be hip enough to come out and deny all the overplays and establish himself somewhere in the middle.
	It's such an easy sister soldier moment to come out on a couple of these things, for Beto O'Rourke to just step up and say, obviously he's not Adolf Hitler.
	Here's what he is.
	And, you know, lay out a few things that they have problems with.
	I can't believe, that shows me how threatened they are on that side, that nobody can see that play.
	Maybe this, I don't even know how to say his name.
	Buttigieg?
	Yeah, yeah.
	He's been the only one who's made any sort of, yeah.
	Maybe he sees it and thinks, geez, I can go for mayor, president, because there's a whole big, probably 45 percent that are predisposed to go directly against Trump in this next election.
	I don't even know if there'll be a third party.
	There probably will be, but you probably have to nibble at 6% max or 5.1% max.
	Or if there's a third candidate, you might not even have to get the 50.
	Somebody should be smart enough two years out to say, I got to disengage myself from this pack that is overplaying their hand with Trump and look like the person that the moderates will vote for.
	Because I do think 45 are voting for him, 45 are not voting for him, and you've got to start making sense to those 10, and I don't think you're making sense to them over playing your hand with Trump, especially when the jobless claims are down to, what, 49-year lows?
	But, you know, for me a big thing, and I always hear it, or I don't hear it hit enough, is there were missiles flying over Japan from that nutcase around two years ago, testing them.
	At any point has he lobbed those missiles?
	One could have blown up over Japan, you've got World War III.
	Yeah, almost have to start it.
	The fact he's not testing him anymore is a huge thing.
	Those are sitters at the net that a wise, moderate Democrat would step in and start a sentence by saying, here's what I like about Trump.
	And then, and this is the shorter part of the sentence, that's all you'd have to do if you were a moderate Democrat.
	But do that, and boy, I'm telling you, it would be an intoxicant to a lot of undecided voters.
	So in a second I want to ask you about the future of the Republican Party and then I want to get back into your history and how you got into all this stuff for folks who don't know your story.
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	All righty, so I want to ask you about the future of the Republican Party.
	We're talking about the Democrats who are off the track.
	They seem to be disconnected from at least a huge percentage of the American public.
	Where do you think the future of the Republican Party lies?
	Because I do think that there is a certain mythos that's been built up about President Trump as sort of great political figure when, in fact, statistically, he performs basically in line with how George W. Bush performed in a lot of the swing states, how Mitt Romney performed actually in a lot of the swing states.
	What do you think the future of the Republican Party is?
	You were always saying that you were socially liberal but fiscally conservative.
	Do you think that we're moving in a more libertarian direction or a more populist direction?
	Where do you think the future of the conservative movement lies?
	Real quickly, just let me put a button on the Dem side of this.
	I think Hillary is going to be the unlikeliest cavalry riding over the hill.
	You think she's coming back?
	I'm looking at her relative silence, not all the time, and I think somebody has told her, listen, the less they see you, the better you play.
	You should stay out of the way.
	We've got a circular shooting range here.
	You've got 18 guys, 14 of them shouldn't have driver's licenses for God's sake.
	They could not pass the ACT test, half these people.
	You should shut up, come in at the end and say, and when they say, you said you weren't going to run, say, they demanded it.
	I don't want to.
	I'm doing this for the good of the country.
	That's where I think the Democrats are going.
	I would not be surprised.
	Especially with Biden falling apart.
	I mean, what do you make of all the accusations about Biden and his candidacy, which seems to be on the ropes this early?
	Biden should get back to his actual job, which is being the third guy in the car on a Sonic commercial.
	You know, for years, I've been hearing about what a genius Joe Biden is.
	And to me, he's one of those big, glad-handing doofuses who went into the bubble when he's 29, he's 75, and every time I see him, he's there, I don't want, drawn to this reluctantly, but I have to help.
	And Joe, if you're out there and you watch Ben, and you know, probably you do, I want to tell you, stop helping me.
	I let you free.
	Go out and help yourself.
	At age 75, because at this point, to me he's more unhinged, shakier than a rescue dog in Phil Spector's house.
	And when they always act like he's avuncular, I think, I guess I'm missing that.
	Because to me he's the sort of guy who looks like he thinks bottled water tastes better after you shake it.
	So I think Biden is going to go in, he's going to get eaten for the reason that they created.
	They birthed this monster, this whole thing about.
	Now, do I find it weird that Joe Biden's leaning in on strangers and smelling their hair?
	I guess it's fetishistic or something.
	I don't know.
	I don't know what that is.
	Do I think that should be a reason he doesn't run for president?
	No.
	Do I think that might end up being a reason?
	Yeah.
	I mean, that's where it's at right now.
	But they started this stuff.
	You know, if anybody out there, that's one thing we should be able to agree to in this culture.
	If you said, which way is political correctness coming from, the left or the right?
	I think anybody would have to concede between college professors and Hollywood social media doyens that mostly the left demands that you walk in a very tight lockstep.
	I've been on both sides of this issue over the years, and I can tell you the people on the right side-o up to their ass-kicking a lot easier than the left does.
	Christians are almost used to it.
	Are they calling for anybody's heads?
	You know what I mean?
	They regularly get poke fun at, and they kind of move on with it.
	The left's the one who have gotten so PC now that Biden probably will be done in by the same thing that he now has to cater to.
	It's weird to watch him walk this Walenda thing, and the same week he has to go back and apologize for his performance at the Anita Hill thing.
	He also has to say that I didn't really mean it when I lean in, but now he has to qualify that and say, I see that the space is different now.
	I'll try to modulate.
	And I think, wow, it is a hard job over there keeping up on the daily PC casting list, which they know.
	And that's exactly right, especially because the same week that Joe Biden is doing all of this stuff, the entire Democratic Party descended and paid homage to Al Sharpton.
	Right, who's like one of the worst people in human history.
	And they're all going to the National Action Network and they're pretending like he's some sort of great political kingmaker, you know, three decades after he pulled the Jussie Smollett with Tawana Browley.
