Bill Burr injects SNL with some much-needed boldness

The A.V. Club

"Burr is such a strong personality (both in his stand-up and his popular, homemade podcast) that it’s a little odd to hear him in tonight’s monologue explaining that hosting Saturday Night Live is 'a lifelong dream,'" says Dennis Perkins. "Like everything else Burr shows up in, (Saturday's) show tingled with an undercurrent of comic tension, in this case from the incongruity that Burr was hosting SNL at all. On one hand, the gig seems like the sort of thing Burr would make fun of. It’s not that Bill Burr is too big for Saturday Night Live—it’s more that the comic ground he’s staked out for himself feels like it’s off the Saturday Night Live map. Sure, he has the Pete Davidson connection, but, as his monologue showed in its typically uncompromising willingness to piss people off, Bill Burr on Saturday Night Live is a constitutional mismatch. As it turns out, that’s just what SNL needed."

ALSO:

• Why Bill Burr's shocking "white women joke" worked: "The joke Burr made about white women works because he’d already told us he’s in the top tier when it comes to villains," says Karen Valby. "He’d made it clear that white guys are awful and have oceans of atoning before them. But he also took a minute to remind us white women that we have a habit of hijacking moments that aren’t ours to take, like the woke movement, while willfully ignoring our own mess."
• Burr called homophobic over his rant over pride month: "I get the joke," says Kevin Fallon. "The time we’re in can seem like the oppression Olympics, and it can make people not used to the demand for recognition from minority and ostracized groups disoriented. From that perspective, there is something to say about the discrepancies between Pride Month and Black History Month. Maybe it’s a dangerous joke. Maybe it’s a salient point. Maybe now is not the time. This is the first episode of SNL, an influential cultural institution that given the intensity of this political moment has more eyeballs on it than it has in years, to air in the week since it became clear that LGBT+ rights are on the line with a more severe reality than they have been in years with the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett."
• Twitter mostly backs Burr's "white women joke"
• Kate McKinnon breaking character on "Weekend Update" is just what we needed right now
• SNL pays tribute to Eddie Van Halen by showing a clip of his 1987 performance with the Saturday Night Live band