The Sad Decline Of Bill Burr

Bill Burr was the comedy hero we needed during the Peak Woke years.

Now, he makes us cringe with every new statement. What happened? Did he give in to Hollywood’s progressive culture? Is he vying to expand his acting opportunities?

He’s already got a plum role in director Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” one of the fall’s buzziest titles. His acting career is in fine shape, or so it would seem.

No matter the explanation, his comedy work has suffered along with his odd lunge to the far Left. How far Left? Think an unusual sympathy for the “Free Luigi” crowd.

The Massachusetts native was already a top-tier comic when he released the 2019 Netflix special “Paper Tiger.” The stand-up set skewered the woke overreach crushing the culture all around us. He even teased an audience member for cheering the notion of a female U.S. president.

“You don’t even know what her f*cking platform is, and you automatically cheer!” he said. He also shredded progressives who insist actors have the same disabilities as the characters they play.

“It’s called acting!” he cried, citing the outrage over able-bodied star Bryan Cranston playing a quadriplegic in “The Upside.”

Right place. Right time. Right comedian.

Except Burr wasn’t necessarily on the Right. At the time, he wasn’t overtly political. He shared common-sense views with a comical twist. For that, conservatives embraced him. He put the funny first, and he followed it wherever it took him. That mattered, because comedy courage was in short supply. Tell the wrong joke, and your career could go down the tubes.

Burr leaned into woke overreach, and it increased his celebrity status. Did it also fuel his current, curious direction, convincing him to play to entertainment’s far-Left culture?

By the time he shouted “Free Luigi” on TV, the old Burr was slipping from view.

The change began around 2022, when Burr savaged Kyle Rittenhouse by calling him a racist without proof.

A year later, he directed, co-wrote, and starred in “Old Dads,” a Netflix comedy that ended with his Gen X character embracing the new woke bylaws.

Huh?

Last year, he joined the Left’s unhinged attacks on Elon Musk. He called Musk a “Nazi” on NPR, based on nothing more than a herky-jerky hand gesture, the kind many politicians have made over the years without incident.

He mocked Musk’s Tesla EV car and called his Twitter-turned-X site an “obsolete media platform.” Comedians connect by telling truths we recognize but can’t always articulate. Here, though, he was 0-2 on the Truth Meter, and then he doubled down amidst violent attacks on Tesla dealerships and expanding Leftist violence:

Why doesn’t [Musk] leave? Why isn’t he stopped?

Burr also mocked anyone who blamed California Governor Gavin Newsom for the Palisades fires and the incompetent government response to the crisis.

“[The fires] were mismanaged? Like some idiot on the Internet knows how to manage the worst fire in L.A.? Sitting there in his underwear?” he told Jimmy Kimmel on the latter’s ABC show last year.

Except you don’t need to be a firefighter to understand basic facts, like empty reservoirs and land management failures. What a weird, anti-populist take on the tragedy, protecting the powerful and tormenting those who lost the most.

He also shouted “Free Luigi” during the ABC interview, drawing snickers from Kimmel.

Burr also has a penchant for blasting billionaires, inaccurately blaming them for a wide range of cultural woes, including those of hard-working Americans still struggling to pay the bills. On his “Monday Morning Podcast,” he raged against the wealthy harder than a Bernie Sanders stump speech.

These f*cking billionaires… They need to be put down like f*cking rabid dogs.

That’s not comedy. It’s anger and, potentially, incitement.

He revisited his “Free Luigi” sentiment in a disturbing new interview with Rolling Stone magazine:

If you look at all of this stuff, like the response to the Luigi thing was not to be like, “Well, hey, maybe we need to look at what we’re doing if what we’re doing makes some crazy person do this” … Their response was to take their faces off of the internet and get security. It’s like, you don’t think you need to examine — you know what I mean? It’s like you’re not the president. You’re just the CEO of a business.

So, if a killer has a message he’d like to spread via cold-blooded murder, we should all line up and give him a fair hearing? Does Burr ever blame the current state of health insurance on Obamacare or the party that voted for it sans a single GOP vote?

We’ll have to wait for his next Netflix special to hear him weigh in on that ugly truth.

Perhaps the devolution started earlier than we originally thought.

Burr could have made a stand for free speech following Gina Carano’s 2021 firing from Disney’s “The Mandalorian” for sharing the “wrong” kind of social media post. The comic actor had worked with her on the “Star Wars” show and, much later, had glowing things to say about her.

An “absolute sweetheart,” was how Burr phrased it. So why didn’t he say it earlier, when it might have mattered? Could that have changed the conversation around the actress following her dismissal and convinced the industry not to blacklist her?

She hasn’t worked in a mainstream Hollywood project since the dismissal.

Was that a hint at the Burr we see today? More importantly, will we ever see the Bill Burr who made us laugh, not the one who makes us roll our eyes in disgust?

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Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of HollywoodInToto.com. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. He’s also the host of The Hollywood in Toto Podcast. Follow him at @HollywoodInToto.