Bill Burr: Paper Tiger (2019) and Drop Dead Years (2025)
If you’re a fan of gutsy, pull no punches, in-your-face comedy (Chris Rock comes to mind), then you should be thrilled that Bill Burr is back with a new Hulu comedy special, Drop Dead Years (2025). But if you think that comedians who use offensive language and talk frankly about sensitive, even touchy issues go too far, then this one’s not for you.
In his new show, filmed in Seattle, Burr riffs on some of his favourite topics like marriage and raising children, but also the precariousness of men’s health (emotional and physical). This is the origin of the title Drop Dead Years which, as he explains, refers to the period of men’s lives (typically between age 49 and 61) when they just drop dead. Why? What happened? Well, Burr reveals matter-of-factly, “he never cried!” For certain, much of Burr’s comedic brilliance resides in his clear-eyed diagnosis of the limits of men’s emotional intelligence, especially in the arena of marriage.
In one of his last big specials, Paper Tiger (2019), filmed at Royal Albert Hall in the England, this Baaah-ston native displayed “wicked smarts” as he riffed on everything from the lamentable overreach of left wing, cancel culture to the challenges of being married, and revelations about being a fairly new father.
You may know Burr from his hilarious turns in animated movies like Leo (2023) – alongside Adam Sandler – and streaming hits like Old Dads (2023) which he wrote, directed, and starred in alongside Bobby Cannavale (Nine Perfect Strangers [2021]) and Bokeem Woodbine. But Burr got his start in comedy through stand-up in the hard scrabble world of comedy clubs. As he recently related to the besties of Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes during an interview on their podcast Smartless, his career caught fire after a fiery takedown of a brazen heckler at a comedy club gig in Philadelphia, which turned into an attack on the entire audience and, yes, the whole city.
During his set, Burr famously told the Philadelphians that he hoped they went to their Ford Focuses after the show and drove off the side of the Ben Franklin Bridge in their “one bridge having, piece of shit city” that was too inconsequential to be attacked by terrorists. He then went on to call them losers, pointing out that the pride of their racist city was built around a white guy that doesn’t exist – Rocky – whereas a real sports hero like Joe Fraser was sidelined due to his blackness. Later he compared the Philadelphia Flyers NHL hockey team to the ice capades, and related that he had been standing backstage for three hours only to get booed by a G.E.D.-having %$!#*&!# crowd!
We should point out that the white Burr is quite enlightened on racial issues, in large part because his wife is black, and his young children (a boy and a girl, are biracial), a fact of which he speaks proudly and at length in both specials.
In many ways, Burr recalls the tempo, intensity, and technique of the British comedic super star Ricky Gervais. Both of course take pleasure in telling people about their business! But both are also surprisingly compassionate and sensitive men. (If you’ve ever watched Gervais’ Netflix shows Derek [2012-2014], about a 50-something English, autistic elder care home worker or After Life [2019-2022], about a grieving husband desperately trying to find meaning after his wife’s premature death from cancer, nothing else need be said.)
Burr is edgy, but not pointlessly so. He ribs his audiences rather mercilessly, in his 2019 British special, rightfully pointing out their pretensions, hypocrisy, and supposed politeness. He is also great at articulating the limits of traditional heteronormative masculinity in terms of things like men’s (in)ability to identify, share, and process their emotions and deal with their feelings. He does so again in his new special around the issue of death and his fear of (and the futility of) open caskets. In the new special, Burr drills down, exploring the limits of heterosexual male emotions. It is not that straight men don’t feel everything that women do, it’s that they are limited by social pressure to express only two states , that is being fine or being mad. To be anything else is to be stigmatized as outside of heteronormative (coded appropriately masculine) behaviour. Hence, what most straight guys do is grab the “big bag of gay” and swing it over their shoulders and “throw it into the woods!” But, the downside of all of this is, that one day, you grab your chest and….hence the title of the new show, Drop Dead Years.
But an unseemly and untimely death is something that Burr is clearly trying to avoid. In the new special, he reveals that he tried something new, expressing his sadness to his wife. One day when she asked him how he was feeling, he answered honestly, “I’m sad.” But to his chagrin, her response was to say ok and walk away, a reaction that he never dreamed was possible in all of the times he was “made” to help her process her feelings down to the tiniest (and most inconsequential) details. Of sad men he quips that the best place to find them is at home in their own garages, claiming to be working on fixing the “thing” that never gets fixed or at Guitar Center.
Burr also tackles topical, often polarizing subjects. In the new special its the absurdity of how society measures criminality and how race and racism are (mis)understood. He muses about how ridiculous it is to live in a world where the police may ticket you for driving in the carpool lane with only one person in the vehicle, but it is still legal to join the KKK! As Burr aptly notes, their very existence (still, in this so-called enlightened moment) is due to the fact that they “don’t fuck with white people!” In Paper Tiger, he explored the necessity and the overreach of #MeToo which ended up lumping together serial rapists and idiotic, hapless men who lack the looks, charm, and charisma to entice and seduce women without creeping them out. (Not the same thing of course.) He also ably weaves themes throughout his shows, opening subjects like his wife’s bafflement at his emotional immaturity, which he then returns to in the final frames of the 2019 special.
A particularly hilarious bit in Paper Tiger is his exploration of the dramatic recent shift in access to pornography and sex toys. He points out that past generations had to actually go to a brick-and-mortar store to do things like buy pornographic videos, or for the more desperate and lonely males, purchase a plastic inflatable sex doll. Burr uses his body to mimic the movement of the plastic doll coming to life as the hypothetical male buyer gets home and blows air into his new “woman” for use.
In Paper Tiger, Burr also recounts the chasm between his wife’s emotional maturity and his own more stunted state, reciting her constant refrain in their ongoing marital fights when his explosive anger rears its head, “where is this coming from? I don’t understand where this is coming from!” He finally goes on to relate the story of their discovery of their beloved pet dog’s jealousy of their baby daughter and how they came to the difficult decision of giving the dog away. Burr observed in dismay as he heard his wife crying nightly once she understood that the dog would have to go. She was, as he relates, “crying herself into acceptance”.
His approach? Well, you could say it was a bit different. Burr shoved his feelings down until the day finally arrived, when he walked his dog to the door and handed it over to the new owner, said good-bye, and closed the door behind it after which he “cried like a little boy for 0.8 seconds” before he put the lid back on the jar of his emotions, fastened it back, and added it to the “shelf of anger that is in every man’s chest!” After this episode, Burr’s explosive anger returned as did his wife’s lament “I don’t know where all this anger is coming from…”. His point? They (standing in for men and women in relationships generally) are both of course, ridiculous and clueless. Cleary, we see a line between Burr’s partial emotional self-realization in Paper Tiger (2019) and the potential dire medical implications of his denial in Drop Dead Years (2025). But for fans of Burr, we can also see the profound connections across his stand-up and his preoccupations with understanding himself through his most intimate relationships with his wife and children.
Burr’s comedy is about the mundane, the political, the social, and the intimate, and he weaves it all together with his incisive intellect and grudging compassion. It is clear that he loves his life, appreciates his newfound fame, and is a committed family man, and a devoted father, who is profoundly in love with his wife. He is also unafraid to laugh at himself, to call out racism, and to speak bluntly about the stupidity and rigidity of liberal cancel culture. Poignantly, the final image of Paper Tiger is him holding his baby daughter in his arms on stage at Royal Albert Hall. Well done, again. Take a bow Mr. Burr!
