Larry Miller

Los Angeles

We mourn those closest to us when they die: parents, relatives, family, friends. When a leader or athlete dies, an obituary is good; it's something to share.

SOMETIMES I'M SO stupid I amaze even myself.

THERE ARE TWO WAYS to say "I'm here" in Hebrew. Like any language, there are probably lots more, but here are the top two.

WE'RE ALL PART of the pop culture world. Whether you think you are or not, whether you want to be or not, no matter how aloof and superior you feel, even if the Atlantic and Foreign Affairs are the only things you keep in your bathroom, you're as much a part of the celebrity culture as the booker…

YOU'VE PROBABLY ALL HEARD the phrase "Jumping the shark" by now. It's a show business thing from decades ago that I think has been culture-wide for quite some time. (I only heard it myself about a year ago, which, considering I'm in show business, is probably pathetic.) In case you haven't . . .

I HATE CELL PHONES.

I'VE TAKEN TO GIVING MY KIDS haircuts at home lately, but I think that's rapidly coming to an end. Not because my reasons for doing it have changed, but because the kids hate it, my wife hates it, and--Well, that about tells the tale right there, doesn't it?

Los Angeles

I BROKE MY ANKLE on Thanksgiving Night, 2004. We had my sister and her kids staying with us from New Jersey, and my sister-in-law and her family from Huntington Beach in Orange County. No better joy in a house than when all its beds and couches are full.

SO I GOT UP ON SUNDAY AND FELT PRETTY GOOD. Very good, in fact. Great, actually. It was the first Sunday in a few weeks--or a few years--where I hadn't had too much to drink the night before. Well, weeks, years, why quibble, right? The point is, I'd had a good night's sleep, made everyone…

WHEN A PROMINENT AMERICAN IN any field passes on, it's front-page news. Some sneer at this and say, "The same thing happens to everyone. Why is it bigger if it happens to a star?" But I think it is bigger. Yes, thousands probably die in the same way at the same time, and each is a sorrow, but the…

Editor's note: Larry Miller has been on hiatus recently, working hard on both a book, which will be published soon by Judith Regan, and a pilot for a television show for Sony and NBC. He will return regularly to THE DAILY STANDARD in a few months.

IN THE WEEKS, months, indeed years of exhausting campaigning, speechifying, and punditizing leading up to a presidential election--exhausting, that is, from the voters' point of view--and in a particular contest in our nation's history when the rhetoric has been especially, er, tart--I was…

THE DIVINE MRS. M. went with a friend to have something done to their feet the other day. It was a Saturday afternoon, about one o'clock, and I was downstairs reading the obituaries and watching our sons build things and destroy them. (I love the obits; they're like tiny biographies of regular…

WHEN I WAS ON THE ROAD a lot in my salad days--which, ironically, is the time in all of our lives when we almost never eat salads--my favorite audiences were always in the Twin Cities.

MY WIFE just got a new dishwasher for us. She didn't tell me, she just got it. I discovered this the other day when I came home from work and saw it, but it was difficult to learn any more at the moment, since she was in the living room with her best friend, Ilana, planning a party at our house…

"Violent military action by an occupying power against inhabitants of an occupied country will only make matters worse." --Kofi Annan, April 28, 2004 NOW THAT MAY NOT BE the undisputed, going-away, hands-down, dumbest thing ever said, but you have to admit it's close.

"OKAY. IT DOESN'T seem all right to me, but what do I know? Nothing. What do they know? Everything. So I guess everything's okay."

"OKAY. It doesn't seem all right to me, but what do I know? Nothing. What do they know? Everything. So I guess everything's okay."

OKAY, I give up. What, exactly, is a "spiritual leader"?

QUICK, what's the first thing you think of when it comes to Spain?

I'VE MENTIONED LT. RUSSELL BATES before in this column, a Marine pilot, my friend Pete Hamilton's nephew. Pete and his wife, Marcia, brought their four girls out from Connecticut and stayed with us last Thanksgiving, and his sister, Trish, another pal forever, made everyone a fabulous meal at her…

ONE OF LENNY BRUCE'S most famous bits--and this is a very loose paraphrase--concerned Jewish guilt for the crucifixion. "Folks," he would say wearily, "I've gotta be honest. We did it. And I'm real sorry. But we did it. I just found the proof in our attic. Turns out it was my Uncle Lou."

