Not Bill O'Reilly
ATLANTIC CITY — Opposites really do attract. How else can you explain the early success of “Bolder & Fresher,” the new tour that teams Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly with politically conservative comedian Dennis Miller?
The polarizing host of The O’Reilly Factor and Miller, a weekly contributor to the television show, seem to be picking up where O’Reilly and former Fox host Glenn Beck left off.
“[O’Reilly] and Beck used to perform [on stage] together, but then Beck moved to Texas,” Miller tells Atlantic City Weekly. “I’ve been on [O’Reilly’s] show for two or three years now; we have a pretty good comic timing thing between us so we decided to give it a try.”
Miller says O’Reilly is a natural comedian who doesn’t tell jokes. Instead, he’s a natural storyteller who weaves humorous tales about his life and growing up during his 35-minute turn on stage that follows Miller, who leads off the show.
“He kills,” Miller says during a recent phone call from his California home. “He’s a very adept communicator, and he knows that if we both did [conventional] stand-up, it would just be us going back and forth. So instead, he goes out and takes a completely different tact and kills the room.”
Miller and O’Reilly would seem to be a political odd couple even if they weren’t doing a comedy tour together. The former Saturday Night Live star says the TV host is the more liberal of the two.
“He’s anti-death penalty and stuff like that, and he’s more in [President Obama’s] corner than I am,” Miller explains. “He’s willing to give him a wider berth than I am.”
Throughout his career, Miller, 58, has never kept his political opinions to himself, on stage or off. In his early years in the funny business, he was a liberal who sided with Democrats.
But even while bashing the right, he always had a conservative side, which came to the forefront following the terrorist attacks of 9-11. He backed President Bush and supported the war in Iraq.
“I find that on the left, people sometimes say to me, ‘I hate what you do,’ and when I ask them if they’ve seen me, they say ‘no’ — they wouldn’t give me the benefit of the doubt,” Miller says with a chuckle. “So I ask them how they know they hate it if they haven’t seen it? But people are going to think what they want to think.”
In spite of his conservative leanings, Miller still harbors some liberal views. He supports gay marriage, and while he doesn’t believe in abortion, he supports the right to choose.
Miller, a native of Pittsburgh who earned a journalism degree from Point Park University, cashed his first comedy paycheck in 1979, when he won $500 as a runner-up in Playboy magazine’s first humor competition.
Many performers have used radio as a springboard to a career in television. Dennis Miller did things in reverse. After more than 25 years of entertaining audiences on the tube as a comedian and pun-...
Atlantic City’s smallest casino will make history Friday night, July 23, when it hosts arguably the biggest “headliner” of the summer: Former President Bill Clinton.
Former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Dick Cheney will be part of a series of special events this summer at the Atlantic City Hilton that will also include a joint appearance by conservative Fox News political commentators Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly, Atlantic City Weekly has learned.
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