Bill Burr, the comedian — or perhaps I should call him an ex-comedian —is still pretty angry at me.
That’s because all the way back in February, I said that he had gone rogue. He got really sad. That was after he suggested that the healthcare CEOs of America might deserve to be murdered.
On Thursday, Vulture — which still surprisingly exists — published an interview with him.
“I want to ask about politics because it has been an interesting few months for you in this arena. You’ve had a few things happen, including Ben Shapiro talking about going to one of your shows and complaining that you’re becoming ‘woke,’” Vulture began.
“He doesn’t even know what that word means,” Burr insisted. “His definition of woke is white liberals’ definition of woke, and they didn’t even know what it was; they just took the word from black people. That’s the worst thing about our people — not only do we take from other cultures, we don’t even take the time to understand the definition. He went there to be annoyed so he can then have something to talk about and then he can make money off dividing his own country. Those people, it’s treasonous what they do.”
“The fact is that it worked for what his goal was: for it became a thing online where a certain portion of the right complained about how you’re woke —” Vulture posited.
“Racists. They’re racists,” Burr complained. “They send pictures of monkeys to me and my wife. They’re f***ing horrible people. And they’re cowards, and they never say it to your face. … What I’m finding is that people keep trying to categorize what it is that you’re doing. Like that idiot Ben Shapiro: ‘He’s woke now!’ That f***ing guy. He was trying to bring me into his fold. At one point, the guy liked me. And then when I didn’t, all of a sudden I’m a, I mean, I’m supposed to look at that guy like he’s an adult?’
Vulture: “Do you feel misunderstood if people take your words one way or the other?”
“No, I’m not, mis — I’m deliberately misunderstood,” Burr moaned.
WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show
Okay, a couple of quick housekeeping notes there. First, I don’t need to pay to go to your comedy show to be annoyed. There’s a lot of stuff in the world that annoys me. And typically, I don’t shell out hundreds of bucks and then take my wife and my friends to a show in order to be annoyed. I’m sorry; you did a bad show, and a bunch of people didn’t laugh in Florida, and then you fussed like a child and then walked off the stage. It was really ridiculous.
That’s on you, dude. You probably should give the people refunds because they paid for Bill Burr at Red Rock. Instead, they got Joy Behar at some dive bar.
You used to do jokes like this. “Look at the WNBA. They’ve been playing in front of 3 to 400 people a night for a quarter of a century. Not to mention it’s a male-subsidized league. We gave you a league. Where are all the feminists? That place should be packed with feminists wearing jerseys, flashing it … going nuts like the guys do in the upper deck … ‘Me on the jumbotron. Am I doing it?’”
Or: “Women failed the WNBA. Ladies, ladies, name your top five all-time WNBA players. Name five WNBA teams. Name the WNBA team in your city. You can’t do it.”
Or: “You don’t give a f*** about them. They play night in and night out in front of nobody. It’s a f*** tragedy.”
That’s what you used to be. But now your latest material is like this: “Then they’re talking about looting, but CNN and Fox News are not going to bring up the insurance companies that are just going to keep everybody’s premiums and still give themselves a bonus. Free Luigi!”
Or: “For conservative people to act like they’re not the biggest babies also is hilarious. Have you seen this? My people? Whitey, we’re all upset. There’s enough of us to get it going, trending, anyway. (laughing) We’re upset about the new Cinderella movie. ‘The actress playing Cinderella isn’t white. There’s no prince. They changed the story. What am I gonna tell my kids?’ The things my people get upset about. ‘What am I going to tell my kids?’ Well, talk around it the way you do, the way we talk around the real history of this country.”
I’m glad he’s laughing at himself because nobody else is. Man, what a fall.
Not liking your show isn’t “treason,” you doof; you’re not the president. You’re the guy who came in second in the Billy Corgan lookalike contest because you showed up sloppy drunk and forgot to shave again.
Here’s what I mean by wokeness: There is a definition, and I’ve explained it over and over and over again on the show. It’s not my definition. It’s the definition that Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic — who literally wrote a book on Critical Race Theory — laid out in explaining the basic principles that match up with wokeness.
One: racism is ordinary, not aberrational.
Two: Our system of white over color-ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material.
So you put those together for wokeness. What that means is that the system of America is designed to create racially disparate outcomes. Any proof of racially disparate outcomes is evidence of the malignancy of the system.
There’s another element of wokeness that is self-contradictory here, that there is a racial essentialism that stops you from criticizing as unfactual the viewpoints of others. “You don’t understand because you’re not black,” or ‘You can’t understand because you’re not gay.”
This ends conversations and contradicts the fundamental basis of wokeness, because the basis of wokeness is that everybody is basically the same, which means all group outcomes should be the same, which means any inequality of group outcome is evidence of systemic inequity.
But then wokeness will also posit that racial groups are so different that you can’t even talk to one another. You can’t even criticize the viewpoints of members of another racial group. It’s a bizarre defense mechanism.
I call Bill Burr woke because he is. He believes that America is a deeply racist place and that it’s embedded in all of our social systems, and the evidence of that is our economic inequality, and therefore, it’s probably okay to shoot healthcare CEOs.
And if you criticize him as woke, it’s because you don’t really understand the term “woke” because black people invented that term, and when white people use the term “woke” as a descriptor, it’s cultural appropriation.
Oh, how times have changed.
Bill Burr used to tell this joke: “The black guy who brought up leg-shaking, saying, ‘Elvis took leg-shaking from us.’ It’s like, ‘Really? Leg-shaking? No, nobody thought to do this. Black people came up with that. You telling me that? I’ll even give you that. Let’s say you came up with that. Where did that black dude learn how to do it? Didn’t he watch some older black guy do it because he’s the same color? He’s not stealing. He’s just carrying on the tradition. But if Elvis does it. Oh, what the f***. Now he’s the biggest thief ever.’ That doesn’t make any sense to me.”
The current Bill Burr would presumably call that Bill Burr insensitive and unresponsive to the needs and definitions of black people, which is amazing, because Bill Burr is whiter than a painting of a polar bear in snow on a white canvas.
He’s the most annoying form of a woke person: a white lib, the kind he likes to criticize. The white person who apologizes for being white by pretending that he can speak on behalf of black people about the systemic privileges of being white.
While pulling down millions of dollars to be an angry thumb of a human.
So Bald Rumpelstiltskin over there — who gets mad when you call him by his real name — is still pissed off. I didn’t enjoy his comedy show last year, and he thinks that my wife and I and our friends paid to attend his show just so that I could criticize him.
Here’s the thing. On a random weekday night, if I’m going to a comedy show, I’m going because I want to laugh. We paid to attend your show because you used to be funny, and then you transed yourself and turned into a white, bald, allegedly male version of Sunny Hostin on The View screeching at me about income inequality and racism.
You’ve decided that you’re a victim and that everyone you know is a victim and that America is cruel and nasty, and you’re deliberately misunderstood just because you won’t put on a great show anymore.
I used to enjoy watching Bill Burr. But now watching him is like watching Robin D’Angelo, but even whiter and even faker and less funny and with a screechy Boston accent to boot.
You turned into Billy, the piss-drunk woke leprechaun. Good luck with that, dude.
Listen, I hope you turn it around. I really do, because the world needs better comedians, and I like a lot of comedians that disagree with me, including Louis C.K. and Dave Chappelle.
But we don’t need 57-year-old men trying to earn street cred with fellow kids by turning into a human embodiment of those stupid “In this house” lawn signs. That makes me sad. It does.
And yeah, you’re being a woke jackass.