I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but I'm one hundred percent behind a newer, bigger space program. I just have one question: Exactly what have we gotten from the old one besides Velcro and Tang?

I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but I'm one hundred percent behind a newer, bigger space program. I just have one question: Exactly what have we gotten from the old one besides Velcro and Tang?

BREAKFAST was a little hectic the other day. It was a school day, but we gave Mommy a break. The Divine Mrs. M., God bless her, was sleeping in, and Daddy was spinning all the plates--literally and figuratively. Normally my wife is up at first light, gliding effortlessly like Donna Reed, dressing,…

WELL, you live, and you learn.

LENO USED TO HAVE A STORY he loved to tell about his early days at the Improv in New York. An older comic had started hanging around the club; he'd been out of the business for a while, and wanted to get back in. And he had material like, "You ever notice it's always the guys in uniform who get the…

AH, SADDAM, SADDAM, SADDAM. What has it all come to, eh, my friend? All those palaces, all those solid gold toilets, all those deliciously terrified looks in people's eyes. All that hard work, and you just wind up looking like Jerry Garcia after a show.

I KNOW EVERYONE is supposed to think about Thanksgiving before it happens and be consciously grateful prior to the feast, but I always reflect on my blessings afterwards, when we've eaten our fill and must begin the hard work of getting back into the shape we were never in in the first place. This…

EVERYONE'S SEEN "The Sting," because it's a great movie. Well, I guess not everyone, but you know what I mean. And it's still a great movie. Newman and Redford are wonderful (I've always wished the two of them had made more together), and the rest of the cast is as good as it gets: Robert Shaw,…

I WALKED A PICKET LINE THE OTHER DAY. I'm not a member of the union that was on strike, and it's not my line of work, anyway. I don't believe I've ever walked a picket line before, although I think I drink enough so that maybe I have and can't remember. (Just kidding. Sort of.) No, I never did. I…

THE FIRST SENTENCE of an article is called the lede. Sometimes it's the first several sentences, sometimes just one, but the concept is what counts. A good lede gets your attention and sets the stage. The best ledes can be intriguing, informative, thrilling, even shattering. Some became immortal…

FIRST OF ALL, I could be wrong on this. By the way, have you noticed how rarely most people ever admit they were wrong? What's the big deal? Why don't more folks enjoy saying, "Well, I guess I was all wet on that one." I love being wrong. Seriously. I like getting ideas and pitching them, and if…

I MET JOHN RITTER for the first time two-and-a-half years ago when he and Henry Winkler were ending their hit run on Broadway in "The Dinner Party." The rest of the cast, the great Len Cariou, Penny Fuller, Jan Maxwell, and Veanne Cox were staying with it, and Neil Simon offered Jon Lovitz and me…

I TAKE A BRISK WALK around the neighborhood every morning. I love those walks. They loosen my back and get the blood pumping and on mornings after I've had a few drinks (never more than 20 days a month; well, not never, but rarely; oh, skip it) they clear my head. Olympian good health, though, is…

THIS IS LARRY MILLER, your Special Man On The Street, Self-Appointed Hollywood Recall Election Correspondent, reporting live from the rooftops of Universal City. Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea. I can see the lights of the explosions below me in Encino. Oh, the…

COME ON IN, the water's fine! Well, it's a national story now. Isn't this fun? I don't know about you, but I can't recall (so to speak) ever giggling as much about a political story. I got home yesterday, turned on the tube, and there he was, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a really nice XXXL blazer,…

ANYONE WHO THINKS Gray Davis's goose is cooked knows nothing about Gray Davis. Oh, it's in the oven, all right (his goose, that is), and it's been basted, and it's been going for a while. And the table is set, and the guests are seated, and they're all smacking their lips.

