Comedian and actor Bill Burr has been to Canada before, but not often enough to know there’s no beaver in Beaver Tails.
“There’s no beaver in it? It just looks like a beaver tail?” a confused Burr asked.
The 45-year-old comic has graced Canadian stages less than 10 times and has never been to Ottawa. He said he plans to make the best of the time.
“I heard you people skate out there on some river or something. I’m going to do that,” Burr said.
Burr was in his final year studying communications at Emerson College in his hometown Boston when he broke into the stand-up scene. He participated in a talent contest to find the city’s funniest college student.
“I went up. I did okay. I didn’t do bad. I just did okay. I just did it,” he said.
After that first taste of the spotlight, Burr said he developed his aggressively funny stand-up routines at local open mic shows and went on to record his first comedy special in 2003, Emotionally Unavailable.
Not wanting to limit himself to stand-up, Burr has appeared in several different movies and television shows over the span of his career. He has notably played Bostonian ex-mobster Patrick Kuby in AMC’s popular Breaking Bad series.
Now 22 years into his career, Burr said he’s gotten over a speed bump that many new comedians face—memorizing and practicing stand-up routines. He said he thinks the habit, caused by a newer comic’s natural anxieties and stage fright, can lead to a robotic and stale act.
He said his method is less structured and allows for a more natural narrative, which he said was important in finding his personal style.
“I just sort of go up there and talk about whatever I’m feeling,” he said. “Whatever interests me, whatever I’m afraid of, whatever is annoying me, whatever I’m really into, I just kind of go up there and I talk about it.”
Burr also said putting “parameters” on an act, or steering away from certain topics in order to please the audience, is an easy way to suck the character out of an act.
“Well I can’t talk about that. What if the crowd’s not into it? Well fuck it! Get them into it,” he said.
Burr said he plans to give Ottawa a taste of his signature comedy at the National Arts Centre March 4-6, in return for a taste of Beaver Tails and skating on the Rideau canal.
“I find myself blown away by the response to the shows up there so I’m going to make sure I’m on my game,” Burr said about Canadian audiences.
He said he finds Canadians to be cool people.
“The only time you guys go a little nuts is during the Stanley Cup playoffs,” he said.
