Bill Burr Explains Why He Went After Women So Hard in His Early Stand-Up

Bill Burr fans know that the perpetually irate comic is about as much a feminist as Oprah is a mother, but at least he knows why he was so hard on both Oprah and mothers back when he still had hair.

At 56, today’s Burr is a very different man from the short-fused rant comic who first rose to comedy stardom in the late 1990s, and Burr is proud of that fact. Burr’s struggle with his anger and his often-times strained relationships with the women in his life are cornerstones of his act, but as a proud father of two and a husband to the equally outspoken Nia Renée Hill, the Monday Morning Podcast host has done the hard work of facing his demons and accepting what made him so angry in the first place.

An important step in the process that turned Burr from a red-blooded, rage-fueled single comedian into a funny family man was confronting what made Burr habitually target women and women’s issues throughout his comedy career. In a recent conversation with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Burr admitted that his early misogynistic mocking came from a place of masculine insecurity about wanting to get married and have kids, but having no idea how to do it.

That sounds like a problem that could have just been solved by a simple but serious talk about the Burrs and the bees.

During the talk, Burr admitted to having been verbally abusive in the past, but he had lines he wouldn’t cross — especially compared to the men when he was young. “I grew up and I saw men calling women bitches all the time, and I saw the looks on their faces, and so I made this rule in my head (that) I was never going to do that,” Burr explained. “And I didn’t. I’ve never done that. I’ve never done it in a relationship. I might have done it in a car. I’m sure I have.”

Of course, watching his language didn’t stop Burr from cutting even deeper with routines about Oprah, the WNBA, the #MeToo movement, feminism in general and dozens of other women and female-focused topics that are still fodder for his stand-up routine. When Gross played a clip from Burr’s comedy in which he joked that he’s surprised feminism hasn’t died and wonders why women expect men to participate in it, he defended the joke, saying, “I just thought that it was hilarious that, when that #MeToo thing came out, all of these guys all of a sudden were walking around, and they had on these ‘male feminist’ buttons, right? And that was absolutely hysterical to me.”

“It was hysterical to me that women didn’t call out the BS of that because, it’s like, where was that button before this happened?” Burr continued of the male feminists whom he so often mocks. “You had your whole life to wear that button, and you didn’t wear it until guys were getting thrown off the bridge of their career. Then, all of the sudden, ‘Oh, I’m a male feminist, duhh, females first!’”

Addressing Gross and women everywhere, Burr declared, “And you fell for it!”

While Burr’s contemporary comedy certainly isn’t of the “male feminist” variety and although he still targets women and gender in his act, Burr insists that, for as patriarchal and chauvinistic as some may find his comedy to be, his stand-up is still way more egalitarian than it used to be. “I actually do love women, and I do find you guys fascinating,” he told Gross. “And at the same time, I find you incredibly frustrating. And I see the beauty in what you do, and I also see the destruction, because you’re human beings, or whatever.”

“And I gotta be honest with you, if you watch my earlier stand-up, when I’m like, ‘Uh women this, women that,’ that had nothing to do with women,” Burr admitted. “All of that crap I said had nothing to do with women. It had to do with the fact that I didn’t know how to get on with my life, that I wanted to get married. I wanted to be in love. I wanted to have kids, and I didn’t know how to do it. And I didn’t understand what my problem was and I didn’t know how to fix it, so I blamed what I wanted.”

“One of my biggest fears, when I was a younger comic and I looked at older comics who never got married and never had kids, and they were still doing shows and then hanging out afterwards trying to pick up chicks at the end of it,” Burr recalled of those early years. “And it was just I was like, 'Oh my God, I don’t I don’t want to be that guy.’ I wanted to get married at 26 and have, like, five or six kids but I didn’t know how to do it.”

Clearly, Burr found a way to find love and start a family without giving up his jokes about women, but it’s true that his current material isn’t half as misogynist as his old stuff — Nia wouldn’t be here if he was still complaining about the Titanic’s “women and children first” policy over a hundred years later.