Fri. July 13   

Back in the day, behind the Weekend Update anchor desk at “Saturday Night Live” with his wicked grin and mullet hairstyle and on various HBO specials, Dennis Miller would go to town on the right wing, especially, well, Ronald Reagan. The comic, now 58, called Reagan an “aging spendthrift… who told the country we could have our pie and eat it, too,” and that plans to put Reagan’s head on Mt. Rushmore were ditched because it was discovered that “granite was not dense enough material to accurately portray the former president’s head.”
   Barry Crimmins, a friend of mine who used to write for Miller, calls Miller gave Miller an entire chapter’s worth of bile in his book, “Never Shake Hands With a War Criminal.” He calls Miller “The Mount Rushmore of Wrong-headedness.” Why is that? Well, Miller is on “The O’Reilly Factor” weekly, and since 2007 he’s had a syndicated radio talk show, “The Dennis Miller Show,” heard on 300-plus stations.  What you’ll hear at Wilbur Theatre in Boston Friday July 13– will be a whole lot of tricky verbiage unloaded at Barack Obama and those on the left side of the fence.
    We spoke to Miller on the phone recently about his politics, his controversial shift in direction and what he calls his monkey trick. 
JSInk: You’re on Bill O’Reilly a lot. How does it work for you and him on TV?
Miller: He’s had the No. 1 show for 12 years. He’s a pro, a great broadcaster. In a world where everything’s gotten a little sloppy you can agree or disagree with O’Reilly, but that show runs like clockwork. It’s beautifully put together. It’s got places where people can hang their hats, segments they get used to. He writes everything hat’s said on the air – every intro, every talking point, he hovers over it and does it right and that’s how you kick people’s ass for 12 years.
Are you at all a foil?
Put it this way. I have found I get a lot of recognition off that show for not being a jokesmith constantly. Sometimes people come up and say. “‘Hey, I really liked what you said on there.”  It helps my cred a little as a comedian who doesn’t just do mindless jokes, but rather reads about stuff and gives O’Reilly a sort of peg. And he gets a guy that he can help him laugh at himself, like when I call him Billy. He’s been such an imposing figure for years and you can tease him a little. I know, as a hockey fan, you’re only true buds with someone when you add a “y” to the name. Maybe he needed to loosen it up and maybe I needed to tighten it up.
The general perception of you is that you moved from left to right, triggered by 9/11.
I didn’t like the way comics treated things back then. I remember thinking this room’s getting too hip for me; there’s too many hipsters on the left. Too many are too certain of their guess work.
Was 9/11 the catalyst? Did you flip a switch?
No.  I’ve always been a pragmatist. I did a “Young Comedians” special in the early ‘90s where the young comedians were David Spade and Rob Schneider and a lot of the stuff I say today I was saying then. My job description at “SNL” dictated I tear a hole in the president and Reagan was the president. I guess people got that [liberal tag] in their head. But I’ve always been a pragmatist. Socially, I’m very liberal. If people with similar genitalia wanna get married ‘cause they love each other, fine. I just would like to keep half my money and kill nutcases before they kill us. If that’s what passes as a right-wing fanatic nowadays, sign me up. 
      If somebody says they’re Christian, I don’t immediately start mocking them. I run into more Christians on the road than I ever did ‘cause of my affiliation with Bill, as he has a lot of people of faith watching the show. When somebody looks me in the eye and says, “Listen I don’t have any axe to grind with homosexuality, but you understand my faith prohibits me … If I get on board, I’m sinning and putting myself in harm’s way.“ There are people who believe this, ardent Christians. I don’t agree with this, I don’t get it, but I’m not gonna grab them and start making fun of them. These are personal, consequential decisions. Mine are different than theirs. But I’m not gonna lecture to people because they say they believe in God a lot. What business is it of mine?
So what’s your relationship to religion?
I was raised Catholic. I don’t feel Catholic at all anymore, though I do like the new Pope because I thought he humbled himself and apologized to people – it’s been a mess over there [with the child sex abuse cases]. But when he apologized for the sins committed by the church, I thought, “Good for you, you should.“ I didn’t know what to make of him at first. Usually you get a German guy, a balcony and an adoring throng together and I’m not happy about it, but I think he’s worked out OK.  I don’t fancy myself as Catholic anymore. I think I’m a Christian, but I’ve never had a Road to Damascus moment or an epiphany where an archangel appeared to me in my makeup mirror. I would say that if I have to codify my religious believes, I believe someone created Charles Darwin. I don’t know what that means.
Does anger play a role in your comedy?
