The philosophy of Bill Burr and Conan O’Brien

I started my recent journey of Bill Burr videos with an interview on none other than NPR. Below the video are stream-of-consciousness notes in which I waver on Terry Gross but eventually admit that Burr badgered a decent interview out of her. I wouldn’t make a habit of listening to her interviews, though. It’s a testament to anti-intellectualism that she’s considered a leading light of liberal thought.

Bill Burr on NPR

Bill Burr (extended interview) by Fresh Air / Terry Gross (YouTube)

I love how Bill Burr runs the interview, in that he doesn’t let her “move on” from talking about cancel culture and the complete bastardization of the “MeToo” movement into something that just rounded up so many people with unwelcome opinions to the same thing as Harvey Weinstein.

At 13;57, Burr talks about people’s capitulation to Musk,

“This is why I hate liberals. It’s like liberals have no teeth whatsoever. They just go, ‘oh my God. Can you believe? I’m getting out of the country.‘ I’m just like, ‘you’re going to leave the country cuz of one guy with dyed hair plugs and a laminated face? Who runs a bad car company and has an obsolete social-media platform? You’re going to leave this country? Why doesn’t he leave? Why isn’t he stopped? What are we so afraid of? This guy who can’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag?”

Gross is so f@&king condescending, saying that the discussion would be worthwhile if it were “nuanced,” implying that Burr is not capable of having the discussion the right way. Burr says, “nuanced conversation is not my strong suit,” which is utterly belied by the relatively nuanced argument that he’d just delivered. But Gross happily agrees—because she’s a classic liberal and is only interested in having conversations involving ideas and coming to conclusions that she already held before they start. It’s safer that way.

Burr is so very in-control of this conversation, even revisiting his tirade and relating it to his character in Glengarry Glen Ross, a play that he’s currently starring in, who also tends to express himself as he intends but in a manner that is more offputting than he wanted. Nice plug, Billy Boy![1]

He is not only one of the funniest people to have ever graced this planet, he is also quite insightful and empathetic and disarmingly intelligent, in the sense that he’s able to root out hypocrisy like a truffle-hunting pig.

He gets angry because he’s so frustrated with how people like Terry Gross seem to be so smugly satisfied with living in a giant stew of hypocrisy, holding views that just happen to not only make them feel terrific about what wonderful people they are, they also coincidentally lead to themselves never feeling any financial or emotional discomfort.

They never ask “why me and not all of these other people?” They don’t really think about the answer, but if they would, they would say it’s because they deserve it for being so smart and amazing and useful. Bill knows that the answer is “luck” or “I don’t”.

At 50:30,

“It’s funny to me, because I just thought it was hilarious that when that me-too thing came out, right? All of these guys, all of a sudden, were walking around and they had on these male-feminist buttons, right? And that was absolutely hysterical to me. And it was hysterical to me that women didn’t call out the BS of that.

“Because it’s like where was that button before this happened? You had your whole life to wear that button and you didn’t wear it until guys were getting thrown off the bridge…then all of a sudden, I’m a male-feminist—females first—and you fell for it!

“I … that’s a red flag. Let’s just take it out of men and women. I remember when I first got a manager, and an agent, and I thought oh boy oh boy now I don’t have to make the calls! Someone’s going to be making calls for me. It’s like no-one’s going to care about what you want more than you, so you got to empower yourself to do this.”

Conan on Hot One

Conan O'Brien Needs a Doctor While Eating Spicy Wings by First We Feast / Hot Ones (YouTube)

He controls the show from start to finish. He invited his own fake doctor and set up fake bits to do throughout. He was obviously suffering and he did not stop, nor miss a step. He improved through the pain, to the point where I thought he might be faking it—but the show doesn’t let guests fake it.

At 15:00,

“I’d have […] said there’s no way there’s ever going to be a Charlie Rose show where you eat hot wings but I’ve […] I would have been wrong.”

At 23:30,

“Read. Read widely and read well. There’s comedy in the Old Testament. There’s comedy in the New Testament. You can read all kinds of stuff; just don’t lock yourself in to ‘it’s got to be some comedy from the last 10 years.‘ No. There’s great comedy out there, that was written a long time ago. What’s funnier than Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza, you know? This is good stuff. The classics are funny, you know? You can read Chaucer’s Tales. They’re funny. There’s funny everywhere. Don’t be a snob. Look high and look low. A Mad Magazine is funny. There’s funny stuff online all the time. There’s no reason for us to try and exclude one category over another.

