Bill Burr - Self Awareness on Stage

I saw Bill Burr at the Punchline last weekend. It was a truly great show. I had heard about him before, and think I've seen some clips of him on Comedy Central, but his stage persona really came out during his performance. I'm not sure how far (or close) it is to his normal self, but on stage he's a thin, mildly psychotic, conspiratorial stress-ball who looks like he's about to snap. His trademark line, and it worked every time, is "let's bring this back mainstream," and it typically comes out after a line or two about how the banking system is legalized loan sharking or how the world is controlled by only a few families. Not that I disagree with him or anything, but they aren't exactly "golden material" topics. Nonetheless, the awkward silence during which the audience contemplated and tried to digest his reality-tweaking comments were broken with bursts of laughter with his comment, and he would move immediately into lighter subjects.

It's not uncommon for a comedian to have a line they fall back to when they're not getting laughs. Usually, it's something like "didn't like that one so much, did ya?" or some self-referential comment like that. It breaks the audience out of their dislike for their joke, and makes them laugh at the fact that the comedian is "ok" with it. However, it's typically reserved for jokes that don't work. Bill Burr just uses his line almost to pull himself back into it as much as his audience. It's not that he tells a joke that doesn't work, he just goes with his material and sometimes gets lost in the weeds. "Let's bring this back mainstream" eases the audience's tension because because it shows that he's comfortable with his own awkwardness.

No comedian is going to be flawless, and having a way to bring yourself out of a hole is always a good idea. It won't save you if you're bombing, but if you can sense that you're losing the audience with a subject, it's a good way to transition into something completely different. I don't have a collection of phrases like his that I'm in love with, I just use something like "not so much?" More often than not, I just power through the joke and get to the next one. Hell, I'll only be on stage for 5 minutes, he's got to be there for an hour.