In a new interview with Vulture, Bill Burr is extremely resistant to being defined on the political spectrum (he makes the case that both right and left are bad, classically citing the supposed “overcorrection after #MeToo” as an issue on the left). And yet he talks a lot about politics and the current state of affairs, roasting conservative commentator Ben Shapiro for complaining that Burr is “woke” now. “He doesn’t even know what that word means,” Burr says, observing that Shapiro only came to see his stand-up “to be annoyed so he can then have something to talk about and then he can make money off dividing his own country. Those people, it’s treasonous what they do.”
He says, “There’s an ugliness out there right now where if you’re a racist, if you’re an antisemite, if you’re a psycho nationalist and you want a softball interview, there’s podcasts out there where you can get one, and they will laugh at your fucking bad jokes and give you this pass. There’s a really ugly thing going on out there, and we’ve already seen what it does to a nation, and it’s not the way to go.”
Burr says his comedy lately is focused less on the politicians and more on the “puppeteers,” the people who pay our politicians: “And they’re always distracting us with other stuff. CNN and Fox News are a fucking disease.” But the comedy podcast scene has almost surpassed those traditional outlets as the foremost political commentary apparatus in the United States. Personally, Burr wouldn’t interview a president on his podcast (“not with my intellect”) and suggests that there are a lot of dumb people out there acting as if they’re smart by presenting information that they don’t truly understand: “It’s not just reading a bunch of smart shit, putting it in your head, and then puking it out at people. That’s not smart. You’re torturing people.” But entertainers getting involved in politics was “happening before” the podcast boom, he notes. “I remember the first time I saw a president go on The Tonight Show. I thought it was cheapening the office. They never did that. They used to run for office, they would have the debates, and they wouldn’t even go on Meet the Press. But I just feel like now that everybody has a camera, it’s just so all over the place. I just think the landscape of it has changed.”
Though Bill Burr is equal opportunity with making fun of all sides of the spectrum, he prefers to be left out of it himself—yet he feels “deliberately misunderstood” by folks trying to make him a champion of the right or a hero of the left. “What I’m finding is that people keep trying to categorize what you’re doing. Like that idiot Ben Shapiro: ‘He’s woke now!’ That fucking guy,” he complains. “He was trying to bring me into his fold. At one point, the guy liked me and then, all of a sudden, I’m a fucking asshole. I’m supposed to look at that guy like he’s an adult?” You can read the full interview here.
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