GRAND RAPIDS, MI – Near the end of his set Saturday night, Bill Burr lamented that the collapsed roof his Los Angeles home recently endured may be karma from one of his bits.
That bit begins like so: “It’s really disappointing that that meteor didn’t kill anybody.” That’s a jaw-dropping shocker of a line, referencing the recent space rock that shot, frighteningly and majestically, across the Russian sky, and became a viral news story.
But don’t think for a minute that Burr actually believes in karma, considering that much of his 70-minute show could be considered a belligerent smirk in the face of the howling existential void. And he admitted as much.
“Why am I talking about this (stuff)?” he asked rhetorically. “I can’t get out of this. Everything leads to death. I keep going over subjects in my head and everything involves guns or death.”
Oh, he had his lighter moments, when he joked about sports or ridiculed the more implausible scenes from romantic movies. But frankly, those bits comprised a small percentage of his material. He primarily focused on topics such as God and fate, the end of civilization, gun ownership, his inability to relate to people his age (he’s 44) or genocidal dictators.
That would explain why Burr’s first words as he took the stage of Fountain St. Church were, “This is (expletive) creepy.” Deep into the set, after he openly questioned the existence of a higher power – “There might be something, but if there is, it doesn’t give a (expletive),” he said - he couldn’t resist the temptation to step into the pulpit and give a scathingly sarcastic faux-sermon about focusing on the positive things in life.
In the wrong hands, such material could be disastrous. But Burr, gifted in the art of loose and casual storytelling-style stand-up, takes a cynical perspective and boils it down to its scalding-hot pitch-black elements. The result is wickedly satirical, and the crowd responded with howling, sometimes nervous, laughter.
His material is also potentially offensive, and that element of danger is what makes Burr’s comedy so vital. A few examples of his slashing wit:
On adopting a child who worked in a sweatshop: “All I have to do is let him sit down, and I’m the greatest guy ever!”
On the issue of gun control: “Don’t we need to weed out the sociopaths somehow? Do we not let anyone have a meat cleaver? Can we never have another pork chop?”
On staying in a hotel room where the windows don’t open: “Entombed in the exhale of 10,000 orgasms.”
On the hurricane that hit New York: “Another thing I thought was tremendous.”
On the end of the world: “After three days without power, you’d eat a live puppy. Its squeals would excite you.”
Burr expanded upon each of these bits at length, his complaining-everyman delivery softening the harshness of the material a little. He often scrunched his face into a wide-eyed, devilish grin, like a precocious child contemplating mischief. He also often recognized the bleakness of his material, saying, “How creepy is this, to be saying this (expletive) in a church?” and “I’m getting real self-conscious about all the stuff I’m talking about now.”
But he never apologized for it, nor should he. The sold-out crowd didn’t ask for one, either, preferring to respond with gales of laughter. Burr’s ability to joke about death and despair is an act of bravery that, perhaps ironically, exhilarates and inspires.