Seemed to me that Mr Burr stayed more or less true to form. But so did the audience. He was dying out there! The American people -- those on the coasts, anyway -- are so woke that nothing is funny any more. Everything must be taken seriously, so you can't rag on gay pride, white women, "wokeness" or any of the liberal shibboleths and expect to not be the next victim of the cancel culture.
One of our assiduous readers commented, "I find the whole drift into swearing, open sex, and incorrectness sad." Maybe our reader never listened to one of Bill Burr's monologues before, but I have to tell you, this wasn't your normal Big Balls Billy speaking. Compared with something like "The Philadelphia Incident", he toned his act down for lamestream TV.
Even so, the usual suspects dropped the shithammer on him for being insensitive, politically incorrect, yada yada yada.
But "Being furious about Bill Burr's caustic comedy is a waste of time", as the Globe and Mail's John Doyle wrote yesterday. For those who can't or won't punch through the paywall, here's part of his review.
Bill Burr...opts for that old-fashioned stance of reason over passion. Some comics are enraged by what they call "cancel culture" and deliberately provoke in order to push boundaries and buttons. Burr simply takes the view that, as he sees it, sensitivity issues have gone too far. He's a 52-year-old white guy, married to a Black woman, he tells jokes and acts for a living, and he's skeptical about a lot of things.
It's easy to take Burr's jokes out of context, string them together and paint a picture of him as a misogynist jerk. In a recent interview, he said, "Comedy is a pastime. The pastime is making fun of something you're not supposed to make fun of because that gives you a mental break from all the taxing crap you have to do. Not everything has to be important."
Bill Burr: Paper Tiger, taped at the Royal Albert Hall in London, is the most recent and a fascinating example of Burr's tactics, and it's especially trenchant because he's not talking to an American audience in the venue. He gets busy mocking feminism, the #MeToo movement and Michelle Obama.
Paper Tiger is where he is now. He's like someone who shed the straitjacket of insecurity about his role and his humour. He's not aiming to demolish the current culture of outrage and sensitivity. He sees it for what it is, a movement that sometimes puts passion over reason and his lived experience tells him to be skeptical. He's nobody's enemy and he's no destroyer. He's just saying that everything is flawed, including him.
Couldn't have said it better myself. [You can say that again. Ed.] I hope Bill Burr keeps talking. It's so good to hear someone say what so many of us are thinking, and if the "woke" types don't like it, that't too [expletive deleted. Ed.] bad!