A LOT OF PERFORMERS disagree with me on this, but I hate it when audiences whoop to show their pleasure. Before the taping of an HBO special years ago, the producer walked out to whip the audience into a frenzy, which he thought was a good thing for a comedy show. "Are you going to get crazy…

SO WHAT, exactly, did parents do with their children before television? People have been having kids for a long time, so I know it must have been something. I just don't know what. By the way, when it comes to permissive over-telefication--That's probably not a word, but it sounds like one, doesn't…

ONE OF MY OLDEST and best friends from college days (daze?) is a guy named Pete Hamilton, and we're still close. Our families are, too. We visit them, they visit us, gifts go back and forth, I'm Godfather to one of them, you get the picture. He has four daughters, each one prettier than the next,…

REMEMBER "Short Attention-Span Theater"? I think we're in it, and not on the audience side. I think we're the stars. I don't believe this is just me, or a third of us, or even half of us. I think it's every American (not counting the fiercest partisans on the left and right, say, ten percent on…

I FORGOT to get my wife a gift for Mother's Day. We, who about to die, salute you. The kids drew sweet portraits for her and made cards in school that were achingly cute; her sister sent her something nice; my sister sent her something nice. We went to the local International House Of Carbs for…

I HAVE A FEELING I'm about to make a lot of people mad. I don't want to, you understand, but there's something I've had on my mind, and I think it'll make a bunch of folks angry. Maybe not so much angry, as horrified. Yeah, that's it, horrified and disbelieving. Aghast; agog. They'll gasp, stagger…

I'M SURE MOST OF YOU are familiar with Marcel Proust's brilliant and epic work, "Remembrance Of Things Past." That is, I'm sure you're as familiar with it as I am, which is to say you picked it as one of your free book-club selections 14 years ago, got a few pages in, found it less convivial than…

THE WAR has been on for four days (or two years, or twelve years, or a thousand years), and I took the kids for haircuts. It's one of those kid-places with balloons and play areas and horrible music, which, if you're a professional crank like me, means any music at all. For some time now I've…

I BELIEVE MOST AMERICANS, irrespective of their personal views on the matter, expect that we will shortly be engaged in Iraq. In the held breath before this begins, I want to reflect on several minor aspects of major issues before we cross the Rubicon--or the Euphrates--and change our world forever.

IN THE COURSE of our adult lives, we all learn lessons about humanity that disappoint us, but, for me, this one has been stunning.

KIDS ARE DOING EVERYTHING earlier these days. That's not a fresh thought, to say the least. You have to figure that every generation of parents in history has said the same thing. Go back a thousand years to the Norman conquest, or two thousand years to the life of Jesus, or three thousand years to…

I DIDN'T SEE last year's Super Bowl, but at least the reason for that gave me a pretty good column. This year, on Super Sunday, my wife took our kids over to their Super Friends and told me to stay home and do some Super Relaxing. "Watch the game," she said. "I'll take them to dinner, too, so you…

ALL MEN carry specific things in their pockets, and the items and locations are as constant as the Northern Star. For as long as I can remember, I have carried my wallet in my left front pocket, and a knife, Zippo lighter, and change in my right front. The denomination of the change is always…

SOMETIMES IT'S GOOD TO BE SELFISH. That goes for all of us, collectively as well as individually.

IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN Jerry Seinfeld's movie, "Comedian," you should. If it's not playing near you, or if it's no longer playing anywhere, buy the video when it hits the stores. Watch it often, buy several more, and give them to your friends, especially anyone who's ever said, "Ooh, I love…

I'M WRITING THIS the day after Thanksgiving. I knew I was going to write something today, but I didn't plan for it to be about the holiday itself. In fact, nothing could've been further from my mind. I had several other terrific ideas, I didn't feel like it anyway, and, just incidentally, the…

I'm old enough to remember Dinah Shore--"Jewish, you know," my parents would always say with a smile--closing her show by singing, "See the USA in your Chevrolet!" On the other hand, I'm apparently too young to remember the next line of the jingle. I think it was roughly like, "America is something…

WE JUST GOT a new toaster. And it wasn't easy.

A GREAT GUY and publicist I work with, Michael Hansen, tracked down the manager of blink-182. They were the band who said all those things about President Bush and his Iraq policies. Their manager confirmed that they said them and, also, that this was followed by huge boos, which didn't upset the…

ON September 30, I wrote a column where I recounted a story my friend Jack Burditt told me. He had been to a punk rock concert in Los Angeles with his teenage daughter and, while there, one of the punk bands had said some nasty things about President Bush and his Iraq policy. The crowd, Jack told…

I have some good news for you. In fact, some great news. When I heard it, I laughed out loud (hooted, in fact), clapped my hands, closed my eyes, and felt a tingle all the way down to my toes, as if I had just swallowed a blast of whisky. Wait a minute, maybe it was a blast of whisky. No, that was…

Back around 1990 some British producers started hiring American comics for shows in England at the Queen's Theater (Theatre?) in London. Every two weeks they'd pick three American comics and put them on the bill with three English comics. I did it and loved it, and who wouldn't? You fly first…

