Day: November 11, 2007

Hundreds of thousands of people have seen the YouTube video of Bill Burr telling off a booing crowd in Philadelphia during last summer’s Opie and Anthony comedy tour. It’s certainly a sight to behold. But you really should make time to catch Burr onstage in a regular stand-up gig. He has come a long way since Emotionally Unavailable, his CD of material that dates back to 2002 and only recently became available last month in stores via What Are Records. Last weekend, he taped his first DVD special at the Skirball center at NYU and tore the roof off the place. I saw him steal the show last fall in Boston at an Emerson College gala that included performances by Steven Wright, Denis Leary, Tom Shillue, Anthony Clark and Eddie Brill. Here, alone, he proved that there are few working stand-ups who can steal the show from him. Why? Burr, like Louis CK, has reached a level of honesty and depth that makes his punchlines so much more potent than most observational comics. Take his opening bit on pedophiles, for instance. You can find plenty of stand-ups in any city right now making a "To Catch a Predator" reference. Burr, however, cuts to the emotional core and reveals how much differently we all relate to children because of it. He similarly takes a joke about the relentlessness of women...