Do You Want to Get the F- Out of Here?! — Bill Burr Rages About Animal Captivity and Cruelty
Bill Burr is a comedian who is well-known for his stand-up comedy routines that are frantic, angry, amped up and rapid-fire in terms of his delivery. Nowhere is this comedic style more evident than in his gorilla joke routine about a YouTube video of a sign-language capable zoo-kept gorilla that is mourning the loss of its pet kitten. In this routine, Bill Burr recounts how he was watching the video with his wife and goes at great length to tell the story of a gorilla in captivity, who is given a kitten as a reward for learning to communicate with his zookeeper via sign language. Then, tragedy strikes when the kitten escapes and is killed by a passing car and the video abruptly ends with the gorilla wailing and crying in a remote part of his cage. Bill Burr is sent into a rage at both the utter sadness of the event and the fact that he and his wife are left to ponder the pain and suffering of this majestic creature. After railing at the subject matter and attacking the general cruelty of what we as humans do to zoo animals, Bill Burr then — in his crazy, aggressive, hyper-style — offers an alternative ‘fantasy’ conclusion to the story which actually ends up, through his skilled use of narrative, counterpoints and escalations, a more absurd ending than what he actually viewed.
To understand the effectiveness of this joke, we must first understand Bill Burr’s comedic style. Burr’s style is very different than a Ted Talk that was examined on fellow comedian Louis CK, who has a very deliberate delivery and specific word and language choices in his routines. Mr. Burr comes from a completely different comedic approach. His approach is to work off a rough outline of his joke, live in the moment and gauge an audience’s reaction to material and play around in between based upon the audience’s real time reactions. As he said recently in an interview on The Good One podcast:
“As long as you have the essence of the joke, you know where it’s going. It starts here, goes here, ends here. Then you can improvise within the joke — expand, contract, etc.”
Like a boxer sparring with an opponent, Bill Burr seems to be a master at finding openings to jab at and provoke audience reactions ranging from gasps to rowdy applause. As he improvises he also uses various physical techniques: flailing body language, agitated pacing and roaming, arm-waving and lying on the stage. It also interesting to note that when Mr. Burr touches on very troubling matters, he laughs and smiles along with the audience at the material he’s delivering, which must be a conscious attempt to remind the audience that this is comedy even when talking about Hitler, dead kittens and sad gorillas. Bill Burr’s physical, improv comedy style and techniques are critical to his successful execution of the gorilla joke.
The gorilla joke comes from Bill Burr’s comedy special, Walk Your Way Out. The premise of this joke starts off with Bill Burr and his wife in bed watching a YouTube video of the gorilla’s caretaker teaching it sign language. Burr thinks this is genius and proceeds to watch the video while cuddling with his wife. The caretaker gets the gorilla a little kitten to reward the gorilla when it becomes more adept at sign language. The kitten is taken away at the end of the learning sessions and is used to encourage the gorilla to become a better communicator with its human captor. Naturally, the gorilla falls in love with the kitten. Everyday, it would get so excited to see this kitten until one day the kitten doesn’t show up and soon the gorilla finds out — perversely through signing with his captor- that the kitten got hit by a car and died. The gorilla is devastated and the video abruptly ends with the gorilla sobbing, wailing and crying off-screen. As previously noted, Bill Burr is outraged by the end of this video and decides to offer an alternative ending. In this alternative, Burr ponders why, if the gorilla can speak sign language, that the zookeeper didn’t ask the gorilla if he wanted to leave the zoo (where the tag line “don’t you want to get the f-ck out of here?” is first delivered). Then Burr, in his imagined scenario, proceeds to release the gorilla into the wilderness of human society. The simple premise of a husband and wife watching a YouTube video makes it possible and surprising for Burr to go on an emotional journey with the audience.
Successful comedians use counterpoints to either overtly or subconsciously create tension between reality and comedy. The counterpoint here is the absurdity of what we as humans do to captive gorillas. After Burr’s outrage that the zookeeper/trainer could allow the gorilla’s pet kitten to get killed by a car causing obvious emotional pain, Burr gets irate that a sweet, cute video could take a turn for the worse. Of course the study of primates, our closest relationships in the animal kingdom, is important, but the joke is principally focused on the cruelty done to zoo kept animals and underscored by the absurdity of errors that negatively impact this poor gorilla. Gorillas might not know what is going on when they are snatched from their home in the jungle and put in a zoo, but we do know that once confined they experience depression when they are enclosed in some fake, human-built jungle prison. Being humans’ closest related species, gorillas should have basic moral rights (Mosher). Burr observes that our treatment of these highly evolved animals is bizarre and often painful for the animals. Instead of sitting in cage waiting for its daily regimen of sign language training, Burr reduces the premise to such a basic counterpoint: if animals can communicate, then let’s ask them what they really want. This counterpoints helps underpin the entire joke and Burr then uses several escalation points to bring the joke to its wild, raucous conclusion.
