Tom Maurstad

There are comedians who joke about airplane food and a guy walking into a bar. And then there are comedians who joke about current events and the everyday absurdities that are elsewhere in the media known as news and politics. Dennis Miller isn't just in the latter category; he's the very definition of it.

The trajectory of his career illustrates the payoff and the danger of being a current-events comedian. His evolution from "Weekend Update" anchor on Saturday Night Live to his current gig as weekday talk-radio host, depending on your perspective, reflects a performer finally finding the platform that fits or a comedian whose penchant for political barbs redefined him as a pundit-commentator.

Although in the last few years most of Mr. Miller's media appearances (his stint on Fox News, for example) have been in the role of a pundit (albeit a very funny one), his essential identity is absolute and uncomplicated to at least one person: Mr. Miller.

"I am a stand-up comedian, that's what I am, that's what I do," he says. "I love the radio show I'm doing. I think my strengths and the demands of the medium match up very nicely.

"But my favorite job is stand-up."

'My favorite job is stand- up,' says Dennis Miller.

Through the many and occasionally improbable turns (color commentator on Monday Night Football?!) he's taken, Mr. Miller has always had a singular skill that has highlighted whatever rant-filled or observation-striking work he was doing: the firing-on-all-synapses simile. Whatever the subject (a mule-headed politician, a celebrity behaving preposterously, a Darwinism-defying pop-culture fad), Mr. Miller has an unerring knack for grafting some obscure low-art relic with some rarefied, high-art reference to create the perfectly pointed and hilarious summation.

During a rant on Fox News last year, for example, Mr. Miller skewered Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., in part by mocking his oratory skills, which are so lacking that the senator makes "Mr. Limpet seem like Demosthenes."

Everybody get your Google on to either learn or remind yourself that a) Mr. Limpet, played by Don Knotts, was a meek, ineffectual nebbish who turned into a cartoon fish in the 1964 film The Incredible Mr. Limpet , and b) Demosthenes was a Greek statesman (384 B.C.-322 B.C.) widely considered to be the greatest of the ancient Greek orators. In a word, wow.

"They just come to me. That's my one gift," says Mr. Miller of his skill. "I have a reasonably deep drawer of knowledge to make various associations and references, and they just come to me throughout the day. I don't know how exactly; they just do."

The stand-up comedian can't resist getting in one more punch line.

"It's like I say in my stand-up, I've got a gift for similes like ... like ... well, like something."