There are only maybe a dozen comics who could confidently go on stage at Red Rocks, as comfortable performing to a sold out crowd of 9,500 as they are watching football on their couch on Sunday. Bill Burr is one of those comics. He belongs there. He has earned it. And boy did he look comfortable out there. My first thought when I saw Burr walk on stage is that he was just wearing the clothes he put on that morning. He doesn’t have a special standup outfit. He is going to go out and kill with no thought. Filming this special was just another part of his day.

I first saw this material in the Miller High Life Theatre in Milwaukee in November 2021 and was excited to see how the special ended up shaping up. The material was largely identical to what I saw in Milwaukee.

His first post-pandemic special, it was only logical that Burr would open with COVID material. Some people are getting sick of comics talking about the pandemic but, in my view, if this your first tour since the lockdowns ended, it is unnatural and weird to open with anything else.

COVID is a major, likely the major defining event of the lifetime of anyone who was alive during it. Any comic who has emerged from the COVID era without some new insight worth talking about on stage probably isn’t at the top of their game. And plus we’re still freaked out from the anxiety and dread of that time and we need a damn laugh out of it.

And pretty much all of the COVID material I have seen has been funny and enlightening.

–Sam Tallent’s Waiting for Death to Claim Us, the last special filmed just as the lockdowns were beginning, presents the clearest picture of what that time felt like, so much so that I will show it to my kids so they can get a feeling for the anxiety, dread, and uncertainty of that time.

-Neal Brennan talk about how much he secretly loved lockdowns as an introvert and enjoyed extroverts getting their chance to suffer.

-Shane Torres talk about how he was at the height of his life, getting to film his first Netflix show and staying in a fancy hotel when the lockdowns started, ensuring his show never got made and sending him back to his small New York apartment.

-Bo Burnham’s Inside, need I say more?

-Heck, any comedian getting on stage these days is doing the joke that if you don’t have COVID yet, you probably do now because you are stuck in this room with all these people. And it still makes me laugh every time because we have been victorious over COVID. Most people who get it aren’t dying and this little comment is a nice celebration of that.

And then there is Bill Burr’s COVID take, which is so wonderfully Bill Burr. We’re all fighting over whether to get vaccinated so why not host the “COVID Hunger Games,” he asks? People who don’t want to get vaccinated will get the chance to avoid vaccination if they can run across a field before getting shot with the vaccine from above by a pro-vaccine person in a helicopter. And before the Republicans can groan too much, Burr reassures them- “Don’t worry. It’s a liberal with a gun.”

It’s an instant Bill Burr classic, evoking his cruise ship final solution bit and making fun of both sides of the political spectrum like he loves to do. Plus, we get to hear his hick voice. I don’t know about you but I could listen to Burr do that gun-loving, patriotic hick character all day.

Next, Burr talks about how a good impact of COVID is that it slowed cancel culture down because it was getting out of hand with canceling dead people. His examples are: John Wayne for comments he made in 1971 in Playboy (“a magazine that doesn’t exist anymore”) and Sean Connery for saying you need to slap women around a bit.

This isn’t Bill Burr’s first foray into this topic. That old people have racist and sexist views because they grew up in a different time is a topic he has been engaging with for a while but Burr loves revisiting his favorite topics (trashing women and overpopulation anyone?) and I have never found his re-engagement with a topic to be boring or tired. If anything, when he reexamines a favorite topic, it becomes richer and more layered.

Indeed, this time around, I think this topic actually serves as a great jumping off point for the central theme of this ultimately poignant and meaningful special. And that topic is in his words “you are of your time.” You are a product of the time, the parents, and the atmosphere in which you were raised. Of course, Sean Connery thinks it is acceptable to slap women around a bit. He was born in 1930. Burr comes back to his later and ultimately refuses to be a victim of his upbringing. More on that…

Throughout his career, Burr has preferred not to really take firm political stances but to instead point out that everyone, on all sides, is a hypocrite. He’s sick of white people using the term “woke,” a term they stole from black people. All of these white wokes think they would have been the hero working the underground railroad but really they would have done what they are doing right now: nothing. Hash tagging black lives matter does nothing and putting plywood on your store windows and then writing “Black Lives Matter” over it is the silliest, most hypocritical image that typifies white woke culture.

Returning to our friends, John Wayne and Sean Connery, and the idea of cancelling dead people: What about Coco Chanel? She took up with an actual Nazi and nobody has mentioned anything about cancelling her. Burr makes clear that he doesn’t judge her. She was scared and it is an option she had. Like he said, you are of your time and your actions should be considered within that context. If there’s anything we can learn from Coco Chanel, it is that women always know it is an option to fuck their way out of a situation. (Men don’t learn that unless they’re in prison.)

