Bill Burr sat down with Variety for the inaugural episode of “Anatomy of a Joke,” a new video series spotlighting stand-up comedians and the process behind one of their favorite punchlines.
In “Drop Dead Years,” Burr’s Emmy-nominated Hulu special from earlier this year, the comedian gets vulnerable about confronting his mental health issues.
“I found out recently I have, like, depression issues,” Burr says in the special, to scattered laughter. To some, this was a stunning admission from the Boston-born comic, finally ready to crack open the hard-shell reputation he had built for decades on the road.
“The ‘Sad Men’ bit came about from being a sad man,” Burr tells Variety. “I thought I was regular, normal, whatever that is. And then I took mushrooms a couple of times, and I learned some things … stuff that I didn’t think affected me, affected me.”
The 57-year-old comic says his first mushroom trip was “insane,” and the central joke of “Drop Dead Years” arose after three or four experiences with the psychedelic drug.
“The first time I did [mushrooms] was the most learning,” Burr says. “Somebody said to me one time, ‘Anger is just pain. It’s just hurt.’ And I started thinking about that. … It’s just the next logical question: ‘Well, why am I hurt?’”
Burr says he trips once every year to 18 months because “I really respect mushrooms.” “I don’t just do them to do them, to be goofy,” Burr says, before admitting, “I did one time when I went to a Billy Joel concert. It did not turn out well.”
In “Drop Dead Years,” Burr examines his past tendency to wall off his feelings, joking that, growing up, he was conditioned to compartmentalize his emotions and set them aside in a “giant bag of gay.” Now, he realizes communication is key to addressing mental health issues.
“Mushrooms kind of brought that out,” he says of his newfound vulnerability on-stage. When he began performing material about his sadness, he knew it had to be a major subject in a special.
“As I was sort of playing with it on stage, the reactions that I was getting from the guys, the way that they were laughing, let me know that I was onto something that was beyond myself,” he says.
Watch Burr break down the “Sad Men” joke below, in Variety‘s first episode of “Anatomy of a Joke.”