Bill Burr is a stand-up comedian from a little suburb outside Boston best known for his various stand-up specials, his role on Breaking Bad, and more recently his Netflix animated series F is for Family. Many people have unsuccessfully tried to pin Burr’s comedy into a genre. Burr’s description of his comedy was the one I found most accurate: “I’m the loud guy at the bar with uninformed logic.”
I had a chance to sit down and chat with Burr about his upcoming show. We talked sports and the comedic process, and he shared stories of life on the road as a stand-up comic.
Burr started doing comedy in his early 20s, because it was the only thing he ever did where he felt like he had the talent and drive needed to succeed.
“It was one of the only things in life that I had the confidence that I could do it . . . With everything else, I always felt like a fish out of water,” Burr said. “Getting to comedy felt like I was one of the people who had the potential. I was one of the guys who older comics looked at and said, ‘Hey man, if you stick at this, who knows, you could really do this.’ ”
The success didn’t fall into his lap, however. Burr planned, and worked hard at his craft, working two jobs and sleeping on a futon in a one-bedroom apartment until he could support himself solely off doing gigs.
“I kept thinking I had to get a day job because my money was low, but one day the mindset changed and I thought, ‘I need to get more gigs.’ One day I just thought, ‘yeah man, I just do comedy. This is awesome,’ ” he said.
He rose to national prominence for his work on The Chappelle Show and his first comedy special Why Do I Do This?, which was released in 2008. Since then, Burr has become one of the more recognizable names in comedy. Burr said despite this, he tries to pay attention to the people he meets as he tours, as well as appreciate local comedy.
“As you travel, you start looking at things in a bigger way, so the stuff you notice becomes national, and if there’s something local and you decide to tell it in another place—you have to adapt that joke for the area,” Burr said.
Burr said the Boston comedy scene is definitely the foundation of his style, but he’s been away from Massachusetts for as long as he had lived there, so he didn’t fall into the trap many local comics did in not broadening their horizons.
“I think your foundation will always be your foundation, but my perspective is I’ve been away for so long, I can look at it from afar and see how much has changed to the point where it doesn’t really feel like home,” Burr said.
The most surprising thing is Burr doesn’t write down any of his jokes.
“I just hash it out on stage. If something funny happened to you and you went to tell your friends would you write it down and practice it in front of the mirror? Or would you just go over and tell them because they’re your friend and you’re comfortable? The big thing with comedy is you have to get to that level of comfort in front of a crowd an then you just go out there like you’re talking to a friend,” he said.
Burr hosts a twice-weekly podcast called The Monday Morning Podcast and he’s bringing his unique humour to Ottawa when he performs April 3 at TD Place.