And with that, we have officially transitioned to one of Bill Burr’s all-time favorite topics: Trashing Women! This is a topic he has touched on probably more frequently than any other topic in his career and he absolutely thrives in it. (One of my favorite bits of all time is the most difficult job in the world is being a mother from Burr’s 2010 special Let It Go.) Bill Burr is not quiet about his problems with women. For years, I think his website or the Monday Morning Podcast website described him simply as “I am a comic. I have problems with women.” And for years, he has mined this topic for solid gold.

And before you can get mad at me, I am a woman and I am not offended. Why? Because these are jokes, morons. And they’re funny jokes at that. Burr has been upfront about his problems with women for years. He makes fun of himself tons more than he has ever made fun of any woman. He has been happily married to his wife for years. And he has given several female comics like Jessica Kirson, Rosebud Baker, and Michelle Wolf, a huge platform. So if you’re shouting about misogyny, standup comedy probably isn’t your thing. Stay out of comedy clubs. Don’t watch comedy specials. Find a hobby that better suits you.

Back to the material. Burr talks about feminism like a “band you can’t stand” who has been gone for years and then “oh, do they have a new album out?” I think this is sort of a meta-commentary of Burr doing comedy about feminism and women. Throughout his career, he will stop talking about women for a while (no mention of women in Walk Your Way Out) and then comes back guns ablazing with his women jokes. It’s hard to watch him and not think “good god, is Burr really talking about women again?” I could be giving him too much credit but I believe he is showing an awareness of this.

One of my favorite jokes was when Burr talked about how a female soccer player will go on ESPN asking why women don’t get paid the same as male athletes and all of the men sit around pretending like they don’t know the answer. When I saw this material live, one of my favorite jokes was “you can just see the guy going oh yeah I have no idea why Tom Brady gets paid more than you over there.” He didn’t do the Tom Brady material for the special and I wonder why. It was a great little tag. While Burr is watching women complain about this stuff, he is yelling at the screen “YOU DON’T SELL ANY TICKETS!”

Burr then delves into the fact that women don’t support each other. Why aren’t all of these feminists attending WNBA games? Women are letting other women down, not men. No one can name their top 5 WNBA players. No one even knows the name of the WNBA team in their own city. Instead, women are too busy watching the Kardashians and “drowning whores in money,” another great Bill Burr line, evoking his legendary epidemic of gold digging whores bit.

Women are smarter than men, Bill Burr asserts, but why are they losing? It’s because they tear each other down unless the women is fat, in which case women praise her because she is no longer a threat.

There are many jokes that the wokes won’t like but the #1 cause of complaints might be his joke that praising someone and calling them brave for being fat is like praising an alcoholic who passes out and ignores his kids. People ain’t gonna like that one!

Burr then moves on to homelessness and how when he was coming up, homeless people were bums but they are a whole different breed now.

My favorite picture he paints is a homeless guy yelling next to people eating eggs benedict. Back in the 70s a guy would pull up in a van, walk over, and go “hey buddy, how you doing” and that guy would be off the street.

Then the workers started fucking the patients (everyone knows crazy people are great in bed) and they had to let them all out.

There are legitimate points that certain homelessness experts have been making for years in this bit. And that’s one of the things I like most about comedy. It makes a convincing case for a particular point of view in an entertaining way in a short period of time. Why are mentally ill people out on the street? It’s a great question Burr raises here.

Then we get into the true theme of this material. Bill Burr recently did mushrooms for the first time and had a fun little trip for about an hour but then a “profound feeling of loneliness and not being loved” washed over him.

He excused himself to the bedroom so as not to ruin everyone else’s trip and was just stuck in this feeling. He started to feel like had married the wrong person and then joked that it’s pretty normal to feel that way about every six weeks in a marriage.

Then, he started thinking about his kids but knew deeply that they love him so he realized this had to be about something else. Then, it dawned on him that this profound sense of loneliness is how he felt growing up as a kid.

This is a huge insight for Burr but on the outside, it confirms what I feel like has always been apparent about Burr’s upbringing. It has always seemed obvious to me that he was the product of an abusive upbringing from stories he has told on his podcast. It always felt like Frank Murphy, the harsh 70s dad on Burr’s F is For Family was based on Burr’s own father.

Watching this material live in Milwaukee, I thought to myself “finally, he is admitting and realizing this stuff and he can move on.” This vulnerable, emotional material is not something the what are you a f#g Bill Burr would have ever felt comfortable doing.

Burr returns to the theme that I promised ran through this special: you are of your time and Burr is acknowledging that he is, in fact, of his time. The 70s and 80s were an angry time, corporal punishment prevailed, it was acceptable for other people’s dads to hit you.

And beyond just the general times, within his own family, Burr had a brutally honest dad. When his mom got that short hut hair cut that every mom secretly wants, most dads pretend to like it to keep the peace while inwardly detesting it. Burr’s father saw that hair cut and exclaimed “Ah christ it looks like shit!” Burr has been telling a similar story on his podcast for years about how his dad would say something similar about a meal gone wrong, “Christ you burned the shit out of it!”

