Bill Burr's own career is the perfect counterargument to his "cancel culture" tirade

The Atlantic

Burr stuck up for Shane Gillis after his SNL firing, saying on Lights Out with David Spade last week: "None of them care! All they wanna do is get people in trouble!" But as David Sims points out, Burr's recent Netflix special Paper Tiger showed how comedians can push buttons and be inscendiary when it comes to race and get away with it because of its comedy context. "As much as the term would likely provoke an eye roll from Burr, the comedy scene largely remains a 'safe space' for performers to test out all kinds of incendiary jokes," says Sims. He adds: "In comedy, the humor is always going to matter most; it’s perhaps the only notion held sacred by such an irreverent art form, and it’s one worth remembering every time a new set of complaints about 'cancel culture' emerges. Gillis’s jokes flopped because they were not only offensive, but also entirely without perspective—a series of rambling and irrelevant thoughts delivered by a man who seems delighted to mock people he views as different from himself. Burr should understand better than anyone that when stand-ups are onstage, no matter whom or what they’re talking about, the spotlight is always going to be trained on themselves. It’s the sort of legitimate scrutiny that Gillis seems to have been unprepared for."

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• Shane Gillis' firing exposed an underground of conservative comedy: "Mostly they make their homes in podcasting, livestreaming, and radio, putting out hours of content each week for their dedicated fan bases and generally featuring their like-minded friends," says Seth Simons, who originally unearthed Gillis' use of racial slurs. Simons adds: "This is a world whose social norms are decades in the past, populated with comics emboldened by growing digital audiences for reactionary speech."
• Gillis' firing reveals a growing rift in standup comedy: The Gillis controversy "has become a flashpoint revealing a deep and widening rift in the comedy world," says Seth Abramovitch. "Like every other aspect of American life in the Trump era, stand-up is turning polarized, pitting comic against comic in an escalating civil war over what's acceptable humor and what's unfunny hate speech."
• L.A.'s Laugh Factory owner, who famously banned Seinfeld's Michael Richards his 2006 N-word tirade, defends Gillis: “Comedians, they’re allowed to be able to have this freedom of speech,” says Jaime Masada, who founded the popular Sunset Blvd nightclub. “All of that stuff is very important to our culture. ... This poor guy they hired for Saturday Night Live, they hired because he’s funny and he made people laugh. And the next thing you know, they fired him. They ruined this guy’s life.”