No, not anger. It’s the same [expletive] I used to tell a shrink for $200 an hour – what pissed me off. I have got one monkey trick. I’m good with simile and metaphor and I seem to have somewhat of a trap in my head for arcana.  At “SNL,” I put a big poster on my wall and all it said was “Indignation-What I am-arcane reference.” And if I ever have to go back to the template of my iambic pentameter, that’s what I look at. That’s all there is to it. I’m not saying it’s a great monkey trick, but it’s fed my family for years.
Do you ever get lost in those convoluted metaphors?
No. There’s a bit in the act where I say Hilary Clinton has been cheated on more frequently than a blind woman playing Scrabble with gypsies. You start out with Hilary’s been cheated on a lot and the rest of it just came to me. At the end of that joke – and that joke scores – I poke fun at it. I say “Aw folks, similes come to me like … like uh … like uh … let’s just say they come to me.” I know it’s a monkey trick, but I’m just happy I got one. When I hear Stallone talking about “I wanna be known for more than Rocky,” I’m like “You gotta be [expletive] kidding me! You got to be Rocky!” I’m not looking to be a Renaissance man.
Do you want to feel like you play a part in the national political discussion?
No, it‘s like the antithesis of that. I look at show business as such a fluke of nature. You’ve gotta bust your ass, but you’ve got the door opening to you in a world where good people go unrecognized and unrewarded. I don’t feel that there’s any importance to my place in it. I’ve been lucky and I feel like I’ve been funny, but nothing beyond that. I think I’ve worked hard to be funny, but making a dent, nothing interests me less.
Has writing and performing gotten easier or harder as you’ve gotten older?
Oh, it’s gotten easier. I know how to be Dennis Miller now. Dana Carvey taught me how to be Dennis Miller, when he’d do an impression of me on “SNL.” He’d sit next to me in a bad wig [on Weekend Update]. He wouldn’t even say words but just do an impression of me – “Ba ba ba, ba-ba ba ba.” I said, “Oh I get it, I’ve got a rhythm now that people know.” People would howl and I never much thought about it, but for better or worse a rhythm developed. Trust me, at the beginning I was an ass-kisser. I remember George Carlin and I were talking once and he told me about one time when you saw him on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in a suit and two months later he looked like Jesus Christ. He had the light bulb go on about who he was. I was watching Richard Belzer one night at Caroline’s when I was an eager-to-please comic and Belzer was so indifferent to the crowd. I thought, “I see, they don’t want me to be a suck-up they want someone good. They want me to seize them for an hour. They don’t want to see the guy flying the plane to be Don Knotts.” You might be tremulous in the rest of your day-to- day existence but for this hour you have to look in charge. So that’s where whatever character I have came from.
You’ve gotten a lot of Internet sniping when people saw that political shift in your comedy. Do you get heckled live?
I don’t get heckled. Maybe once a year.  I’ve had people walk out. Listen, I’m not a huge fan of the job Barack Obama’s done and there are some people out there who I almost feel they’ll swim upstream against any sort of empirical proof that he’s not a great president. They refuse to hear it and they’ll walk out. I like my gods who walk among men to be less whiny, and when I bring that up a couple people get up and walk out. As far as heckling goes, I’ve been in this for 25 years and the ticket price was not $85 when I started. Most people don’t come to see if they’re ready to snap. They come ‘cause they dig what you’re saying.
Do you take shots at Romney or are you on his team?
I like him as a man. If they’re gonna start to paint him as the Anti-Christ I think they’re overplaying that hand. I’ve met him a few times and I’ve tried to get them some campaign ideas because I do want him to win. I told them they should find a  place in  Middle America where  there was a regular guy named George Clooney and hold a dinner party at his house, charge $40 a head, and at the end of the night show a check for $1500. You would subvert all that stuff about Barack Obama being a man of the people and Romney being a swell. Imagine if he came out in short sleeves and an apron and said, “We made $1500 tonight!” And if he picks Tim Pawlenty for Vice President the bumper sticker should be “A Mitt and a Paw and No Handouts.” Do I love everything about Romney? No. But all I know is he could change his name to Not Obama and I think he’d have a chance of winning.
I’ve got to say, though, Romney is pretty humor-challenged.
Oh, I don’t give a shit about any of that. You think LBJ was Frank Gorshin? I  give a shit that they can count. Right now, we got one column that says $15 trillion and the other column doesn’t say anything near that. That’s what I’m looking for: A guy that can come in and notice that.

(This is a version of a piece that ran in the Cape Cod Times Saturday July 7, www.capecoldonline.com. )

Tix: $57. Show at 7:30.

248 Tremont St. 617-248-9700  www.thewilburtheatre.com