Ranting Again

by Dennis Miller

Overview

Dennis Miller is back, and he is Ranting Again in this hilarious compendium of wit, wisdom, and righteous outrage.  This is good news for all of us who fume at the country's lack of common sense, and seethe at the absurdity of the daily headlines.

Setting his sights higher and wider than ever before, Dennis Miller is at the top of his game, unleashing his unique brand of scathing wit on anything and everything.  Taking on such targets as illegal immigration, the sobriety movement, the American school system, and men who wear tight T-shirts even though they have big breasts, Miller proves that nobody is safe from his hilarious yet hard-hitting scrutiny.

Showcasing Dennis Miller's trademark blend of wide-ranging allusions, thought-provoking insights, and outrageous opinions, Ranting Again is a brilliant collection that is his sharpest and funniest yet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307799371
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/09/2011
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	767,345
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Dennis Miller first gained national acclaim as the anchor of Weekend Update, the news parody on "Saturday Night Live." He is the host of the Emmy Award-winning talk show "Dennis Miller Live," now in its fourth season on HBO.  He and his wife live in Southern California with their two children.

Read an Excerpt

Smoking

You  know, they say every cigarette you smoke makes your life seven minutes shorter, and I know that's true because I had an uncle, and the first cigarette he ever smoked was on an airplane. Smoked the cigarette, and he immediately dropped dead of a heart attack. Seven minutes later, the plane crashed into a mountain.

Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but America's attitude about smoking has become more hostile than a militia member at a tax audit. These days even the Philip Morris employee cafeteria has a no smoking section. If you walked into a restaurant and loudly demanded that they serve you a charbroiled live puppy, you'd probably cause less of an outcry than you would by simply sitting down and lighting up a smoke.

When I say "smoke," I'm talking mostly about cigarettes, although I guess with the increasing popularity of cigars, we have to include them in this discussion. For years, cigars concerned only half the population, but their usage is growing more prevalent with the fairer sex. For women, smoking cigars is like going to Chippendale's: You're basically saying, "Look, guys, we can be just as big a bunch of assholes as you can."

Now, it's been proven that tobacco company executives' sworn congressional testimony concerning the addictive properties of nicotine had all the sincerity of a defense attorney's tie rack. But who can possibly be shocked by this?

Tobacco companies will stop at nothing to win the smoking wars. Now their scientists are saying some of the smoking research data is no longer valid because the contemporary mores dictate that rats have to step outside their mazes to have the smoke.

Hey, don't blame the cigarette makers. Tobacco companies are being sued way too much. I admit they're evil poison-mongers who give other evil poison-mongers a bad name. Yes, they lie about the addictive nature of their products and get rich doing it. But come on, tell the truth, we knew they were lying all along. If you're saying you didn't know cigarettes were bad for you, you're lying through that hole in your trachea. Of course it causes lung cancer. Of course it causes emphysema. It's fucking smoke. Would you build a campfire and every hour stand real close and take deep breaths?  How could you not know smoking is bad for you?  Is having teeth the color of caramel corn normal? Is coughing up your lungs one smoldering loogie at a time normal?  God gave you two lungs, so don't be an asshole. Think. Use one lung for smoking and the other one for breathing.

Here are some signs that it might be time to quit smoking:

1. Before lighting up, you wrap a nicotine patch around your cigarette.

2. Your newborn twin sons are named Benson and Hedges.

3. You name each cigarette and have a personal conversation with it while you smoke.

4. You're at Arlington Cemetery, paying your respects to JFK, and you lean over and light one up off the eternal flame.

And 5. You shit pure tar.

Listen, the bottom line on cigarette smoking is it's really just the way you interpret things. I mean, they say smoking gives you cancer. Sure, you can be negative and look at that as a bad thing, or you can see that smoking gives  you cancer. It gives it to you. It's a present. Here, here's cancer. . . . Why, thank you very much, Mr. Cigarette.

You know, when I find myself in a room where everyone's smoking, and it gets too intense, you know what I do?  I don't start waving my hand around and fake coughing; I don't start rattling off heart disease and lung cancer stats like some autistic surgeon general; I don't lecture anybody about their lifestyle choices. . . . I leave the room, okay?  My acceptance of smokers is one of the compromises, one of the little negotiations that one must make if one is to live in modern urban society.

I don't know why people complain about secondhand smoke. At nearly two dollars a pack, don't you realize how much money they're saving you?

Plus, if you smoke, you get to read matchbook covers and learn about the exciting career opportunities awaiting you in cartooning.

And hey to all you militant antismokers whom I see screaming at strangers for lighting up: If you were that concerned about your lungs, what in the fuck are you doing living in L.A.?

Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents

	Preface	xiii
	The Single Life	1
	Generation X	5
	Animal Rights	10
	Family	15
	Ethnicity	19
	Are Movies Getting Worse?	24
	The Armed Forces	28
	Smoking	32
	Acting	36
	Sobriety	40
	Violence in Media	44
	Hype	48
	The American Education System	52
	Bad Drivers	56
	Computers	60
	Mothers	64
	Immigration	68
	Bad Habits	72
	Lawyers	76
	Fashion	81
	Bad TV	86
	Feminism	91
	Washington, D.C.	95
	The Royal Family	99
	Abortion	103
	Bill Clinton, Second Term	108
	America's Obsession with Beauty	112
	Parenthood	117
	Modern Psychology	122
	Elections	127
	Sportsmanship	132
	The Prison System	137
	The Death of Common Sense	142
	L'Affaire O.J.	147
	The Pursuit of Happiness	151
	Spouses	155
	Lying	160
	Art	164
	Child Rearing	169
	White People	173
	UFOs	178
	The Afterlife	182
	Gun Control	186
	The Fall of the Middle Class	190
	Friends	194
	Cops	198

Editorial Reviews

More rants to follow up Miller's New York Times best seller, "The Rants".

Library Journal

Cable TV satirist Miller ("The Rants", 1996) is throwing his barbed tantrums again, dispensing some seriously smart-alecky stuff between his patented opener, "I don't want to get off on a rant here," and his closing tag, "that's just my opinion, I could be wrong." Generally, of course, he is not wrong. He's not supposed to be. The outrage is often common sense, but with an attitude. With the ephemeral topicality of a Will Rogers and the no longer arresting vocabulary of a Lenny Bruce, Miller (with his writers) expresses unique scorn for typical targets like lawyers, kitsch, and O.J. Simpson, as well as bad habits ("You've got bad eating habits if you use a grocery cart in 7 Eleven, okay?") and Senator D'Amato ("waste of an apostrophe"). He's against bad guys. He is, it seems, on the side of Mother's Day, feminism, and the pleasures of parenthood. Often, he verges on the politically correct. Hey, so he's not the counterculture iconoclast his way out hip scat riffs would indicate, okay? His preaching is founded on pop culture, so forget about the deep semiotics; he's just got the rants (or, as he calls it, "pay cable rant syndrome"). Style is all, and it's quite sufficient. Figures of speech, from irony and hyperbole to metonymy and synecdoche, abound. Once and future nonentities who may or may not have once appeared in the 'zines seem to be cited simply for the musicality of their names. Trent Reznor, Lance Henricksen, Elsa Klensch, these are household names? It's all very trendy and, as we know, trendy is hip. And Miller, the old philosopher, is nothing if not hip. As luck would have it, he's also pretty funny in these in-your-face monologues. His patented sarcasm machine producesanother caustic and clever, albeit impermanent, little volume.

Kirkus Reviews