	I, you know, I met him once and I couldn't call him Reverend.
	You know, I interviewed him once.
	I said, listen, I can't do the Reverend thing.
	You know, I must admit, it was pretty, it was pretty easy about it.
	I just said, there's too much, you know, there's too much You know, you read about that haberdasher up in Harlem who ended up getting killed?
	I mean, this is rough stuff when you make these accusations that are false.
	So I don't respect Al Sharpton at all.
	And by the way, that weight loss, I think he just got to a point where he had so violated the sacrosanct promise of not overusing the minibar on speaking engagements that he actually had to cut it out of his rider, and that's when he got thin.
	I think that man was entirely filled with a gray goose and Toblerone.
	It just turned into a Macy's balloon.
	Everybody sees him now.
	What are you doing?
	Did you cut out carves?
	No, I f***ed up on the minibar so much they had to take it out of my ride.
	But now all of a sudden, to watch them kiss his ring is just unbelievable to me.
	And that's what I mean about that 10% in the middle.
	45, 45 are going to go against him or for him.
	That 10 in the middle, I think, sees stuff like that and says, oh, really?
	Is he the gatekeeper now on all this?
	He's not even a good guy.
	Now, you had asked me before about where do I think the Republicans are going.
	I don't know.
	I haven't paid attention to the Republicans.
	It's not Republican.
	It's Trump.
	And in an odd way, he has turned out to be very conservative.
	I mean, he's led, I would say, on most big issues.
	You're more conservative than me.
	I'm pretty conservative.
	He's done pretty well as far as checking conservative boxes, hasn't he?
	Well, certainly with regard to tax cuts, with cutting regulation, with appointing conservative judges, moving the embassy to Jerusalem.
	He's done a lot of great stuff.
	I mean, the one area where I think the Republican Party continues to be a giant fail is, of course, on spending and entitlements.
	And they will be a fail for as long as any party can be a fail.
	Yeah, he has failed on that.
	This is the reason stuff that I think he can talk about, where they should talk about it with him.
	Yeah, we're spending our ass off.
	I don't think we're spending At the same speed that we did under Obama, but certainly it's not enough of a thing where you go, oh, he's notched back on that.
	I think that I can't judge Republicans because I don't feel Republicans been in there.
	I feel an unlikely conservative guy.
	I view Trump as the guy.
	We got to the place where this whole thing, if they had had another eight years to sort of cement, solidify, smooth over, appease, tamp down problems with Hillary's dossier and all that.
	If they'd had another eight years to do that, I don't think this country was coming back.
	And when people say, well, what do you mean coming back?
	That sounds apocalyptic.
	I just mean it would have turned into some huge sort of Scandinavian country.
	And it would have been, you know, people over here are such hustlers, it would have been Scandinavia because everybody would have been beating the system and you wouldn't have shot for the moon anymore.
	All that stuff.
	Trump, I think, is what would have changed if Hillary got in.
	I think it would have become a single-payer health care system.
	I think all these things kind of are not the country I grew up excited about where you went for it.
	So that's all I'm saying.
	What happened?
	Do I think it would turn into a roundup for everybody?
	No, I don't want to be apocalyptic about it.
	Trump actually turned around and said, now what about self-determinism?
	What about we go for it as individuals?
	And then that makes the yield curve go up.
	So I admire him for that.
	That's what I like about the country.
	I like a can-do attitude, and I was always puzzled.
	The most enamored I ever was of Michelle Obama as I saw her speaking one night on TV, and she was talking about how her father, who she adored beyond all others, would come home in between shifts and take an hour at home.
	and bounce her on her lap as a young girl, and then he'd go back out, leave.
	You know, it's almost like caveman stuff.
	You leave the cave to procure meat for the young ones.
	And imagine, you have your dad, he's smiling at you, he's come from a busted-ass job, he's going to another.
	Imagine a young girl sitting there, "Wow, there's a man for you." And then later in life, I thought, "Why do you want to turn this stuff over to Chuck Schumer?" You know what I mean?
	Why do you want your old man's government to be in charge of what was the most important moment in your life?
	I've never understood that part of it.
	When people say to you, why are you conservative?
	Stuff like that.
	I always loved the American dream.
	I always loved the going for it.
	No guarantees.
	I always work well when my cat's paws heels are backed over the abyss.
	You know what I mean?
	I hustle then.
	And I think if it's all soft landing, it's like I defy people to tell me they didn't used to dig the Willendas more when there was no net.
	You know what I mean?
	You put the net in, you're still there, but it's, well, they fall, and that's, I don't know, that's my big protestation with an entitlement state.
	So where did this view come from?
	When did you actually become, or realize that you were politically conservative?
	Well, listen, I grew up in Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh's an OBS town, so you work hard for your money, so that's in my hard drive.
	I remember as I got older, it was important, and this was pretty late in life, comparatively, it wasn't a childhood thing.
	Admiral Stockdale was a big thing for me, because I remember thinking, I remember Stockdale was picked, when's Perot, is that a, what year?
	Perot is 92.
	Okay, so we're now going on 17 years, and I remember... 27 years.
	Jesus, I can't believe life's moving by like that.
	But he picks Stockdale, and Stockdale goes on TV, and he's This is a man who was in the Hanoi Hilton, for God's sakes, tapping out codes of prayers to young men who, you know, they'd say, Jimmy in cell 8 wants to die, you know, and he would pray with them through the night.
	Can you imagine a more... I don't know, I always hear that and it makes me cry thinking about the kid who wants to just die.
	You know, just stop trying to live and die.
	And this man getting on and praying with him and code through the pipes, it just boggles my mind at the nobility of that.
	He goes on TV and says, I don't even know what I'm doing here.
	They naturally excise that clip and make him look like some doddering fool.
	And I'm thinking, for God's sakes, the vice presidents we've had over the years, Quayle was a vice president.
	You know, I don't make fun of Quayle.
