There was a great moment in Bill Burr’s most recent special, Bill Burr: Live at Red Rocks. There were a lot of great moments, actually, but there’s one in particular that stood out – about half an hour into the set, Bill slowed down his pace and got introspective. He quietly told the Denver audience, “I am a changed person.”
“Bulls—!” yelled out some guy in the crowd, breaking the stillness of the moment.
Bill calmly addressed the heckler, asking him, “Are you saying bulls—, sir, because you don’t believe me, or ‘cause you don’t want me to leave? Is that what it is? The little angry circle you’re in?”
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This unplanned outburst followed by Bill’s response perfectly encapsulated an ongoing paradigm shift that we’ve been seeing from Burr for some time now. As the last of the great rant comedians, Bill’s reputation for being as furious as he is funny has attracted a massive following over a prolific three-decade career at the forefront of Angry Guy Comedy.
His humor attracts stand-up fans from all walks of life, but if you read the comments on YouTube clips of his older work, or browse his subreddit, or visit his Facebook page, you’ll see a trend among his most fervent followers – the most impassioned fans are typically guys, usually above the age of thirty-five, and, more often than not, they see Bill as the mouthpiece for their personal frustrations with a changing society. Too many of those comments start with an asinine preamble like “Back in my day…” and continue with complaints about the usual laundry list of Angry Guy gripes – women are annoying, Cancel Culture is out of control, kids nowadays are too soft, lather, rinse, repeat.
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Among the Angry Guy contingent of Bill’s fans, there exists this sentiment that Bill is the last in a line of street-preaching, misanthropic, iconoclastic comics that stretches all the way back to W.C Fields. Titans like Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, and George Carlin all paved the way for rabid, ranting, and irate comics like Bill to speak truth to power, to tell it like it is, to suffer no fools, and to force their unflinching worldview onto a complacent public. To many of his supporters, Bill is the last of a dying breed of truth-tellers who will be doomed to extinction once Ol’ Billy Redface hangs them up.