Stand up comedian Bill Burr has been getting a lot of screen time lately. Chances are you’ve seen him in a guest appearance on New Girl, in his regular role on Breaking Bad, or maybe in his early days on Comedy Central. His IMDB page is full of movies you may have seen him in too, like 2010’s Date Night starring Tina Fey and Steve Carrell and 2012’s Stand Up Guys. He’ll appear in two more comedies this year: The Heat, starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, and Walk of Shame with Elizabeth Banks.

But this week, Burr will roll into Charleston for the first time to perform his stand up routine, proving he’s still just as funny off screen, unscripted and unedited.

Burr got his start as a regular on the second season of Chappelle’s Show. Afterward, he went on to do his own hour-long specials on Comedy Central: Bill Burr: Let It Go and Why Do I Do This? Making regular appearances on the late night circuit with Conan O’Brien, David Letterman, and Jimmy Fallon gained him notoriety for his signature uninformed logic.

“I don’t read, so I just watch stuff on TV and I start piecing things together in my own paranoid world,” Burr says of his material. “Stuff about the dollar collapsing and growing your own food and fighting zombies, stuff like that.”

And when it comes to his film work, he keeps things varied. “I like doing both [comedies and dramas] and I plan on doing that throughout my career, bouncing back and forth,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to just do dramas, I wouldn’t want to just do comedies. I’d like to be in as many different kinds of movies as I can. It’s just fun.”

Despite his silver screen success, Burr says he’s not ready to give up the mic when it comes to doing live comedy. This spring he sets out for another U.S. tour with an hour of entirely new material. “I am a stand up comedian and I always will be,” Burr says. “I have no intentions of stopping.”

Unlike seeing him on the screen, his live show audiences get to see Burr as he jokes about his reactions to the world around him. “It will be my usual ignorant thoughts on the world,” he says. “You’ve got a mixed bag of everything — a little pop culture, a little personal stories, a conspiracy theory, and then whatever strikes me that day.”

Burr is used to improvising and talking off the cuff, which he does every week on his popular Monday Morning Podcast. Listeners can send in questions and tune in to hear his rants about his week, his girlfriend, and anything else on his mind following the weekend.

“I remember when I had a day job, I hated it and I hated Mondays,” Burr says. “So I figured I’d put it out on Monday and give people something to look forward to at the start of the week. It’s pretty over-the-top and it’s fun.”

His stand up show should offer more over-the-top fun, he says, and he thinks Charlestonians will like it despite the fact that he’s not a Southerner. “Just come on out to the show and see a Yankee do some stand up,” he said. “You’ll have a good time.”


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