	Except I don't think he's a man, he's a historical figure to me.
	So certainly Stockdale could do this job.
	That was a big moment for me when the left started ridiculing him.
	I remember thinking, this room's getting too hip for me if guys like that are, you know, going to be disparaged at the expense of other guys who are, quite frankly, just hacks who went into a system ages ago.
	You know, to me, much of politics is the ability, the best people at it, are the ability to look at the crowd they're speaking to and point an individual at and actually have that individual think they must have met at some point.
	It's always that.
	I always see them go, and I think, oh.
	There's more to it than that.
	How's about there's a guy who doesn't know how to do that, but answers the call to save a young man's life in the most horrid situation on earth.
	So that was a big shift for me.
	You know, some of the stuff was in my hard drive.
	I just believe I'd like to keep 50 cents on a dollar.
	I think I live in the best country in the world.
	I think I'd like to keep one for every one I give away.
	And then when I croak, I'd like the half that I kept to go to my kids.
	People always say, well, why do you want your kids to have it?
	Do you want to spoil them?
	And I want to say, hey, why do I want to spoil your kids?
	I don't even know your kids.
	Yeah, my kids give me joy.
	Yeah, I'd like to keep a little.
	That's my vig for making it and having kids.
	How's about that?
	That part of it didn't make sense to me.
	And after 9-11, let's say, anybody who was able to, like, wrap 9-11 up and move on, whenever I hear people say, it's time to get it behind us, like, what are you kidding me?
	It's primal.
	It's in the hard drive.
	Now, as much as I'd like people to work hard for the money, I remember thinking, oh, we've got to get serious now.
	I don't know what serious is.
	I'm not a wizard wonk about foreign policy.
	18 guys were able to do that.
	And that's a dangerous world.
	So that changed me a little too.
	So how did people in Hollywood react when they realized what your politics were?
	So can you take me through sort of what your resume was?
	What was your career progression here?
	Because a lot of people know you at like certain times.
	So people know you from SNL or they know you from your show on CNBC or they know you from your radio show.
	But what was the sort of timeline and career progression?
	Well, listen, when I was on SNL, And I was talking about earlier about a business decision.
	I had some political leanings, but man, when you get hired to do the news on SNL, you're there to make fun of power.
	And that was Reagan at the time.
	I didn't even know that much about Reagan, honest to God.
	I mean, these people always act like that they were... I remember talking to you when you were in the amniotic sack and you were smart, but I didn't pay that much attention, honest to God.
	And I had no trouble lighting up Reagan.
	He was an older cat, power.
	I was the weekend update anchor.
	You know, you're supposed to be Scaramouche.
	You've got to come out and flourish the cape a little.
	So I made fun of him, but I can't even say I knew everything he stood for.
	But if I go back, I do believe we had some basic overlaps.
	And I've seen old specials of myself where I do have a pragmatic side that comes through even when I'm trying to be a hipster as a young man.
	I would say 9-11 was a big thing, I would say Stockdale's a big thing, and I think just common sense is a big thing.
	I wasn't certain enough of my guesswork to be liberal anymore.
	There was such a degree of certitude about the same sort of, you know, or flip a coin that most of us do.
	As I got older, it just didn't make sense to me anymore, some of that stuff.
	And as I get older yet, it still doesn't make sense to me.
	Listen, they always say, oh, Trump's insane, and I guess Obama's held up as the avatar of, you know, wisdom and that.
	And I always think, who loads 1.8 billion onto a pallet and sends it to Iraq?
	I mean, I'm kind of—people say, that's so naive.
	I can hear John Kerry say—and I go, well, you overthink it.
	I just know they live to kill the Jews.
	I dig the Jews.
	I'm not even Jewish, but I dig the Jews just because they live in the craziest cul-de-sac in the world.
	And anytime you pre-package 1.8, just the fact that they would ask for it in cash, I'd say, why don't I just give you a check and fill the memo section on kill Jews?
	You know what I mean?
	It's obviously, anytime you send an unmarked cash to Iran, some of it's going to end up bombing a Siberian pizza parlor.
	That stuff doesn't make sense to me.
	I can't fake like it does.
	I have to stop down on each issue.
	And more socially, some of the liberal stuff makes sense to me, but on basic common sense things.
	So that would be my progression.
	I think when I was on HBO, I was on there for 10 seasons, I think.
	215 shows.
	And as I look at it, I was always A pragmatist, but maybe in the second half of it I was just more openly skeptical about some of the BS.
	I can remember having Tim Robbins on one night, and this was probably a turning point.
	I said, where have you been, Tim?
	What are you doing?
	He said, well, I've been on the road with Bill Clinton for two weeks campaigning.
	I said, that's twice in your life you had to crawl through a pipe filled with shit.
	And I remember thinking, I came up after people to look at it.
	I mean, I might have gotten more open about police at that point.
	So in a second, I want to ask you, you've done a bunch of these jobs.
	Which one of them did you like the best?
	The kind of mix of comedy and politics.
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	Enter Shapiro.
	So obviously you've had a pretty varied career here.
	Which one of these did you like the most?
	Which did you enjoy?
	Well, let me go through them.
	I was a stand-up comedian.
	I dug it.
	But I was broke.
	At the beginning, you're broke.
	I can remember being out on the road.
	It's a brutal scene.
	You go into the comedy condo and there's andromeda strain on the shower curtain.
	You know, like nothing's been cleaned.
	But you're out there.
	At least then I was able to tell myself, yeah, brother, nobody throws your ball until they have to throw you the ball.
	So shut up, lay low, keep your nose to the grindstone, and get through this as quickly as possible.
	But you'd see club owners taking kids audition tapes and taping the Winter Olympics over them.
	It was just like gladiator camp.
	And I thought, well, I'm going to go down hard.
	So I got all Spartacus about it.
	I look back on it.
	Now I'm such a wuss.
	But at the time, I thought, well, this could be tough.
	So I got tough, and then I was seen for Saturday Night Live.
