Bill Burr: Walk Your Way Out
Early on in his new special, comic’s comic Bill Burr talks about how he doesn’t understand why we’re not supposed to make fun of fat people. As he says, it’s not a race or a religion, and it’s totally curable.
“Eat an apple, and go for a walk! Why are you yelling at me? I didn’t put the cookies in there, you did! Jesus Christ! You ate your way in, you can walk your way out!” Burr yells at the audience at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee. Considering how Tennessee is one of the fattest states in the US, you’d think the audience would pull back. But no, they’re howling with laughter.
Burr’s been a comedian for almost three decades and made his bones with an aggressive, profanity-laced Boston-style of comedy, skewering everyone and everything including himself. He’s was never a crowd-pleasing hack, instead diligently working the road for years refining his comedy and building a fanbase that loves his take-no-prisoners approach to parsing all the ways in which the world is fucked up.
His patient refinement definitely paid off: Burr is considered one of the best comics in the world, referred to by other comics as continually raising the bar. In my opinion, he’s raised it again with Walk Your Way Out.
Burr’s preferred topics revolve around relationships, gender relations, social commentary, conspiracy-tinged politics, race, sports, religion, and, lately, animals. Most of these came up in his last special, 2014’s I’m Sorry You Feel That Way, an incredible set filmed in Atlanta, Georgia. When I say Burr has raised the bar with Walk it’s not because he’s reached some higher plane of comedy awareness, unlocking hitherto unknown secrets of stand-up. Instead, he’s just reached a higher level of professionalism, through lots and lots of practice, and it shows.
Burr owns the stage, confidently striding back and forth, locking eyes with the crowd while unapologetically making a Michael Jordan/Adolf Hitler analogy that would’ve failed in the hands of lesser comedians. Pontificating on why Hitler set the standard for Evilness worldwide despite higher kill counts from Stalin and Mao, Burr doesn’t back down when he feels the crowd pulling back, and turns it around on them by transitioning into a music analogy instead. It’s Nashville, after all.
One of the many reasons I love Burr is his refusal to apologize for diving head-first into controversial topics. His righteous anger and mockery is balanced by his self-deprecation, often referring to himself as a non-reading moron who just fills his brain with shitty reality TV and the worst YouTube has to offer. But besides his aggressive tackling of overpopulation and obesity epidemics, Burr has expanded his repertoire. He still does all that better than anyone of course, but he’s been adding more physical comedy and impressions to his act over the years, and it makes his act more dynamic.
If you look at his earlier specials and albums, like Emotionally Unavailable, Why Do I Do This?, Let It Go, and You People Are All The Same, Burr mostly had three standard impressions he’d use; a ditzy woman as a stand-in for all the problematic women in his life, a moron as a stand-in for all the guys who infuriate him in public, and some variation of a dumb redneck. Then, in I’m Sorry You Feel That Way he started showing more storytelling and impersonation skills. It didn’t clash with the rest of his performance, it added to it, functioning as a counterpart to his justified indignation.
In Walk he continues this, impersonating New World Order-type tycoons secretly planning to eliminate billions of people, a dictator piloting a submarine to sink cruise ships, and a gorilla escaping the zoo by learning to walk like a human. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds, but it works better than you probably think.
The best bit in the special is the aforementioned exploration of his fascination with Hitler’s rise to power despite being out of his mind, and how he set the benchmark for evil. He compares it to Michael Jordan entering the NBA, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller versus Hootie & the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View — they both sold millions but no one would refer to the latter as best album of all time. It’s insane, it’s outrageous, and it’s supremely funny, much like the rest of Walk Your Way Out.
Burr’s productivity the last decade has been unreal: since 2008’s Why Do I Do This? he’s released a stellar stand-up special every two years, performing all over the US, and more recently, internationally, acting in Breaking Bad, and taking small parts in other movies. In 2015 his animated show F is for Family dropped on Netflix and Season two is right around the corner. Walk just dropped, and he just had his first kid with his wife Nia Hill. I don’t know how he’s done it, but I hope he manages to keep going. In the New Golden Age of Stand-Up Comedy, Burr has proven himself to be one of the standard bearers.
