Once upon a time, before CNBC's "Dennis Miller," before co-hosting "Monday Night Football," even before HBO's "Dennis Miller Live," the actual Dennis Miller, host of "SNL's" "Weekend Update," had the headline joke-extraction market pretty well cornered. And as sarcastic know-it-alls go, he was pretty funny.
But that was long ago, before "Saturday Night Live's" incisive Tina Fey revitalized his former franchise, before Jon Stewart remade "The Daily Show" into the only genuine source of political satire on American TV, and before Miller -- whose political apostasy was so swift, categorical and absolute that it made St. Augustine's thunderbolt conversion to Christianity look like a passing fancy -- became a man on a very particular, if very confusing, mission.
"Nine-eleven changed me," Miller said last week, by way of explaining how a guy whose living once involved impugning the intellect of the commander in chief could wind up across the table from David Horowitz, another liberal-turned-conservative-pundit, calling him "Davey" and tacitly agreeing to his suggestion that the CIA failed to do its job in Iraq because "the liberals in the universities" somehow prevented its agents from learning Arabic in college.
As Stewart remarked to uber-hawk Richard Perle last week, "It's a wild world."
To effect his conversion, Miller seems simply to have pointed his trademark sneer in the direction opposite. But Miller is not the only one whose comedic approach changed after the terrorist attacks. As Stewart told Tad Friend in a New Yorker profile in early 2002, when Stewart took over "The Daily Show" from Craig Kilborn in 1999 the show's humor shifted from what Stewart called "adjectival humor" and ad hominem, often appearance-based, potshots to having the writers express what they "really felt."
After Sept. 11, the show's real foe came into clear focus: the hyperbolic, hysterical and fear-mongering media and, as Friend wrote, "anyone who terrifies, offends or panders to Americans, from Al Qaeda to Tom Ridge."
Two and a half years later, "The Daily Show" has won three Emmys and become, according to a recent study, one of the primary sources of news for people under 35. This despite Stewart's dogged insistence that his show was, in fact, "a fake news show." Of course, regular viewers know that "The Daily Show" is the opposite of fake: It is brutally, nonpartisanly sincere. Lacking in pretense, Stewart is able to say anything that pops into his head as long as it is posed, "Jeopardy"-style, in the form of a question.