	I'd have to say that's, you know, to answer the question, but we can go through the other ones if you want, but that's the biggest change.
	I mean, you know, you come in from Baltimore.
	I remember I was in Baltimore getting stomach poisoning at a, oh, I won't say the name of the company, because I've eaten there since, but at a place, and then all of a sudden, two days later, you're healed up, and you're in New York, you're on Letterman, And I remember I had auditioned for Saturday Night Live and didn't get it.
	They showed the cast in USA Today and I thought, I remember I was so tough at that point, I even saw that picture and just said, all right, now your time brother.
	You know, it wasn't like I, I just thought it's brutal.
	Don't waste a second, you know, being a wuss about this.
	Get your rhino skin together.
	So I forge on, I do Letterman.
	They say, "Lorne Michaels wants to see you up on 17." Now I know something's up because he's not gonna call me up.
	Lorne hates awkwardness.
	He's having me up to talk about something.
	I don't know what he's gonna proffer, maybe an appearance.
	I go up and I sit outside his office for an hour and then they say, "Lorne's ready." And I go in and he's sitting at the end.
	It's such a beautiful scene.
	It's burned into my skull.
	It's like a great engram or something.
	Scientology, they always have the bombard engrams.
	This is a good one.
	I can't get this out of my mind.
	I looked down.
	He's got half glasses on.
	One of those beautiful green table lamps over his shoulder is the Empire State Building in some tricolour status.
	And he looks up and goes, Dennis, how would you like to be the weekend update anchor?
	And I said, well, I'd like that a lot.
	He said, I'll see you at 10.
	And I walked out and your life's never the same after that.
	I found out that Lovitz was supposed to do Weekend Anchor, but he was in so many things that they needed the time.
	This is the vagaries of life.
	They needed the time between the band who would play and the weekend update to dress him out in prosthetics for some of the characters he did.
	Thus, I get the gig.
	And so if I had to say what my biggest change was, it was that.
	And also the most enjoyable.
	You're in the bunker.
	It's life in the bunker.
	You know how that accelerates the emotion of relationships.
	You're talking about a really brutal place where it's fun, too.
	But if you screw up three weeks in a row, you're dead.
	I mean, you're gone to the point where, you know, nobody sniffs you.
	It's like an injured player in the NFL.
	Nobody wants to be around it.
	They know there's a taint on you.
	So I dug that action when I was a kid.
	I don't know if I have the nerves for it now, but at the time it felt like savoir faire.
	Then after that, I went, I was looking for an exit point because I didn't want to be a guy who overstayed his welcome there.
	I remember in college, there was always the guy who came back after he had graduated the next year and hung out near the keg, trying to tap it and get laid.
	And I always thought, what a weird scene that is.
	So I didn't want to overstay my welcome.
	So around six-year point, I looked for a point to jettison the fuel module and get out for money.
	And I got a nice gig in a syndicated show, but it got whacked after just six or eight months.
	I went home.
	That was the one time I remember being hanged on.
	But Michael Fuchs, who headed up HBO, called me the next morning.
	And I had done a couple of specials for him.
	And we got on.
	And he said, listen, you know, lick your wounds, heal up, and we'll do something here.
	And he gave me three shows on the air at HBO.
	The second one won an Emmy.
	And then I got 215.
	At that point, I began to disengage from actively judging how good my life was going through job or not job.
	I remember thinking, you know, I had this theory about lump in your armpit theory used to keep me through where I'd think you could get fired from a job and be like as disconsolate as you want and be in the shower the next morning saying, God, I can't believe they whacked me.
	And all of a sudden, you find a lump in your armpit as you're lathering up.
	And your wife goes, what were you saying about losing the job, honey?
	And you go, hey, screw that.
	I've got a lump in my armpit.
	What does that matter?
	So I started to get that insight.
	I was probably in my 30s at this point, that the jobs didn't matter that much, that you had to have some fun and a journey.
	It sounds a little new agey, but it was true.
	So I did that for a long time.
	That ended.
	I got Monday Night Football.
	I got that horse shot out from under me in two.
	Two years, but I had fun, but I knew I wasn't long for that one.
	Because I was trying to shoehorn what I do, which is weird arcania, into the National Football League game.
	I remember they'd get mail like, what is he talking about?
	What was that reference?
	The Plantagenets.
	I remember, are we on cable?
	Can you say that?
	Yeah, you can say whatever you want, yeah.
	Okay, I'll tell you a great story.
	We're doing a game one night and...
	This receiver hurts his ankle, and they're wrapping it in an Ace bandage and on the air.
	I try to make Al laugh, and the weird Arcania is what makes him laugh.
	Because Al's a genius, but if you throw him off his feet, he can't gather it, and he's like a tipsy air traffic controller.
	It gets a little weird, so I spend all my time trying to get him to laugh, so they show him wrapping the ankle, and I go, you know, Al, I haven't seen that much fabric used since the environmental artist Christo wrapped the Pont Neuf Bridge in Paris.
	And I remember Al hits his sneeze button, which cuts his voice out to the home viewer.
	He looks at you and goes, hey, what the f*** are you talking about?
	Ohmire, our producer, is down in the truck and he fancies himself an Artificianado.
	I actually hear him say, no Al, Christo, environmental artist, good call, good call.
	And I remember simultaneously delighting in that and thinking, I'm not long.
	Because you can't, you know, they're watching football.
	I would have whacked me too.
	It was like when I heard Madden left Fox, I called Fouts that morning.
	He was our third guy in the booth.
	I called Dan Fouts.
	I said, listen, it's G Gordon Liddy time.
	Just tell them what corner you're going to be on so innocents don't get hit in the crossfire because we're gone later today.
	So they just rehired us.
	I don't care.
	Madden has not left Fox to sit up in the Dakotas with the old lady and drink frappuccinos all day.
	He's coming over here.
	Sure enough, they whack us later today.
	I want to whack me, too.
	It's the way of the world.
