Bill Burr Says Mushrooms Helped Him Be Less of An A-Hole
Bill Burr used to laugh at people who were walled off from their own feelings, he said this week on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast. The irony: Burr was exactly the same way. “Mushrooms turned me around,” he confessed. “I had one mushroom trip, and it sort of woke me up.”
Conan wondered if mushrooms might be the key to his own self-discovery. “People tell me I should do that,” he said. “I’ve never done that, and I also have a long way to go.”
Burr would recommend it. “I’ve only done mushrooms like three or four times, and what I like about it, it’s the only drug I’ve ever done that didn’t make me want to do it again,” he said last week on The Breakfast Club radio show. “The next day it made me want to work on myself and try to be not such an asshole.”
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The mushrooms did more than inspire Burr’s good intentions. “I confronted a lot of stuff that happened to me, that made me become a comedian or have the need to do it,” he confessed. “It made me understand my wife more and what it was like to be with me.”
Like in his latest special, Drop Dead Years, Burr alludes to childhood trauma that he’s still trying to reconcile. “If you grow up in a crazy environment, your idea of ‘not crazy’ is just less crazy than the crazy you grew up with,” he said. “But if you get with somebody that had a regular happy childhood — whatever that is like — you think you’re being chill and your chill is a raving lunatic to them.”
Okay, but how do mushrooms help? “The most difficult thing as a human being is empathy,” he explained. “Get out of me and listen to you, what are you saying, and then admitting you’re wrong. That’s the kind of stuff I got out of taking mushrooms.”
Burr’s biggest worry? Mushrooms will become legal, ruining them forever like what happened with marijuana. “Weed isn’t weed anymore,” he complained to Conan.
“Look at those weed stores, it looks toxic. It just looks like a store of chemicals,” he said on The Breakfast Club. “It used to just be in a little sandwich bag and hopefully it was green. It was usually brown with seeds and stems and shit, but it was weed.”
The new legal stuff is too powerful, he complained to Conan, telling him about a friend who offered “a nice afternoon sativa” at Thanksgiving. “I took three hits off of that thing, and I just wasn't at Thanksgiving anymore,” he said. “People kept talking to me, and my wife just kept going, ‘He’s useless, he’s useless.’”
So keep mushrooms illegal, lawmakers. They’re working for Burr as is, and a fancy store version just might ruin a good thing.
