Bill Burr: ‘I am a mess of a human being … but it makes for good comedy’

Comic Bill Burr is known for his contrarian, fiery stand-up. He admits to having not just road rage, but also “kitchen rage” and “why-do-I-have-to-check-myself-out-at-a-CVS? rage.” Still, he swears he’s trying to be less furious — it just takes time.

“I am the king of a day later being like, ‘Hey, you know, you know that thing I was arguing last night? Yeah, you were right. I’m sorry,’ ” Burr says.

The next step, he says, is learning to put the breaks on his anger when he’s in the moment: “I would love to be in the middle of some stupid argument with my wife or whoever, and just be able to stop in the middle of it and just be like, ‘What are we doing? Life is flying by. This isn’t worth anything. … Who cares?’ ”

Burr traces some of his rage — and his dark humor — to the emotional abuse he experienced as a child in Massachusetts. “Every way that you can be abused is what I’m talking about,” he says. “I don’t know if you ever can undo things that were done to you.”

Burr learned at an early age that if he could make people laugh, he was less likely to get hurt. He’s since tried therapy and psilocybin (aka “magic mushrooms”) as a way of dealing with the past. He says both helped; lately he feels lighter on stage.

“That whole myth that you can’t be happy and still be funny is a myth,” he says. “I am a mess of a human being, still, this far into life. … That is my existence day to day, week to week, month to month. It’s just what it is. But it makes for good comedy.”

Burr sold out Madison Square Garden during his 2023 stand-up tour. His latest Hulu comedy special is Bill Burr: Drop Dead Years. He’s also one of the stars of the new Broadway revival of the David Mamet play, Glengarry Glen Ross.

Editor’s note:  This Fresh Air interview is a particularly good listen. Click here for an extended version of Terry Gross’ conversation with Bill Burr.

Interview highlight

On being a redhead in Hollywood (when he had hair)

The greatest thing that ever happened to me is I went bald for my acting career. Because then I shaved my head and I looked like the psycho idiot that I am. But back in the day, when I actually had hair … Hollywood, they talk about racism and sexism and it goes beyond that. Like, they even like divide up redheads. There [were] rules about redheads. I was in the “redhead drawer.” I was in the Opie, Ron Howard, Howdy Doody drawer, and I didn’t get the gun. I didn’t win the fight. I didn’t get the girl. I was a mugging victim. I was just there for the cool guy. I used to do a joke in my act like, I’m not the hero of the action movie; I was the nerd in the van.

On insights he got from taking magic mushrooms

I would say therapy is the treadmill of getting towards [healing]. But mushrooms is this cold bucket of water that just is like, Oh my God! I started tripping and it was goofy and I was laughing. I was like, “Wow, this is wild.” And then all of a sudden, like this feeling came over me and I couldn’t really figure out what it was. It was this profound sense of loneliness. I think I asked the question, which really is a cool thing to do when you’re on mushrooms, to kind of say: What are you trying to tell me? And it’s weird. Like the answer just sort of comes. And the answer was basically: This is how you felt growing up. …

It was the weirdest thing. For like a week after, I was who I would have been if all of this stuff didn’t happen to me. It was like this honeymoon phase, this euphoria, it made me want to become a better person. It made me want to fix my life. So seven days of that. Oh my God, I’m not angry anymore. I felt this lightness in my chest. But then after seven days, the anger came back tenfold. And then I had to work through that. But that was only like a three-week thing because I kind of saw who I could be.

On reflecting on some of his early career jokes about women

If you watched my earlier stand-up … all of that crap that 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. …

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. 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.

On working on himself to end the cycle of abuse

In my neighborhood where I grew up, the dads were freaking terrifying. Terrifying. They were just, you know, buzz-cut lunatics. This is when I was really young, early ’70s. It was a different time. So I don’t want to just single out my dad. Right? He’s just the dude I had to deal with.

I’m older now, and I understand that he didn’t understand what he was doing, what it was doing to me, because he dialed down what was done to him. So the same way I didn’t think I was an angry person because I wasn’t as angry as him, it took meeting somebody like my wife to be like, “You’re really messed up, and your behavior is hurting me, and it’s making me feel bad” and all of that type of stuff. …

This is what I’ve finally gotten to with all my demons is: I can’t fix it. Alright. It happened. There’s nothing I can do about it to make it not have happened. My job is that that stuff dies with me. It doesn’t get passed on.

Lauren Krenzel and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.