This abusive upbringing led all of his siblings to exhibit physical symptoms. For Burr it manifested as alopecia (“in third grade, patches of hair were falling out like I was on Wall Street”.)

During this mushroom trip, while reflecting on his childhood, Bill realizes that his intense upbringing is the source of his rage, rage he has long been aware of but never really grappled with.

It’s why he has spent so much of his life drinking and trashing women. So he decided to get sober and work on his temper. This deliberate decision to get sober didn’t come across as such in real time. On his podcast, Burr talked almost whimsically about trying to do thirty days without drinking, then 60, then a year, and then said he just decided to give it up. It almost seemed like an accident. It makes me wonder when he reflected and really decided he needed to kick the habit. Was it a long realization process or did he really make the instant realization during the mushroom trip and just kind of played off his deliberate decision to stop drinking as accidental? It doesn’t really matter but I am curious as a fan.

Burr then tells a bunch of stories about him flipping out over life’s little inconveniences like toasters with apps and smart TVs that don’t turn on when it is too dark and his little girl calming him down with “truth bombs” like “it’s going to be ok”. We can see the work he has done on himself and how hard he is trying to fix his temper. He isn’t going to end up like his dad. He is scared to death of his children being afraid of him.

This is a new Bill Burr. He is calmer, happier, older, and able to put things into perspective. He is a dad now. This isn’t the Bill Burr who whisper screams into his cell phone for his podcast about some idiot in the airport. This isn’t the Bill Burr who wants to smush his wife’s face in when she asks if he wants to get a pumpkin for the house for Halloween. Don’t worry. He’s still an angry person and he’ll never stop ranting hilariously over nothing and thank goodness for that because life without an angry Bill Burr is no life at all. But he can control his temper now.

He is aware that he is of his time but he is refusing to succumb to his 70s upbringing. He’s trying to be better than the John Waynes and Sean Connerys and Coco Chanels of the world. Burr is refreshingly taking responsibility for his attitude and his actions and it’s actually a pretty inspiring message.

Having hit us with the huge realization of this special, Burr wants to close with a couple of fun bits. He talks about his time filming King of Staten Island, where he was playing a fireman and had to keep his mustache on throughout filming. The movie was being filmed during pride month so he was dreading getting hit on but found that no gay guy ever hit on him, which hurt his ego.

In a test of his new attitude in trying to tame his temper, he tells a story of when a lesbian bumped into him on the street in New York. From the way he tells the story, it was obvious that it was deliberate and she did not acknowledge that it happened, much less apologize for it.

Burr found that he was tormenting himself with rage over this incident for days until he started working on being empathetic and putting himself in her shoes to figure out why she might have bumped into him.

Ultimately, he comes to the conclusion that she bumped into him because she’s a lesbian. He lets the audience marinate on that for a second and then explains that she is married to a woman and woman are inherently difficult. There is a reason gay guys are always happy but in a bar, lesbians and married men have the same looks on their faces. Married men and lesbians need to hang out more but married men need to find the lesbian in the relationship who takes all of the shit. (There are people in relationships who wash dishes and people who soak them and married men need to team up with the dishwashing lesbians.) That lesbian saw Burr walking down the street with his dumb mustache and just decided to give it to him, angry at all of her built up rage at being married to a woman.

Burr closes with an abortion joke because no one loves losing the audience and getting them back again like Burr. And if he can open a special with “I want to get a gun” surely he can close it with abortion.

As with his homeless material, his abortion material shows a nuance and thought that goes beyond partisanship and far exceeds what most “journalists” are exhibiting these days. His analogy to throwing a cake that is baking out of the oven is one of the more hilarious images of the special.

And just in case you worried he wasn’t going to touch on his other favorite topic, overpopulation, in this special you’re wrong in the eleventh hour.

I absolutely loved this material and I think it showed a vulnerability and openness I have never seen from Bill Burr. Burr has been killing for years and I don’t see him stopping anytime soon.

The only negative thing I have to say is I don’t love the idea of a comedy show at Red Rocks. Red Rocks is an unbelievable, iconic venue but it’s for music, damnit. I saw No Doubt there on my 15th birthday, I saw Dave Matthews there three nights in a row when I was 19 and have this amazing memory of sneaking into the 2nd row, and I even saw Bob Dylan there with my mom. But for comedy? No. Comedy belongs in the comedy club and I resent that it is expanding to gigantic theaters and even arenas. In this special, you could really feel the distance of the audience from Burr. The stage is so far away from even the front row and you didn’t have to be there to notice that. It comes across on screen.

Even Burr’s engagement with the crowd feels like he is engaging with voices from the void rather than actual people. I don’t want to see comedy live in a huge venue ever and I really don’t want to see a special filmed in a huge venue. Even the mic sounded weird on this special. Outdoors for comedy? Also a no.

Congrats on performing at Red Rocks. That’s a tremendous achievement. Now that it is checked off, do your next special in a club, Bill!