Language: English
To be clear to Netflix and Bill Burr, neither him nor his friends kill in the Bill Burr Presents: Friends Who Kill showcase. Repurposed as an hour-long comedy special from the set that took place at the Netflix is a Joke comedy festival in Los Angeles last month, the showcase sees Bill Burr take the stage along with his curated list of 10 comics. As Burr mentions several times during the course of the show, the 10 comics selected for the showcase are custodians of some of his personal favourite punchlines. The promise is simple: each of these comedians, including Burr, who hosts the showcase and does an inaugural set, will deliver material that will be both thought-proving and rib-tickling funny. To say that Bill Burr and his co-conspirators achieve neither will be a bit of an understatement and an act of extreme kindness.
The format is deceptively simple: Bill Burr starts off the show with a set and from then on, every comedian gets under ten minutes of stage time. Burr comes in after every act to introduce and sufficiently hype up the next performer on the lineup. As is Burr’s reputation, a lineup curated by him is certainly not looking to play nice; instead it is expected to tread boundaries and most importantly, be objectively funny.
Burr’s 10-minute opening set, stacked to the brim with the comedian’s usual rant-esque delivery, tackles COVID-era jokes that have now become nauseating. Even worse are his attempts to spin material around proclaiming his love for guns and Kyle Rittenhouse, both of which fall flat in a matter shocking for a comedian as sharp as Burr.
The problem isn’t so much that his jokes are insensitive — which I’m sure would be a definite point of contention for many viewers and critics — especially in the light of the recent Texas school shooting. I’d argue that the point of comedy isn’t to play polite, rather it is to plumbs the depths of the human condition as long as a punchline can emerge from it. The problem rather is the fact that every single second of his set is horribly second-rate.
Burr doesn’t exactly make it difficult to follow him and it helps that Michelle Wolf, arguably the only watchable act, is terrific form. Wolf effectively utilises her 10 minutes with a provocative set about the hypocrisy of yass queening, both in America and abroad. The comedian’s delivery doesn’t skip a beat and her set sticks to the purpose of sucha showcase by spotlighting a distinctive point of view.
The British-Irish comedian Jimmy Carr comes up next with an act that starts off strong but quickly devolves into second-hand embarrassment-inducing territories. Carr seems to evidently be of the opinion that risque material equals funny jokes. But as is evidenced from his yawn-inducing set, both those things aren’t exclusive to each other. It doesn’t seem to be getting any better when Canadian comedian Steph Tolev takes the stage; her material is so unforgettable that for a second, I was convinced that it was a mistake that Burr ended up putting her in the lineup.
To be fair to Jeff Ross and Dave Attell, the duo atleast make an effort, albeit in their old-men-who-give-no-fuck type of roundabout way. But unfortunately, their material is a bunch of one-liners assembled next to each other that work better as inside jokes than punchlines at a comedy fest. At one point, the duo bring up Burr for their famed “roastmaster” segment and the resulting exchange is funny enough to register but by no means is memorable.
I’ll say this much about Ian Edwards: he appears to be heading somewhere. The comedian does an ingenious bit on Michael Jackson that I quite dug and another on The Handmaid’s Tale that is nothing short of brilliant. The trouble is in the fine-tuning of both these bits, which suffer from an evident lack of both polish and delivery. Still, for someone clueless about Edwards comic voice, the set acts as an apt entry point and for me, Edwards felt like the only discovery of the lineup.
The last three acts of Bill Burr Presents: Friends Who Kill are perplexing to say the last and almost entirely impossible to wrap your head around. Actually, there’s no point beating around the bush — it’s an absolute trainwreck. Worse, it’s a trainwreck three times over. It goes downhill with Jessica Kirtsen’s set; the comedian’s delivery and material seem to be at odds with each other. And then, it gets significantly worse when Josh Adam Meyers and his band The Goddamn Comedy Jam takes the stage to deliver a musical comedy piece, which is certainly the lowest point of the show. Even kids who didn’t study anything for their exams would have fared better.
There’s no way that Burr was in his right mind when he curated this set. Actually, none of this would make sense even if Burr was held at gunpoint and asked to come up with a lineup of 10 comics without warning. At some point, Ronnie Chieng appears on the stage to sing Katy Perry’s 'Teenage Dream'. If you are a normal functioning adult, then at this point, your soul would have left your body wondering if this is what Bill Burr thinks is funny, then the world is surely under threat. Because by now, it’s not only disappointing, underwhelming, or even boring. It’s outright shameful. To think some people paid to witness this in person might actually be the funniest gag of the entire showcase.
Bill Burr Presents: Friends Who Kill is currently streaming on Netflix.
Poulomi Das is a film and culture writer, critic, and programmer. Follow more of her writing on Twitter.
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