Bill Burr

PASS STHE MIC Bill Burr spouts off.

On the surface, Bill Burr looks like any other angry comic whose ignorant rants claim to reveal what everyone is already thinking. “I don’t read,” he boasts in his new special, Why Do I Do This?, which premieres on Comedy Central Saturday 23 and comes out on DVD September 16 (a CD version is already in stores). But while he defiantly rants, leaning forward and lashing the audience with his working-class Boston twang, Burr’s far more perceptive than the lot he’s often thrown in with.

His most YouTubed and possibly most hilarious moment: When a Philadelphia crowd booed him, he scrapped his material and used the rest of his set (around 12 minutes) to spew a free-associative diatribe against the entire city, peppering it every so often with “11 minutes left!,” “eight minutes left!” But the reaction was less an angry outburst than a response to the pointless vitriol coming from the audience—hate was their currency.

On Why Do I Do This?, Burr fantasizes out loud about fist-fighting women and mowing down pedestrians with his car. But instead of coming off as a total psychopath, he often makes sense. If the performance has a fatal flaw, it’s too much flab. Burr actually acknowledges his long-windedness: “You know what I love about that joke? You guys got it after the first example, yet I felt the need to give you 58 more examples.” Perhaps he finds it necessary to expound because he wants to separate himself from the pack of angry comics. He hopes to draw a clear line between racial humor and racist humor, being edgy and being insensitive—he wants to do comedy that’s actually incisive social commentary, despite sounding like an ignorant tirade. He doesn’t always succeed, but every now and then he’ll force you to say to yourself, I was thinking that—even if it makes you uncomfortable.