	Listen, if I'm ever in L.A.
	on any given night and I want to do stand-up and I go into the improv and John Madden's on stage, they better haul his fat ass off, too.
	That's the way the world works.
	So after football, what did I do then?
	I went to CNBC and I didn't even I want to do that, but there's a number they hit.
	I'll make the drive.
	That's the way I look at it.
	I mean, you can be all ethereal about showbiz, but at some point they hit the number, you go, listen, I'm a breadwinner.
	Go win some bread.
	And then from there, I got the perfect gig, which was, I was on for six minutes a week with O'Reilly.
	Right.
	I didn't even have to do the heavy lifting because he didn't want me to.
	He wanted to say, hey, Miller, there's a robot in Korea.
	And, you know, he'd show footage or spring break so he could show the bikini footage eight times in a row.
	What about these kids?
	So I was sort of like the hinge joint that would like take the weird stories.
	I did that for five years.
	I made a good buck.
	And the best thing was we'd go on the road.
	We're selling 10,000 seats for a guy.
	O'Reilly's like a commerce machine.
	And you're selling 10,000 seats.
	So I just rode that.
	I didn't do anything else for six years.
	But then O'Reilly, I don't know what happened.
	That ended relatively quickly.
	And in the interim, I've just been sort of looking for something else.
	But nothing's shown itself at this point.
	And like I said, I had a great talk with Ada Carvey.
	We were talking.
	I said, I don't know.
	You think it's politics, Carve?
	And he said, Do you think it has anything to do with the fact that we're midway through our 60s?
	You know, he's brutal too, Carve, about the nature of showbiz.
	So at this point, I don't know.
	I like doing this, but it's not like I wake up every morning thinking, where's the side hustle?
	I'm sated.
	So what were your parents like?
	I mean, growing up, where did the comedy come from?
	Well, I remember being in high school, and I was completely ostracized because I was so shy.
	But I remember I sat in a study hall next to the star tight end on the football team.
	And under my breath, I would make him laugh.
	And I was just Pavlov's dog at that point.
	You're talking about a kid who might as well have been Eddie Slovic walking down to the electric chair all alone.
	All of a sudden, the tight end says, you want to walk between classes, you know?
	And I'm thinking, Wow, I get it now.
	I make them laugh and I'm included.
	So that's when I started to, you know, get funny.
	I don't think funny is some mystical sword from the stone moment.
	I think you have to have a perspective that's a little quirky.
	And I think the best guys have a quirky perspective.
	But it's like Seinfeld always said, you sit near the faucet.
	These are most people watch the drip go down the drain.
	You cup your hands and catch the drip.
	Put it under the jeweler's loop, feed it back to them to make a living.
	It's less Camelot and more, you know, just pay attention.
	And after the initial thing, you shouldn't let yourself be afraid after around a month.
	You should at the beginning.
	It's petrifying.
	But then I remember at the end of the month thinking, well, the option is to hand this to strangers and watch them score with it.
	And I don't have that sort of... Some guys have that where they can sit behind the scenes.
	I didn't.
	I thought, force yourself through this vomitous feeling and tell your own jokes, brother.
	This is going to back up on you.
	So how much of your work do you actually craft?
	What's your kind of workflow when you're creating a new scene?
	When I do a special, I craft the whole thing.
	And then it's an interesting thing.
	I don't have the memory I used to.
	So what I do is put a prompter in the back of the room, and I have a button on stage right near my right foot.
	And I leave the prompter off, because everybody wants to do it.
	But just knowing that it's there, bullet points, if I get to a point where I'm just For a second, it slipped my mind.
	Like I said, I don't have the memory I did when I was a kid.
	I used to remember it like that.
	I just go like that, and the kid turns the prompter on, on the bullet point I'm at, and then I hit it and turn it off, and then you're good for another 20 minutes.
	But on a special, I write everything.
	The way I develop jokes is I'll go up with the, I used to always try to, when I was stuck on SNL, I had this big poster on my wall.
	Where, you know, Friday, come Friday, nobody wants to hear your sad tale about how you don't have a weekend update together.
	And like I said, you do.
	If I didn't do that good for three weeks, well, for three weeks in a row, A. Whitney Brown would be co-hosting.
	So I'd get motivated at a certain point.
	I'd think, you better write jokes now.
	You better shut up with the whining.
	And I'd look up at the poster and it said, indignation.
	What am I?
	Arcane reference.
	It was like a basic iambic pentameter for jokes, because I would get to the point where I'd say, you know, I went to the doctor, he said I was a little stiff, what am I, Rosie the Robot Man?
	You know, it was pretty easy.
	It would signal it, or it would trip me up, and then I'd think how easy it was.
	You have to at some point have a little, you have to be debonair about it.
	You know, you have to demystify it and then you have to feel proud of it.
	So at the beginning I remember I went on Letterman the first time and Biff, the guy who lets you backstage after if you don't get called over, says, hey, what's your last two lines?
	So I know when to pull the curtain.
	And that was a big thing.
	I remember thinking, beautiful!
	That demystified it for me.
	So eventually you get through that part and then Weekend Update I remember thinking taking it to the next level thinking I'm taking the next level as a value judgment I did the best I could but I remember thinking you better do some panache now brother because they want somebody out there It doesn't look like he's looking at his feet and shuffling and acting apologetic.
	They want him out of doors So start getting in closer to the horns.
	That's when I started putting Savoir Faire in and all the goofy affectations and I just remember that During the week, I had a perfect thing.
	I was in New York City.
	If I had a joke I wasn't sure about, you go out to a club and you go up and tell it.
	And it doesn't have to kill, but you have to get something that lets you know it has a pulse, you know?
	And so it was a perfect lab.
	I was just smart enough to think, don't drink, don't get loaded.
	You know, I've never done blow or anything, you know, like it was a crazy time.
	I just remember thinking, I talked to Leno about it.
	He said, Stay on the road!
	I know the road looks crowded now, but I'm telling you, everybody starts going off the road for pleasures or neuroses.
	And it was true.
