Name: Bill Burr - How I Got My First Job
Uploaded: 2020-09-13T12:32:06.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Bill Burr - How I Got My First Job' from Comedy University on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-09-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Bill Burr - How I Got My First Job' from Comedy University on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-09-13. Transcript available.

You did comedy really young, though, but I know you did a bunch of other shit
before that.
Yeah, I had, I mean, we're going all the way back to my first job.
We're going, yeah, literally, this is how it usually starts.
I say, okay, so Bill Burr, where are you from, and what was your first job?
All right, Massachusetts.
My first job was I had a paper route, or if you want to count shining my dad's
shoes for an allowance.
Okay, that's, I don't count that one, but the paper route.
Nepotism, you can't count nepotism.
No, no, no.
And also, did your parents, did your dad know a guy who got you the paper route,
or was he just like, go fucking figure this out?
I forget how we got the paper route.
My older brother wanted one, and then my dad took him down.
He got one, and he got the foot in the door.
Okay.
Sort of the first guy that goes to Yale in the family, so then we all got paper
routes after that.
I basically had a job since 1978.
I've been gainfully employed except for one year.
Four or five-month period where I was on unemployment.
Sure.
And I felt like a loser, even though I had paid into it.
But that summer, I got jacked.
Oh, yeah.
I got jacked because I was just going to the gym, and I was picking up my check
every two weeks.
I remember going to the unemployment office and running into a woman I went to
high school with.
We were both kind of looking at each other like, yeah, three years out of high
school is not working too well for us, is it?
It was very quick.
I remember it was a very quick, shameful hello.
But, yeah, so I had a paper route, and then I worked at this place.
Hold on.
Quick question about the paper route.
Is this a paper route where you have to go collect?
Because there's a big difference between, oh.
See, that's the worst paper route.
Well, I wasn't good about, you know, keeping records, and then I also felt bad
if people, if they ask too much money.
I've already been yelled at too much in my life, so I would knock, I'd knock a
week off just to, or if they seemed cool, I would maybe tell it to them.
But, you know, but I always had money, so it was good.
Okay, all right.
So, you know, put my football cards and whatever.
Yeah, that's the weirdest part about, like, being a 12-year-old with a paper
route is they're like, and you also have to shake down an old man.
Yeah, well, the worst was the ones they would be, all they got is a 50, and
then you'd collect your whole route, and you'd come back and have the money, be
all excited.
I'm going to see a $50 bill, and they'd be in there with the TV on, and they
just wouldn't answer the door.
You kind of got, yeah, you kind of killed a little bit of your childhood asking
people to pay you the money they owed you in the third grade.
You kind of got to see, like, wow, there's all kinds of different people out
there.
There's the nice, warm, welcoming people.
There's the people that bitch, and there's the fucking deadbeats.
So, you know, I had a few people that they skipped on the rent, and the papers
were piling up for the week, and then I would come, you know, and I would have
to pay for all those papers.
Usually it took me, I wasn't too smart.
It would take me a good 10 days of papers piling up and not smelling a body
that I'd be like, all right, I think they left.
All right, so you did that for a while.
I was in the Burr family business.
I did that from third grade to right to my freshman year.
It was starting to get weird.
My voice had changed.
I was driving a 12-speed bike.
Yeah.
I kind of was starting to look like, shouldn't you be, like, dealing weed or
something?
Like, what are you doing here?
I mean, also, a third grader carrying around, I don't know how many papers you
had, but they had to just destroy you.
That's where your back problems came from.
No, no, it was good.
It was good because it made me a morning person.
So, I had to get up at a quarter to six every morning.
It was 365, quarter to six in the morning, and then on the weekends, sleeping
till seven because they had to be delivered by eight.
That was just, like, the greatest thing ever.
And to this day, I have this weird thing now because now that I became a
comedian, I became a night owl, and I can do either or.
I just need one day of health to switch over, and then I can stay up till four
in the morning, or I can get up at four in the morning.
I just, I don't know.
It's weird.
It's a skill.
Okay.
So, you do that.
Sounds pretty chill.
Only a couple dead people, maybe, by the sounds of it.
Dead beats.
Dead beats.
No bodies.
But I thought they were, like, there were dead bodies in there when you just,
the papers were stacking up.
No, I'm saying I couldn't smell one.
So, when I couldn't smell a body, I was thinking, okay, they must have left.
Okay, okay.
There we go.
So, no dead bodies.
Then you get to high school.
What's the first, now you've got to, like, fill out an application and get a
job at, like, the buckle, or what was that?
I filed for a worker's permit because I couldn't wait to get out into the
workforce.
I remember I had a teacher.
He goes, what is your rush?
You got your whole rest of your life to work.
It's so exciting.
Hang out with your friends.
Yeah, but you want to get out there.
Yeah, I was also introverted, and I was a loser.
So, I might as well at least make money during my alone time.
So, I worked at this place called More Shoe, and I think it was a big shoe
company, and it was right as computers were taking over, but they still needed
people to sort of bridge the gray areas.
