Bill Burr on his O&A Philly gig, YouTube video

Bill Burr deserves to break big. He absolutely destroyed last night at the “30 Years of Emerson Comedy” show at the Cutler Majestic. Several times during his 11-minute set, audience members around me were saying things like, “This guy is AMAZING!” Tore the roof off the joint. Anyhow. Like I said, more on the show as a whole later.

Got to talk to Burr briefly after the show. Two young fans already were asking him something about the Opie & Anthony Traveling Virus comedy tour, and the Philadelphia fans who booed Burr and many others. Burr told the fans to look it up on YouTube. Here is a 10-minute clip from that set, which includes lots of cursing, which makes it NSFW:

“It was great,” he told me last night. Burr said he’d always wanted to have an opportunity like that to completely tear apart an audience, and last night, said Denis Leary (fellow Emerson alum on the bill last night) recalled the time Lenny Clarke found a crowd so hostile and unworthy that he actually decided to clip his toenails onstage, giving play-by-play of the clipping instead of his usual jokes. As for the O&A tour, Burr said Philly was the only tough crowd he encountered, but he figured that one of the cities on the tour would go screwy. Why? “They’re animals,” he said of O&A fans.

So I posed the question: Should stand-up comedy even make a tour of arenas for O&A fans? Burr paused. “I don’t know.” But then he talked about how Opie comes up with all sorts of crazy ideas and tries to make them work, regardless of how crazy the idea is.

Sean L. McCarthy

Editor and publisher since 2007, when he was named New York's Funniest Reporter. Former newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News, Boston Herald and smaller dailies and community papers across America. Loves comedy so much he founded this site.

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