	I just, like, wrote my jokes and shut up and didn't get loaded.
	And, you know, it opened up.
	So you're famous for being so arcane that they threw you off Monday Night Football because of it.
	So where did all the— Oh, that and other reasons.
	I don't want to make it strictly that.
	Like I said, John Madden's the best color, and people think I'm all wounded and dinged.
	He should do that job.
	The moment he wanted it, like I said.
	But yes, also the Arcania doesn't only serve, but then it does, listen, people act like you're some cat who gets to dim some around and say, I think I'll be this.
	Funny from this direction.
	It's my one monkey trick.
	I got a somewhat deep drawer and a nice retrieval system.
	That's all I got, man.
	You know what I mean?
	It's not like I'm not Moliere.
	I'm not an old coward.
	Everybody's got their strengths.
	I did learn a lesson from a great comic named Richard Belzer early on.
	Belzer ended up being an actor on... Law and Order, right?
	Yeah.
	And when he was young, in the 70s, he ruled New York City at Catch a Rising Star.
	He was like Anton LaVey, the Dark Prince, man.
	And he was so non-caring about whether they dug him or not.
	That was a big lesson for me.
	Because I would go up there, and I had this talk with Carlin once when he was young on the Ed Sullivan Show.
	He said, I look back, I'm coming on, I'm practically a band singer.
	And then he just said, screw it, I'm going to push all my chips in on George Carlin.
	He came out in a long sweater.
	He rolled the dice and said, if I'm going to take this up to the next level.
	When I watch Belzer, I remember thinking, I'm such an ass kisser out there.
	I'm so needy to be liked.
	I've got to drop that.
	And I find out in a very important lesson, at least in a confined space, a room, People don't want you to be as kissy.
	They find it unctuous.
	This is the objectivist in me.
	I'm reading Atlas Shrugged as we speak again, and part of it's weird to me, but part of it, the self-determinism part, I find really exhilarating.
	I remember thinking they don't want you to be up there being sucky like Dagny's brother Jim in the novel.
	They want you to be like Hank Reardon.
	Step up and do your thing and do it confidently and they're freed up to dig you because they don't have to worry about your self-esteem.
	I remember at the beginning crowds would look up.
	Nervous laughter is them thinking you seem like a reasonable, nice guy and they don't want you to fail.
	They've diverted their shields like on Star Trek away from just flat out laughing into protecting you in some way.
	If you go out and start giving off that sort of Garbo thing that you don't care if anybody ever sees you again, it's an intoxicant to them.
	That's showbiz somewhere right there.
	It's politics too, right?
	I mean, President Trump is that.
	I mean, there's no question that it works.
	I've never seen anybody like that, Ben.
	I'm telling you, here's the thing I think about Trump.
	Say what you will about him.
	I think his outer voice is an entirely accurate depiction of his inner voice.
	Oh yeah, there's no filter.
	As crazy as that is on some days.
	I don't think Hillary Clinton's inner voice and outer voice have ever even had a cup of coffee together.
	And I think that's why he's the President of the United States right now.
	Yeah, I think there's very little question about that.
	So, who are some of your favorite comedians?
	You had to rank comedians historically.
	Like, historically, who are your favorites?
	And then who are some people working now you like?
	Well, listen, when I was a kid, Jonathan Winters made me howl, because he was easy to understand.
	You could airdrop him anywhere in the world, and the faces and the funny voices and his ability to improv was liberating.
	So I saw that when I was young.
	That stuck in my head.
	Then the next thing I saw like that was Robin in his first HBO special, where he was so untethered.
	And Robin became a movie star in that.
	but when his young stand-up, just to watch somebody that carefree, I knew I could never do that, but I remember thinking, God, that must feel like a loofah scrub on your brain to go up and be, you're always so guarded in front of strangers.
	To go up and be that unguarded, you must feel bulletproof when you walk out.
	So that was cool.
	I went to see a comedian named Kelly Monteith, who was nice enough to have me backstage, and I don't even know if Kelly's still with us, but I always kissed the ring because I was a young kid thinking, I can't do Robin, but I think I can do what Kelly's doing.
	And I don't mean proficiency-wise, I just mean that sort of, Delivery to Mike.
	And imagine what a sweet man he is to have me back.
	A kid unknown who does not even a comedian to say I'm contemplating it for 10 minutes backstage and giving me some guidance.
	Very important thing.
	Next guy I saw was Jay.
	He demystified it for me.
	He was a stone killer on stage.
	I know people see Jay on the Tonight Show.
	Jay's smart enough to serve a task and the task was to win that for 17 years and he did.
	That was his prime directive.
	There he did a great monologue, but I'm telling you Jay Leno offstage is wicked.
	I just talked to him last night.
	He's just stone killer.
	So that was important.
	The next guy, Seinfeld.
	I remember seeing Seinfeld in New York and thinking, well, I don't think I should watch him anymore because that's too...
	That's insightful.
	You know, it was about socks and a dryer, but it was such a clever take.
	I remember he did a joke one night, he was the only one that said, maybe quit show business.
	It was so deft, where he said, I watch a parakeet fly into a mirror, and I always think, well, sure, they're low brain power, but that being said, wouldn't he want to avoid the oncoming parakeet?
	You know, I remember I had to leave the room and say, man, I'm writing jokes.
	I got to go sublingual here because that's way down here.
	And so he was important.
	And then today, I would say the funniest man in the world is Brian Regan.
	Who's a brilliant comedian who, the beauty of it is you have kids, I don't know if you still have the kids' grandparents, but you could take all of them to this thing from 10, and I don't say this about a lot of guys, to 80, and they all walk out like with temporal mandibular joint syndrome.
	They've been laughing so hard.
	He's a flat-out genius.
	Jerry's still, you know, Jerry's Mount Rushmore.
	He's the man.
	And there's a cat named Sebastian Maniscalco who does sort of a, It's about his upbringing.
	That's a little more that guy, you know, prowling the stage.
