Bill Burr Loved It When This Comedian Got Booed on Stage
Being booed isn’t typically an indication that a comedy show has gone well, hence the reason why Rob Schneider isn’t currently headlining any Canadian hospital fundraisers. But button pushing stand-up comedian and Billy Corgan lookalike Bill Burr recently revealed that one of his favorite gigs of all time found his fellow comics being relentlessly heckled.
During a recent appearance on WTF with Marc Maron, Burr and Maron chatted about the time they appeared together at “Comics Come Home,” the annual Boston charity show co-founded by Dennis Leary. This prompted Burr to recall when he performed at the event in November 2016. “I went up one year, and one comic — it was the first time Trump got elected — and this person went up on stage, and so trashed Trump (that) half the crowd was booing.”
While Burr didn’t volunteer the comedian’s name at first, Maron immediately knew who he was talking about, probably because it made headline news at the time. “That Wanda?” Maron asked.
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Burr confirmed that he was, indeed, referencing Wanda Sykes, who, just one week after the election, made a joke about the new president-elect, telling the audience, “I am certain this is not the first time we’ve elected a racist, sexist, homophobic president. He ain’t the first one. He’s just the first confirmed one.” As CBS reported, before she had even finished the joke, the stadium “filled with thousands echoed with angry boos.”
But Sykes clearly wasn’t in the mood to take shit from a bunch of Trump voters. “Fuck you, motherfuckers. Fuck all y’all. Fuck all y’all,” Sykes fired back, before singling out some of the specific motherfuckers: “You, you, you, you, you,” she said while pointing at each offender.
“How can you say he’s not racist?” she asked. “How can you say he’s not sexist?” she added after reciting Trump’s confession from the Access Hollywood tape. After finishing her set with some apolitical material, she left the stage — but only after flipping off the audience.
While some reports made it seem as though Sykes had been booed off of the stage, she took issue with that false assessment. “First of all, I was not booed OFF stage. I didn’t go anywhere. I was booed while ON stage in the middle of my set,” Sykes wrote on Facebook. “Some people in the audience didn’t want to hear my Trump jokes. Hell, I couldn’t even get to the punchlines. They were booing the setups.”
“It was fucking amazing,” Burr told Maron. “It was one of my favorite nights of comedy. (Sykes) went off on everybody like they all voted for Trump.” And he was clearly impressed that she held her own against such a huge number of hostile audience members. “To watch somebody do that in an arena and not give a fuck? I already loved Wanda, (and) I think love her more,” Burr concluded.
And it wasn’t just Trump supporters that were pissed off that night. According to Burr, after Sykes exited, comedian Nick Di Paolo went in the other direction and “took it to another level of ‘fuck this crowd.’” Reportedly, Di Paolo was booed for joking about “Hillary Clinton's health” and making a “barrage of comments about liberals, Boston women and Jews.”
So what stance did Burr take during this politically volatile show?
“I went up there with a chunk of airplane material that I already had,” Burr admitted. “The most hackiest shit ever.”
After being told that his set was “amazing” by fellow comics, Burr responded, “That was amazing? That was like my Evening on the Improv set from fucking ‘88 before I even did comedy.”
Which may actually explain last year’s terrible Saturday Night Live monologue.