“These aren’t the rantings of someone who’s had some bad chemicals and overdid it to be funny and relevant to people who were at least 50 years younger than him.”

Bill Burr on Conan

Bill Burr Can't Help But Laugh When He Watches The News | Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend by Team Coco (YouTube)

This is a fantastic 12-minute video. Bill Burr is on fire, as usual. He brings together a few stories I’ve heard before, but juxtaposes them to expose new meaning.

After he tells several stories in which he ended up laughing at stories in which others suffered, he says,

“I don’t even know what the fuckin’ news is. It’s like, here’s a bunch of shit you can’t fix, that happened, that was horrible.”

Bill’s point isn’t a new one but it’s an important one to remember: sometimes you’ve just to laugh at the dark humor of reality. Just say, ‘good one, God. You got me.’

You can’t cry all the time and those who pretend that they can are posing for an imaginary audience.

Commentator Bombadil-ez9ns writes,

“I love how good Bill is at saying the WORST THING EVER, then walking you through it so that you understand where he’s coming from, and part of you even agrees.”

That’s called “philosophy.”

Another eloquent summary is from TheOtherMrEd,

“The thing I love about Bill Burr when he goes on these rants is he says all the things we think or feel… but know we shouldn’t. He’s right. Sometimes the level of “tragedy” reaches a point where it becomes absurd. And laughing about things you can’t change is a healthy survival strategy. Processing everyone else’s tragedy as though it was your own leads to burnout and compassion fatigue.”

Bill Burr and Conan O'BrienEven this, though, isn’t exactly why Bill Burr laughs at The Biggest Loser. He said it himself, “most of the world is starving”. That’s why. He’s laughing at the utter darkness of a country having come up with a hit series about people who have eaten so much that they can barely move, filming them crying about their inability to control themselves—which is real and which is devastisting but only to them—when the rest of the world has real problems.

Even a lot of their fellow citizens have real problems that don’t involve having so much disposable incomes that you literally can’t stop yourself from eating Oreos. You laugh at the genius of a culture that airs this kind of stuff to distract everyone else from noticing that they are part of the oppression that causes starvation in the rest of the world, at a system that encourages—nay, enforces—people to focus solipsistically on their own problems, despite having relatively no problems compared to most.

He laughs because he’s really woke, not posturing. He is awake to the structure of the system and he’s laughing at how it’s trying to manipulate him into going back to sleep.

At least, that’s how I read it. I like to think that he would share my frustration that people only care about how their country is tearing the world a new asshole, day after day after day, when their country’s behavior starts to impinge their own lifestyles.

I hear it in Switzerland too: the latest tariffs are going to put companies out of business. Yeah, well, that sucks. But those companies were in bed with an empire that was also cheerily slaughtering people that they never cared enough about because it never affected their bottom line. That’s not a principle. That’s just self-interest.

As long as you pension fund earns 7-8% per year, you honestly don’t give even a single shit about what else is going on. As soon as your personal flourishing might be affected, all of a sudden, what’s going on must be stopped, even if it’s just to shore up the crooked system that stole nearly everything but allowed a few crumbs to drop onto your plate. All of a sudden, people are fighting like crazy to put things back they way they were.

This is how change happens. Your middle-class pain is not the biggest pain in the world. It is, at best, discomfort. You will definitely muddle through. There are still 95% of the people on this planet who didn’t even notice that the stock market went down or that tariffs have been levied because their lives were already shitty.

You never cared about them—not enough to take even a little bit less for yourself—even though making a better world for them would automatically mean that you’d also be living in a world whose continued economic well-being wasn’t contingent on the behavior of a handful of lunatics.

The prison riot might feel really bad right now but, instead of complaining that we want the doors put back on our cells, maybe we should be figuring out how to build a more just system, one that’s more resilient against the whims of mad oligarchs. We should build a world without oligarchs, so that this kind of insanity can’t happen, instead of begging the oligarchs to give us our steady stream of crumbs back.

I like to think that Bill Burr would agree with that.