Citizen Arcane

Dennis Miller takes the stage in Aspen, Colorado, dwarfed by a massive projection of Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane. It is 1996, and the comedian is deep into the rhythm that made him a defining pop-cultural encyclopedist of the decade. He fires off hyper-literate similes and obscure references that demand the audience keep up, treating the English language like a blunt instrument dipped in a thesaurus.

Filmed for HBO while he was concurrently hosting his late-night talk show Dennis Miller Live, Citizen Arcane captures Miller right in the pocket of his cynical, pre-millennial phase.

He touches on the ACLU and writes off Branson, Missouri, as “Vegas for people without teeth”. The pacing is relentlessly dense as he diagnoses an American public he finds “as skittish as Blanche Dubois on a 12-hour Sudafed” and compares the rapid passage of time to “Rod Taylor sitting outside that dress shop in ‘The Time Machine’”. Reviewing the set, the Los Angeles Times noted the comedian was “wearing his obscure references like a tinhorn dictator’s chest full of medals”.