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Filming a stand-up comedy special just before and not after a presidential election feels like a tactical mistake, if not also a missed opportunity. Even without the benefit of hindsight.
Not that this bothers Bill Burr.
Burr long has made his bones by digging holes with his audiences, only to climb his way back out of them through a barrage of burst-out laughing lines, couched in the self-deprecating rationalization that despite knowing right from wrong, he doesn’t necessarily know or want to put in the work to know the right answers.
That combination not only has allowed Burr to come across as everyman, but also one of comedy’s most-revered stand-ups among comedians working today.
So he can get away with verbally counterattacking an arena of booing hecklers and emerge victorious (as he did famously within comedy circles on the Opie & Anthony’s Traveling Virus Comedy Tour in 2006), or tackle domestic violence by pivoting to suggest acceptable times to hit a woman (in his 2012 You People Are All The Same special).
In his latest Netflix special, Bill Burr: Walk Your Way Out, the comedian makes light of his “cowboy shirt” and general lack of awareness about his Nashville audience before quickly acknowledging the weirdness of filming his special in October 2016, weeks before he or we knew whether we’d face 2017 under President Trump or President Clinton. He did believe the choice untenable. “This is like the first week of American Idol. Really? This is what we got?!” he wondered, adding: “You either got a racist dope or the devil.”
(We may look back on this in a future Humor in Hindsight a bit differently.)
But today’s political landscape changes with such brute force and relentlessness, at least in these first weeks of the Trump Administration, that late-night TV comedians also have trouble keeping pace. Their barbs about the weekend’s headlines at a Monday afternoon taping already seemed outdated or superseded by even more ironically satirical actions the new president had taken by the time their shows aired after the late local news. Burr, speaking to me by phone on Friday, still hadn’t been sold on Hillary Clinton as a better option. “She’s absolutely the devil,” he told Decider. Comparing her to Donald Trump, he said: “I would rather have a wolf standing there than to sit there and insult me and have half a sheepskin on and not go ‘Baaa’ every once in a while.” By Monday night’s episode of Conan, Burr still didn’t understand how Clinton could lose when Trump said so many things in the campaign that would’ve ended another candidacy.
Truth is, though, as he notes time and again and did in Walk Your Way Out, he’s not politically-minded or aware so much as he is selfish, and he’d much rather watch inane programming than the news. “Fill up my brain with this dumb shit. I don’t want to deal with what’s really going on!” Burr jokes.
What does he want to deal with, then?
The idea that we no longer feel shame over wanting McDonald’s breakfast all-day, or for the obesity epidemic that behavior creates, or even the shame we all feel looking at ourselves in the mirror. “Nobody’s supposed to say anything?” he wonders, before volunteering that he’ll still say something when he sees something. As he jokes, you cannot look like a 6 and believe society should treat you like a 10. If you’re angry about that, so be it. “I’m a strong 5, all right. That’s where I am. So I feel like I’m punching up here,” he qualifies.
He also continues a running theme throughout all of his specials, warning about global overpopulation and offering suggestions to “thin the herd,” as it were. As Burr told Decider, “It’s my own running joke, because it’s such a huge problem and it’s totally getting ignored. It’s funny to feel like that one guy in the room yelling. I feel like the guy in The Twilight Zone who sees the monster on the wing of the plane.” For his latest theory, he first imagines a secret meeting of world leaders to discuss mass exterminations, only to reveal his own new plan – suffice it to say, Burr would revolutionize the cruise line industry as our potential dictator.
Some of his ideas are half-baked, or as he’ll acknowledge to the audience: “I just like being a dick sometimes.”
“[Hillary Clinton] is absolutely the devil. I would rather have a wolf [like Donald Trump] standing there than to sit there and insult me and have half a sheepskin on and not go ‘Baaa’ every once in a while.”
Other times, however, he’s consciously aware of his audience (or perhaps unaware) to the point of second-guessing them or preemptively launching into corollary arguments or tangents that address either his perceived attitude of the audience in the theater or the many critics watching him from their screens. Burr worries his audience may have booed a mention of Kanye West for the wrong reason, while an ooh at a mention of Hitler’s murder count prompts him to act out an imagined face-off with a blogger on morning television.
A through-line from West to Hitler “could easily go in a Klannish direction,” Burr acknowledges onstage, and just as easily run right through Trump – although the comedian chooses not to connect those dots explicitly. Instead, Burr stops short. He says if West’s “ego had floated down whoosh and landed in a blue-eyed white dude, there is no telling the damage that could have been done…Thank God that ego landed in a black guy.” And yet.
Whereas Burr jokes how we’re all quick to label anyone “the next Hitler,” including Trump, Burr would rather use his wealth of sports knowledge to compare the Nazi leader’s stats to Josef Stalin or Mao Tse-tung. For Nashville, he even tries on a music analogy to put Hitler into proper perspective with Stalin.
Then again, Burr is not lacking in joy or lighter distractions that’ll cause fewer controversies. Watching YouTube videos of zoo animals inspires him to create fan-fiction for himself in which he teaches sign language to a gorilla and decides to help the gorilla break out of the zoo. How the joke ends or should end depends upon whether you’re from Dallas, apparently. Either way, please forgive Burr for his own ignorance about sign language. “No disrespect!”
As he describes his own comedy at this point: “This is just the ramblings of someone who’s sliding into the back nine of his life, and I’m not understanding half the shit that’s going on.”
Just surprise him with a sandwich once in a while and he’ll be a happy old crank.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
