Bill Burr Tells Berkeley Crowd, ‘I F*cking Hate Liberals’
If you’re going to tell a crowd that you “f*cking hate liberals,” you might as well do it at UC Berkeley, the school with the most woke reputation in America. If Bill Burr could get it away with it there, he can get away with it anywhere.
The insult reads worse than it played. As reported by SFGate, the line was more of a self-own, setting up jokes about lame white people like, say, Bill Burr.
The comic was taking down hypocrisy, not politics. For example, he skewered white people putting “Black Lives Matter” signs in their windows but doing little of the actual work to take down white supremacy. “That’s like if I told you my great-grandmother in Germany had a ‘Knock it off, Nazis’ sign,” he joked.
There were more white people in Burr’s sights. “If you run into a white person who says they’re an empath, run the other way,” he warned, explaining that “empath” is code for making other peoples’ suffering about you.
Did any comedy fans fight back? Burr did get into it with one heckler, but the back-and-forth was about the NBA, not politics. “Oh, the Celtics suck, do they?” Burr crowed about his hometown team, currently up 2-0 in the NBA Finals. Take that, Guy in the Lakers Jersey.
SFGate says the crowd was with Burr all the way as he went after certain factions of the digerati. “I hate the term ‘tech bro.’ They aren’t bros,” he complained. “They’re nerds, and they are way more dangerous.” Only an awkward dork would create A.I. to replace the majority of the country’s workforce, he said, winning rowdy applause from the crowd.
Burr also scored points by taking easy shots at Joe Biden’s age and telling the audience that he’d experimented with mushrooms. When the revelation got a huge response, Burr joked, “Jesus, you guys are so supportive.”
Burr touched on subjects that get fellow comics like Dave Chappelle in hot water, including the war in Gaza, transgender rights and child molestation. But “Burr didn’t seem to be picking a fight with the audience or trying to win some grand crusade against cancel culture,” SFGate editor Gabe Lehman wrote in his review. “His jokes that toed the line generally served a purpose and weren’t made just to provoke the crowd.”
The fact that the audience was with Burr must come as a shock to Bill Maher, who recently told Burr on his Club Random podcast that punchlines about touchy subjects could get either of them “canceled in the next two minutes.”
Burr told Maher he wasn’t afraid. Then he proved it in “the most widely mocked safe space in the nation.”