After thoroughly demolishing woke excess in his 2019 special, Paper Tiger, Bill Burr returned to Netflix earlier this month with a more personal and introspective hour that revealed the hard-bitten comic’s softer side.
Just as the Rolling Stones know they can’t make it out of a venue alive without playing “Satisfaction,” Burr is clearly aware he has to play the hits for the fan base he’s developed over decades in comedy. He starts the show playing to type, donning his everyman persona and taking potshots at “cancel culture” scolds and Covid paranoiacs.
For roughly the first 15 minutes, I was left disappointed, confident that this latest special would be a mere rehash of his earlier work, updated with the controversies du jour.
Then, things took a turn: Rather than stopping at defending himself from unhinged attacks by the New Puritans, Burr goes on the offense, telling women that the sorry state of the WNBA is their fault.
Abandoning the “leave me alone” posture adopted by countless comedians and anti-woke pundits over the last decade, Burr turns the tables, pointing out that the revealed preferences of women don’t exactly align with feminist messaging:
It’s a male subsidized league. We gave you a f***ing league and nobody showed up. Where are all the feminists? That place should be packed with feminists. . . .
None of you went to the f***ing games. None of you. You failed them, not me. Women failed the WNBA.
Meanwhile, you look at the Kardashians, they’re making billions. You look at the Real Housewives, they’re making money hand over fist. Because that’s what women are watching, and the money listens.
Burr planted a flag in the ground in 2019 by poking holes in leftist cultural insanity, but the howling laughter he was met with in Red Rocks when he went on offense read like a massive neon sign letting viewers know that the cancel-culture wave has crested and is beginning to roll back.
But it wasn’t until Burr removed his scalpel from the larger culture and turned it on himself that he began to really hit his stride.
Taking his audience by the hand, Burr leads us through an extensive psychoanalysis session, tracing his lifelong struggle with rage to a ’70s childhood fraught with abusive adults — most prominently, his father — who would lash out at the slightest misstep.
Grappling with a relatable struggle, Burr explains how he’s tried to avoid repeating the same mistakes his father made, and finds himself wanting.
Burr realized the extent of his rage-aholism when he gave the Ari Gold treatment to his cellphone in front of his tw0-year-old daughter. In relaying the story, Burr draws the viewer in and has her sympathizing with the same guy who minutes earlier was blaming her for the sorry state of women’s entertainment.
His description of growing up in 1970s Americans — the terror he felt around adults, the casual cruelty of everyday life — reads like a peace offering to the woke scolds he demolishes early in the special.
“We were like the Brady Bunch meets Lord of the Flies,” Burr says, an acknowledgment that as insane as the culture is now, we shouldn’t be eager to return to the halcyon days when parents felt comfortable hitting other peoples’ kids.
It’s relatable, it’s funny, and it wraps his opening and closing rants aimed at familiar targets into a nice bow.
The worst thing about the intrusion of critical race theory and gender ideology into every sphere of American life is the opportunity cost. Comedians who spend all their time fighting the culture war have time for little else, leaving us all with the stultified zeitgeist we’ve suffered through for the last few years.
Let’s hope that as the tide of Puritanism rolls back and the culture war fades from the front of the American psyche, Burr has more time for the personal.