Bill Burr went full woke. Never go full woke.
Bill, what happened to you? You used to be hilarious. You used to rail against The Man. Now you are The Man. Now you rail against those who stand up to The Man. Now you sound like one of those angry, screechy campus agitators who can’t explain the issues they’re screaming about and lash out at the people asking.
Bill is the same man who would stand on a stage and, with a straight face, declare in all seriousness that our government faked the Apollo moon landing. Now, he expects you to trust that same government unquestioningly about everything from COVID masks to their abysmal response to the L.A. wildfires.
Any comedian with his finger on the national pulse would have gone for the throat of the California officials for botching the wildfire response so spectacularly. Half the fire department’s upper management was incompetent DEI hires, and the mayor, Karen Bass, was in Ghana on the taxpayers’ dime. For comedians, this is the lowest-hanging fruit there is.
But Bass is a black woman (more on this below).
His rants of late have become unhinged. During an interview with NPR (everyone’s idea of the go-to outlet for all edgy, provocative comedians), Bill called Elon Musk an “idiot” and slandered him as “evidently a Nazi” for the thoroughly-debunked “Nazi salute” story.
Calling Musk an “idiot” is like calling Aretha Franklin tone-deaf. Self-made billionaires aren’t normally the type of people we think of as idiots, nor are those who build and send rocket ships into space to rescue astronauts who have been abandoned by the government bureaucrats whom Bill so passionately defends.
He openly praises racists like Colin Kaepernick and murderers like Luigi Mangione. He confesses he doesn’t know who Ben Shapiro is (how is that even possible) but nonetheless thinks he’s a “j*** off.”
And when recently confronted about his own statements, Bill lashed out spitefully at the reporters. The irony was apparently lost on him that, in a moment when he was attempting to evade his own past statements, he lashed out at the reporters as the ones who “need to have balls again.” Not a good look for a comedian.
So what happened to Bill? Nobody knows, but we can theorize, can’t we? One theory is that Bill, being far enough removed from his roots in blue-collar Boston and immersed for too long in woke coastal California, has simply gone native on us. He made it up the ladder, he’s in the clubhouse now, and he’s pulling up the ladder behind him. Hey, it happens. He wouldn’t be the first person to do that.
Another theory is that, having made enough money to live comfortably without ever having to garner another laugh, he simply doesn’t care to write good material anymore. Maybe, but probably not.
However, the most plausible theory is that his wife, Nia Renee Hill, has had a disproportionate influence on his writing and comedy. Nia is a radical leftist black woman who doesn’t take kindly to white people, as is evident from her sporadic appearances on Bill’s podcast, as well as his stand-up material regarding their arguments on racial issues.
Bill’s earlier career material was often criticized as misogynistic, a characterization I disagree with, although some of his podcast diatribes did seem to spill over from comedy into a darker revelation of deep-seated anger issues towards women.
And anyone following Bill’s career cannot fail to notice that, over the last few years, he has shifted the brunt of his ire from women in general to specifically white women. “Where are all of these white chicks at the award shows?” he yells unfunnily. “I just think it’s a phony ideology where what they really do is it’s a bunch of white chicks trying to fix their immediate area.”
Hmm. Blaming white women for being insufficiently progressive enough to save the country from Donald Trump. White women failed us. White women betrayed us. He even bizarrely blames white women for the perpetuation of slavery and Jim Crow.
What does this sound like? This sounds like the post-election harangues we heard from many racist black women like Joy Reid, Sunny Hostin, Rhon Manigault-Bryant, and Rachel Cargle. Bearing this in mind, Bill’s shift in focus makes perfect sense. If Bill has issues with women, and Nia doesn’t like white people, what’s the one target that converges their two dislikes? White women. Nia allows Bill to continue making fun of women so long as they’re of the approved skin color.
For the past few years, that’s been his schtick. And it’s lame.
Even when he throws in some “balance” and rails against liberals in general, he only spews vitriol against white liberals. And he criticizes not the irrationality of their positions, but rather that they’re all insufficiently engaged in alleviating the alleged suffering of black people. Do better, white liberals. You’re letting Bill and Nia down.
And no, this isn’t a case of a conservative being mad at a liberal comedian for making left-slanting jokes at my expense (if you’ll notice, I’m defending his liberal targets here). Most comedians are liberal, and plenty of them take funny, open-hearted digs at conservatives that are laugh-worthy. Rather, this is a case of a conservative calling out a coward too timid to stand up to his racist wife and who masks bigoted misogyny against white women as some sort of clarion call to social justice. Bigotry is bigotry, and it’s wrong regardless of who the target is.
Because there does come a point where funny political comedy crosses a line into preaching and lecturing. I don’t know where exactly that line is or how I would define it, but we all know it when we see it. This type of “comedy” invokes what is referred to as “clapter,” where the comedian’s political diatribes garner more cheering and clapping than it does laughter. And I think everyone can agree that the primary goal, indeed, the only goal, of a comedian is to be funny.
And when you sound like Angela Davis’s white house servant, you’re not funny. It’s that simple.
None of this is to say that he can’t turn it around and rebound his career. I sincerely hope he does, not only because I believe in second chances, but because Bill Burr 2.0 isn’t just unfunny; he’s actually painful to watch. His recent SNL opening monologue was a ghastly display of coprophagy, worthy of attention only from the most disturbed voyeurs who rouse in plumbing the repugnant depths of societal putrescence. In other words, he bombed horribly, and I literally cringed watching the awkwardness of his body language as it dawned on him, as the audience failed to laugh for joke upon joke upon joke.
But if Bill’s downward spiral continues, someone can just give him his own late-night comedy show, where he can finger wag and spray spittle alongside other angry, bitter “comedians” like Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, and Seth Meyers. Either that, or give him a seat at the table on The View.
Bill, you’re the “Snow White” of comedians. The original version was awesome. The woke remake sucks.
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