Why Was Bill Burr Conan O’Brien’s Surprise Podcast Guest?

On Sunday night, Conan O’Brien hosted a live taping of his podcast Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend featuring a surprise special guest: Bill Burr. The balder red-haired comedian is currently under fire for his decision to perform at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, especially because Burr refuses to be cowed by the angry comments from fans and other comedians. 

“The general consensus is, ‘How dare you go to that place and make those oppressed people laugh, you fucking piece of shit! I can’t believe you went to that place. I can’t find it on a map, and this bot said I was upset about it so now I am,’” Burr said to O’Brien, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s one thing to wear clothes made by sweatshop labor. It’s quite another to go to the factory and make ‘em laugh. I can’t believe how much anger I had about this issue after it went viral.”

Bill, to borrow your fucked-up metaphor, you didn’t perform for the people who were “working in the sweatshops.” You performed for the people who owned, operated and managed them. Please, grow up. 

But the secondary story to all of Burr’s defensive statements is the venue he got to make them in. Clearly, there’s been no shunning of the Riyadh comedians; Aziz Ansari has already made an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, though he did receive some questioning from the late-night host. O’Brien, too, made sure to broach the topic with Burr. Yet the approach is a few wrist slaps for taking blood money from the Saudi royal family, before we can all get back to laughing together. 

That might work for the brethren of comedians, who seem to forgive all sorts of bad behavior from their fellow funnymen. But it won’t be so easy for the fans to forget, as evidenced by the O’Brien audience members who walked out of Sunday night’s live taping. 

“I was really interested when Bill was revealed as the surprise guest. He’s a smart guy, I’ve always enjoyed his contrarian takes, and I was curious how he’d respond to all the flak he’s been getting for the Riyadh comedy fest,” one person wrote on the r/Conan subreddit. “Instead, he went on a bizarre rant about how he did such an incredible act of good by doing this festival and that anyone upset at him is a moron who doesn’t know where Saudi Arabia is on a map and must think everyone there is a machete-wielding, people-beheading psychopath because they’ve never actually been to the country like he now has.”

The post continued: “We couldn’t believe how self-righteous he was about it all, talking about how because he went and performed comedy there, he helped advance the people over there to be ‘closer to where we’re at,’ that he’s now able to see that the Saudis are people just like us because they like the same jokes, that his critics are just bots, and that the only way to make money these days is to troll and outrage people.”

The Redditor expressed frustration that O’Brien didn’t interrupt Burr’s tirade. After it kept on, they reported walking out of the taping. “So disappointing and off-putting, and after realizing no one on that stage (Conan, Sona or Matt) was gonna try to have an honest conversation with Bill, just agree with everything or stay silent, we were hoping it would move on but after a while it didn’t seem like Bill wanted to talk about anything else so we just left,” they wrote, adding that the audience seemed “split.” 

Burr may be accusing bots of driving the outrage against him, but it’s clear real people who held him in high esteem aren’t willing to sit through his explanations either, even as his fellow comedians don’t give him any real pushback.