I COULDN'T AVOID THIS. I had to write it. And there's no better title than that. I know every bonehead with a computer and a forum has held forth on this anniversary. You may be sick of it. I may be sick of it. Except that I'm not. I'm drawn to it again and again. You don't say a prayer just once,…

NO ONE likes hospitals. Of course, when we need them, we thank God they're there, and we hope we, or our loved ones, are in a good one. My mother-in-law, God bless her, is in a hospital now down in Orange County, and it's as beautiful a facility as you're ever going to run into, I guess. But I…

DATELINE, JERUSALEM--Okay, I'm not actually in Jerusalem, but I just returned from there, and I always wanted to start an article with something dramatic. I mean, it beats the tar out of, "DATELINE, A SHABBY OFFICE IN HOLLYWOOD WITH ONE GOOD COUCH FOR NAPS." Now that I think of it, if I ever appear…

A FEW MONTHS AGO, after his passing, I wrote about the great Milton Berle and mentioned how Milton had set me up for one of the neatest jobs I ever had, which involved Frank Sinatra. Several of you wrote in afterwards asking to hear that Sinatra story itself, sometime. Well, it is now officially…

THE CAREER DIPLOMAT studied the two newspaper headlines with an intensity usually found only in safecrackers. Where average people have laugh lines, his 57-year-old patrician face had lines of earnestness--no, over-earnestness--crop circles that are mowed into human skin by a lifetime of nodding…

I'M SICK of my telephones; I miss my telephones.

Faithful readers of this column (And you don't have to have been all that faithful; there are only eleven of them. My "oeuvre.") will recall that a few weeks ago I wrote about our local T-ball league and how one of my kids is playing in it, and how we played against the bad team (boo) led by the…

I JUST SAW the funniest thing that has ever occurred in history.

"DON'T FORGET to take them in for the new I.D. photos before you drop them off in class. They're doing it in the old classroom next to the gift shop. Catty-corner to the security office. The check is with the application. Got it?"

THE UMPIRE struck back. He ripped off his mask, turned to the stands where sat his tormentor, stalked over, breathed heavily several times to collect himself, looked up through the fence and fixed her with a hard countenance that would have made Captain Ahab say, "Boy, that guy is really angry."…

I WAS WATCHING Greta Van Facelift on Fox the other night, and she and her guests made me talk back to the TV. Shout back, actually. Nothing witty or trenchant, you understand, just something like, "Oh, come on!" Now, to be honest, it was late, and I was downstairs alone, and I was a little, what's…

MILTON BERLE attended many funerals at Hillside Cemetery here in Los Angeles over the years for his brethren. This is "brethren" in two senses. Hillside is a Jewish cemetery and, in case you didn't know or couldn't guess, Berle was a Jew. Also, though, most of these funerals were for a subset of…

IT'S DIFFICULT to imagine any American of any age who has not heard the phrase "But seriously, folks." Of course, it's also difficult to imagine any American of any age who doesn't want to personally blow the head off of every prisoner in Guantanamo, but never mind that now. "But seriously, folks"…

I DON'T KNOW how many sour-pussed Olympics-haters we have in our country. I don't know what percentage of Americans is unmoved by the work put in, the opening ceremonies, the personal stories, the pride in being host, and the struggle for individual and team glory. I don't know how many sneer at…

WE JUST threw our oldest boy a birthday party at the local bowling-pizza-video-drome. He and his twenty-three friends are six, and perhaps you heard the sounds of the balls as they were flung up (surprisingly high and far, I thought) and came down on the polished wood floors. I don't know who makes…

I BECAME a flag-waver, literally and figuratively, about 20 years ago. This is also about the same time I started losing my hair, but I refuse to see a connection. Although, why is it more guys on the left have full heads of hair? Alec Baldwin, Michael Moore, even Ramsey Clark. Most conservatives…

HE'S BEEN CHARGED, he's back from his summer home in Kandahar, and the talk shows fill with John Walker again, and it won't be the last time, will it? There will be no closure for us, folks. He will be in our lives forever, even from prison, a specter that reappears and floats, impossible to swat…

New Editor's Note, September 5, 2002: In yesterday's New York Times, Tom Friedman called this classic Larry Miller column essential reading. In case you missed it, enjoy!