Loose cannon with a moral code
Bill Barr doesn’t forget radio hosts who helped him on his way up
There are a lot of stand-up comics who hate to do publicity, as if wasting a joke on a telephone interview is stealing a little bit of their soul.
Bill Burr isn’t one of them. Despite an ascension to stardom that has him co-headlining Colossal Clusterfest next weekend with Kevin Hart and Jerry Seinfeld, Burr says he still calls into the regional radio shows he would visit before local comedy appearances.
“‘The Sports Junkies,’ ‘The Other Guys’ in Atlanta, Marty Riemer in Seattle,” Burr says, listing a half dozen more. “You know what — before there was a Netflix, before anybody gave a s— about me — all those morning radio guys were good to me. I still call into their shows. I don’t call in and act like this is an inconvenience. I needed those guys.”
That sums up Burr’s personality and relationship with his fans. Although he’s one of the more foulmouthed comics and can go on a scorched-earth rant onstage, the Massachusetts native exudes a goodguyness that would be impossible to fake. He’s a loose cannon with a code.
As Hart and Seinfeld came into worldwide popularity with movies and television, Burr, 48, toiled in the clubs through most of the 1990s and 2000s, getting the moniker of “comic’s comic,” which is a comedy writer’s term for “not as famous as he deserves to be.”
That changed rapidly when he started podcasting in 2007, first for fun, and then building a mini-empire with the All Things Comedy Network. He rode the Netflix wave in recent years, first with two popular specials, and now with the animated comedy “F Is for Family” (returning for its second season Tuesday, May 30).
In the show, set in the 1970s, Burr voices Frank Murphy, a Korean War veteran and father of three whose bitterness and emotionally abusive manner hide strong core values. The tone of “F Is for Family” can be described as “King of the Hill” meets “Dazed and Confused” meets “Raging Bull.”
This is one of several areas in Burr’s life where he can’t believe his luck. He remembers grousing with other comedians about big studios ruining comedy, but he says Netflix embraces the show’s rough edges.
“Put it this way; their network note our first season was ‘Push it forward,’ ” Burr says. “That’s a pretty rare note to get. They’re usually pulling back on the reins. They were kind of slapping the ass of the show: ‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’ ”
The closest thing Burr has to a complaint these days is that he has less time to travel, now that he’s married and the father of a daughter born this year. Burr has suspended his habit of flying from Los Angeles to San Francisco and trying new comedy at the Punch Line — a practice Burr and Punch Line booker Molly Schminke dubbed “Morose Mondays.”
“It was just one of those magical rooms,” Burr says. “Some clubs make you so psyched you were a comedian, and other clubs make you wish you were home. The Punch Line to me always felt special when you went in there. You felt the history of it — Dana Gould and Dana Carvey and Robin Williams. All the stuff they did up there just hangs in the air.”
Burr says he’s excited for Clusterfest (“It seems like every funny person is going to be there. I can’t imagine what their budget is like”), even though he doesn’t have a strong read on the greater San Francisco comedy scene anymore. Not surprisingly, he has a positive outlook about that too.
“When I got into this business, it was 1992. The whole bottom had fallen out of the 1980s comedy scene,” Burr says. “I feel like in a lot of ways that’s the ebb and flow of comedy clubs and all that. Nobody’s going, then people are going, and then everyone’s going, and then the bottom falls out. And it always starts over again, because people are always going to want to laugh.”