	And he, I don't know, my son and I go to see him and literally we were in trouble.
	I think the hardest I've ever left, I have a good memory.
	I can't say he always worked for me because he, but I loved him and he made me laugh.
	The single hardest I've ever seen was Sam Kennison.
	I don't know if you're as familiar with Sam, but it was just so wrong.
	Like sometimes you'd be so wrong that you'd sit there and this is what we talk about with political correctness.
	Now we've like augured out a huge bit of what makes you laugh.
	Sometimes wrong or unfair or mean is what makes you laugh the hardest.
	I remember Sam convulsing me one night.
	There was a group of people in from Decatur, Illinois or something, and we're in the comedy store.
	It's like 2 in the morning.
	He's the last guy.
	Sam comes out.
	He hasn't broken big yet.
	He's getting big, though, but he comes out.
	He's like some pissed-off golem.
	He's got the beret on and the coat, and they don't quite know what to make of him.
	Where are you in from?
	And he starts talking to them, and they think he's nice Sam or something.
	I'm like, oh Christ, they have no idea they're dealing with the Antichrist.
	And then he said, what are you doing?
	The guy describes it, and Sam says, yeah, sounds good.
	Hey, listen, around three o'clock, after hearing that story, around three o'clock tomorrow afternoon, I'm going to be doing some yard work, and if there's anybody else in the crowd who wants to drive by and put a I'm dead!
	Like him!
	I'm dead!
	And the people were like, it was like the beginning of The Mask or something, where the eyes are coming out.
	Now, looking back at that, that's the hardest I've ever laughed.
	I was with a comedian named Jeff Cesario.
	No, I look back on that.
	I don't have any choice in that.
	I look back on it.
	Is it like great moments in comedy?
	No, it's not exactly deft, but it was just so wrong.
	And the equilibrium was so thrown off.
	Maybe it was nervousness, but it just made me laugh my ass off.
	And I often think now, all that's dead.
	Sam would be out of the business today.
	So would Rickles, I mean.
	I think Rickles might get through because he was a softy.
	He had a good heart.
	But Sam had a good heart, but he was more malevolent.
	I don't think either of those guys could work now, and that's a weird place to be in.
	I mean, that's what I was going to ask you next, is about the modern standards.
	You know, it seems to me that we've actually returned to a sort of puritanism about comedy, where if the only jokes that you're allowed to make are basically sex jokes, all the other jokes are out the window because they rely on stereotypes or they rely on observations about reality that could be offensive to somebody.
	Sex is inherently funny, so you can make a sex joke and get away with it, or you can just shock somebody by cursing or saying something incredibly lewd or vulgar, but it seems like that's It's either that or probing social commentary, meaning just leftist social commentary you could watch on Maddow.
	So is there a future for comedy in this world?
	You know, there always is, but I can't foresee it.
	You know what I mean?
	Something's going to happen in this country that's going to uncap this pressure.
	What was the guy's name?
	Ray Donovan?
	Where do I go to get my reputation back?
	Or I think there was a guy named Walsh who one time said, have you no shame?
	You know, Hollywood's running the tightest Torquemada type thing now.
	It's not McCarthyism.
	It's like Jenny McCarthyism.
	You can be kicked out in a second for saying something wrong, supposedly, by the cool kids.
	I never thought I'd see that coming.
	And now I can't say how I see it going, but I do think there'll be some moment where something is overplayed, somebody has a rang.
	It might almost happen with Monica Lewinsky, but she saved that dress.
	I mean, when you look back on that, people always say, that's such an odd thing.
	Thank God.
	They would have driven that young girl, I think, into...
	A nervous break?
	You know, something's going to happen that's going to make us all step back and go, oh, that's heavy, you know?
	And that's weird.
	And we've got to start.
	But I can't foresee what that is.
	But it's not going to be a minor thing.
	Something's going to come out of this perpetually uptight attitude that's going to make everybody shake their head and think, oh, we've gone too far.
	Well, one of the things I wonder is whether there's been too much of a merger of politics and comedy.
	So you were mentioning Leno before, and the fact that Leno really did try to play it straight when he was on The Tonight Show, avoiding ticking off one side at the expense of the other.
	He would actually tell jokes about both sides.
	And now it seems like it's Well, it makes you question what comedy is, doesn't it?
	of the aisle.
	And you'll hear comedians say things openly like, well, there wasn't anything funny about Barack Obama.
	And I just think to myself, how is there nothing funny about Barack Obama?
	There's plenty funny about Barack Obama.
	Well, it makes you question what comedy is, doesn't it?
	Or in another way, it makes me question, I don't know, I don't want to sound like I'm going to be Kierkegaard or something here, but the subjectification of the empirical is a great puzzlement to me.
	And it's why I think somewhere down the road you literally could have 2 plus 2 equaling what the child believes it equals, when you start putting intent, feelings, emotion ahead of Well, what's it equal?
	What are two twos or four?
	That's what's happened now is I often wonder, well, how am I looking at Nancy Pelosi and seeing sort of a disingenuous person who's been in that system for so long, her one genius is knowing how to play that That micro world that she's in of sharp elbows.
	But when I watch her, I don't think she's a great intellect.
	And then I have other people, you hear people talking about her.
	She's our last hope.
	She's a great intellect.
	And I look at that and I think, well, is it just egotistical for me to, do you ever have this moment where you think, what is separating these two?
	And it's my opinion.
	And I start to wonder, is there an actual thing out there?
	Or is there not?
	Is it just how you see it?
	I want to ask you for a second about what seems to me a transformational point in comedy was the rise of Comedy Central, and particularly Stewart's show.
	I think that Stewart's show had almost a cataclysmic impact on the merger of politics and comedy.
	And because Stewart was so incredibly talented, he was able to get away with the merger of the two.
	But it sort of killed comedy to merge it with politics in the way that Stewart did, where he would read a headline, and then he'd make a funny face at the audience, and then the audience would laugh simply at the headline.