Escalation in a comedian’s routine is critical to building to a maximum level of funniness, regardless of a comedian’s particular style. Naturally, Bill Burr is a master of using escalation in his animated and aggressive style at two very critical points in the routine. The first escalation point is Bill Burr’s frustrated and angry reaction to the unresolved and very sad ending to the YouTube video which we have previously discussed with the gorilla loudly mourning (crying, wailing) in his caged area at the zoo after learning of the death of his pet kitten. This is the initial ‘trigger’ that escalates Bill Burr into a frenzied fantasy about freeing the gorilla which results in the “Hey, do you want to get the f-ck out of here?” part of the routine. It is interesting to notice that out of this fifteen-minute performance Burr brilliantly built up the story for eight minutes before this first escalation punch line was delivered. Keeping the audience’s attention is not the easiest thing to do, but Burr does an amazing job at telling the story and of course made it hilarious along the way. While this first escalation would probably be enough for most comedians, Mr. Burr is not finished with the audience and picks a second escalation point in the routine. Mr. Burr’s fantasy ending to the zoo dilemma his him go on at elaborate lengths (using fake sign language, imitating ape-like behavior and movements) to describe how the zookeeper would train the gorilla to walk erect, stop swinging its arms, get it human clothing and they would “get the f-ck out of the zoo” by merely walking the ape out like a human. However, Mr. Burr tortures the audience in his unusual style of escalation. While the audience is rejoicing in the escape from captivity by the gorilla, Bill Burr then introduces a second shocking escalation point: he goes on to have the gorilla murdered by a human who fears that the gorilla (and future fellow human-like gorillas) will take over the earth and enslave human beings, an obvious nod to the Planet of the Apes movies! The audience doesn’t anticipate this twisted end to the story and this second escalation is masterful. The audience is taken from horror to elation back to escalated horror which Bill Burr laughs along with as if to tell the audience once this insane, post-escalation punch line is delivered, “it’s ok, this is comedy.”
One can’t help but think that perhaps Bill Burr was influenced by more than the YouTube video discussed at length in this paper. While Walk Your Way is dated 2017 the recording of the show actually took place on October 21, 2016 about five short months after a horrible event that unfolded at the Cincinnati Zoo. This tragedy involved a captive lowland silverback gorilla named Harambe. Harambe was shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo by a guard after a child fell into his enclosure. The public was in hysterics and public sentiment focused on the negligence of the small boy’s parent in allowing this tragedy to unfold. Almost without exception humans around the world expressed grief and outrage at the killing of this magnificent creature. But it seems the focus was on a human’s neglect of its child leading to the death of the gorilla and unfortunately not a lot of discussion about the morality of why Harambe was in the Cinncinati Zoo in the first place. It took Bull Burr and his comedy a few months to connect these dots and ask the right questions about gorillas in captivity. It is also interesting to note that Bill Burr never shares the name of ‘his’ gorilla with us but the world will forever remember the name and tragedy surrounding Harambe.
Bill Burr is unique among working comedians for both the subject matters he addresses and also his super-physical style. Burr touches on topics like Hitler and demeaning women and has never been called out or ostracized for doing so. In the special Walk Your Way Out where the Gorilla Joke was presented, Bill Burr deviates into Hitler jokes as well as derogatory barbs directed at women. Many comedians such as Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman, Gilbert Gottfried and Anthony Jesselnik have been criticized and penalized for touching these third rails of comedy. I believe that his manner of delivery and rapid-fire approach keeps the audience anticipating the next turn and instead of dwelling on these ‘too soon’ or inappropriate subjects, its just part of the manic flow of his comedy. And while it was noted above, this physical, almost exhausting style of presentation is so key to his brilliance. While a little before my time and generation, I recall watching stand-up comedy by Chris Rock with my parents. He too used an effective, prowling, aggressive physical roaming of the stage style to great success. It’s almost too easy for purposes of this paper to compare Bill Burr (and Chris Rock as well) to caged animals sauntering back and forth in their comedy cages.
The entire gorilla joke routine — delivered by a master of his physical stage settings — surrounds the absurdity of how humans treat gorillas in zoos. Bill Burr’s gorilla joke is a wild ride of ups and downs punctuated by his antic, manic, sometimes angry style. At the end of the day Mr. Burr uses sympathetic animals (a gorilla and a kitten) to show how crazy, self-absorbed and cruel human beings can be and channels his own anger at the situation to highlight not just animals in captivity, but also how humans can make their captivity even more tragic. He strings along the audience — and sometimes bullies the audience — but he always seems to find the perfect moments to escalate the joke and release the pent up aggression of the counterpoint. Let us not forget that Bill Burr is a comedian and with his unique style, he is actually funny regardless of the subject matter. And not just funny. Very funny.
Works Cited
Fox@JesseDavidFox, Jesse David. “Are People Too Easily Offended by Comedy These Days? Bill Burr Doesn’t Think So.” Vulture, 3 Jan. 2018, www.vulture.com/2018/01/comedian-bill-burr-best-joke.html.