	And it wasn't an actual joke about the headline, it was just we laugh at the headline itself.
	And so it became that politicians were now comedians, because I can read a headline too, and comics became politicians.
	There was an actual merger of the two, and you can't separate it off, and that means there's no actual leeway for comedians anymore.
	It used to be that if you were a comic, You could say something deeply offensive and terrible and completely get away with it because you would just say, right, I'm a comic.
	That's what I do.
	I'm here to offend you.
	That's why they came to you.
	Right, exactly.
	And now it's, well, no, you're not allowed to say that.
	That defense as the comic doesn't obtain anymore because The thing that bothered me about Stewart's routine was that it was clown nose on, clown nose off.
	Sometimes it was that he was the clown, and sometimes he was not the clown.
	So when he was appearing with Tucker Carlson on Crossfire and ripping into the horrible things that Crossfire was doing to the world, he was not being a comedian.
	And then he'd go back on Comedy Central, he'd put the clown nose back on.
	And I think people stopped being able to tell the difference between the people who were the comedians and the people who were the politicians.
	And you're seeing that with Kimmel right now, who's being seen as a moral voice as opposed to a guy who is supposed to make you laugh on late night.
	I think the job description's changed.
	I think he's hitting the job description now.
	And at some point this does come down to individuals who have seized great jobs.
	I mean, really, where's Jimmy Kimmel gonna go?
	Where's Stephen Colbert?
	Stephen Colbert was, I believe, in third place and probably in trouble.
	Trump got elected, and he's in first place.
	At some point, it is a Skinner box.
	You're Pavlov's dog.
	What are you going to do?
	Go over and get the electric shock?
	You want the corn kernel?
	Those might be their beliefs, but I'm also saying, even if they weren't their beliefs, really?
	Are they going to come out there and start?
	No.
	You wouldn't have that gig.
	So I can't cut through that part of it.
	How much is that?
	I do know this.
	The people who I think have gone in the bubble for so long, mostly in Hollywood, I think there's always a haunting thing.
	You hear great people talking about, people who have built great fortunes talking about, I was always a little haunted I didn't get a college degree.
	And I always think, why?
	What does that matter?
	It seemed like a jerk-off thing to me.
	But they always say that.
	I look at people in Hollywood, and I think they're a little haunted by their good fortune.
	Not all of them.
	Some of them are great artists, but some of them have a mug that works.
	Some of them are at the right place at the right time.
	I think they're always a little haunted, so they're trying to legitimize themselves now by being, you know, professorial, and I've got some wisdom here, and you're saying, you're the fifth lead on Full House, you know?
	Pepperidge Farm, Alyssa Milano's.
	I have no feeling.
	But the fact is that guys like Trump, Trump lived a whole life.
	I don't think he feels any need to, you know, when people say, how can he say those things?
	I don't think he's thinking the look wise.
	I think he's kind of built what he thinks Donald Trump is, and now he's just going to upset the entire apple cart.
	All I know is this, I don't watch the Oscars anymore.
	I had a chance to last year, but they had somebody also offer me the chance to kayak solo across the Pacific with a rabid meerkat in my lap, so I opted for that.
	But everybody goes on there to look wise now, and you go to Trump press conferences for laughs now.
	That's just such a, so when people say, well, how did we get, I can't even tell you how we got there, much less how we get back.
	But I would say if I had one hot lead on how we got there is people started, people in tertiary industry started taking themselves serious about knowing how the world works.
	Honest to God, when I go out and do my thing, I say that, now these all, Stop at the end of my fingertips.
	I'm barely getting through.
	I've been puzzled, confused, mistaken.
	My whole life's that.
	But there's a degree of surety now that comes along with the self-righteous nature of being right.
	For instance, Real quick, I'm pontificating, but I always look back to 1965.
	It's a big thing for me.
	The institution of the Great Society, which was ostensibly supposed to help the disenfranchised.
	Great intent.
	I guess LBJ's trying to level his karma out from the NOM, you know what I mean?
	So he's thinking, here on the home front, I'll try to help the disenfranchised.
	Now, the yield of that over 64 years now, 2019, I think there was a 21% single parent rate in the black community back then.
	I might be wrong, and once again, these are the subjectifications, but I think that figure is now over 70%.
	And I just say, well, you have a half a century to analyze the data field.
	This has not worked.
	We should try something else.
	That's the pragmatist in me.
	People on the left will never say, no, we just need another 50 years to get there.
	And you think, well, what happens at 50 years if it's 80% single?
	You know what I mean?
	I get to a point where I go, okay, there's a decision that has to be made here.
	There's no decisions that are, those are etched in stone over there.
	Sometimes the, you know, people on both sides are etched in sand.
	It's a little bit bullshit politics, but they are definitely etched in stone on around 10 of these things.
	And that lockstep is tired to me.
	I don't like clogging.
	I don't like line dancing.
	I don't like liberal politics.
	You know, to me, liberalism, modern liberalism is like a nude beach.
	It sounds good until you get there.
	Then there's a lot of cankles, a lot of misspelled tattoos.
	So, in a second, I'm going to ask you the final question.
	I'm going to ask you for the best joke that you've ever heard and the best joke that you've ever told.
	But first, if you want to hear Dennis Miller's answer, you actually have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
	To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com.
	Click subscribe.
	You can hear the end of our conversation over there.
	Thanks so much for stopping by.
	I really appreciate it.
	Hey, I'm happy for you.
	You're such a fine young man.
	I remember talking to you years ago saying, now that is a... You know what you are?
	You're a fine young man.
	I don't know that they use that term anymore, and I don't mean to embarrass you, but you're a brilliant guy.
	I talk to people and they know you're brilliant.
	And when you get beyond brilliant, you find out the guy's not a prick about being brilliant, but a nice young man.
	I'm so happy for you.
	Well, thank you so much.
	I really appreciate it.
	it.
	Good to see you.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
	Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
	Associate producer Mathis Glover.
	Edited by Donovan Fowler.
	Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
	Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
	Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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