So, my whole job was, for, like, three hours, I would have these spreadsheets,
and I would have to look at a number and walk over and pick, it was like a
little manila card that had all these indentations that was going to be fed
into a computer.
And my job was to hand pick those each order for, like, I mean, I don't know
how long.
It was like, the second I got there to, like, 5 or 5.30, I fucking hated that
job.
Yeah, that sounds like a full warehouse job where you're not, you don't have
any warehouse buddies.
No, yeah, that was, we existed between the warehouse and the carpeted area.
Okay.
Where people just sort of passed through on the way to the break room, and it
was, yeah, it was awful.
Because the warehouse can be fun.
You got buds, you're hanging out.
The other area can be fun, you're buds, you're hanging out.
You're just literally a computer.
You're a tiny.
Yeah, warehouse, I had warehousing jobs.
Those jobs ruled.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, good, good.
So, you did that, doesn't sound great.
And then, what do you move on to after that?
Well, I never, I didn't like it, and as was how I was back then, I should have
quit.
Okay.
But my parents instilled two things in me, never quit, and if a situation isn't
working for you,
just don't say anything and continue to plow through it.
So, I learned both of those things.
That was my first job.
I tried to quit, and the woman, it was like a little tourist trap.
She would call my house and leave voicemails on our family answer machine to be
like,
you need to be here someday.
And I'm like, I don't want to go there.
And my parents are like, she needs you.
You have to go.
It's a nightmare.
Yeah.
It's a terrible lesson.
There's a fine line between teaching kid responsibility that life is tough,
and sometimes you have to do things you don't want to.
Yeah.
There's a fine line between that and then teaching somebody to stay in
relationships for years that
aren't working for them.
Both romantic, friendships, business.
I had to unlearn all of that.
So, you don't stay there too long.
Well, it sounds like you stayed there too long.
It wasn't that long a job.
It was sort of a finite thing.
And I remember we would work to 5.30, and the boss would leave at 5.
And one day, I caught her looking over at us, and I knew that, you know, she
knew that we
were fucking off, so they made us leave with her because obviously we weren't
getting anything done.
So, after that, I think I went back to delivering newspapers in the morning,
this time by car.
I had a pickup truck, and I would deliver these things.
I would make money in the morning, then go to school.
And then, after school, I got a job at Cumberland Farms, their original factory,
and I loved that job.
And that was, once again, taking away used computer paper, stocking up computer
paper.
And I was sort of between the warehouse and the carpeted area again, and I just
sort of stayed in there by myself.
I gradually got to know the warehouse guys, but I was really quiet, really shy.
I did that, and then I moved on to this place, Corporate Software, which was,
this is pre-internet.
So, everybody back in the day, if you wanted software, you had to go to this
company, and then go to this company, and go to this company.
They became like a hub where they bought all this software, and you could just
call them,
I need 10 Lotus, I need a box of Lotus, one, two, three, what was some of the,
I'm trying to remember some of the software.
I don't know.
It was so long ago.
Yeah.
So, we would just stock the shelves.
That was my favorite job I ever had.
Okay.
How come?
Why?
You just got to hang out stocking, fucking around?
Because it was good money.
It was great people.
It was a great company.
It was a young company.
Okay.
A growing company.
So, everybody was sort of young and had their whole lives ahead of them.
Christmas parties were great.
Really funny people.
And one of the guys that worked there wanted to do stand-up too.
Okay.
He verbalized it out loud.
So, it stopped being like this fantasy in my head.
It became real.
And I swear to God, if I didn't meet that guy, like, I don't know that I ever
would have tried it.
Because I was just so beaten down.
Right.
At that point in my life.
And how old were you at this point?
Like, into high school or what?
19.
No.
When I started working there, I was 18.
Okay.
And I kept working there 19, 20, 21.
And I had a brief where I left briefly because I was getting concerned about
turning 20.
I needed to have a career.
So, I tried construction and I lasted eight days.
And I was just like, I'm not good at this.
This is beating the shit out of my body.
They basically commandeered my pickup truck and I didn't have the balls to ask
for gas money.
They were totally using me.
So, I worked eight days, quit, and never showed up for my check because I was
too afraid the guy was going to yell at me.
I was really, I was really like, I was a walled off, fucked up little kid.
I got fired.
I was a, don't, I'm not going to come back.
That's fine situation at construction one time where then I was like, I don't
want my paycheck because they're scary fucking guys.
And I was 18.
And my mom was like, I'll go get your paycheck.
And I'm like, don't go near them.
And she, she got it for me, which was, you know, totally emasculating you.
She should have made you go in and get it.
No.
Yeah.
I was like, mom, this is going to make me look worse to these guys.
They already don't like me.
You got to do that with kids early on.
I had a, one time, one of my nephews came to New York when I, when I was still
living there.
And I remember I made him go into a deli.
I go, go in there and get me a paper.
And the paper was like a dollar or something like that.
So I said, you don't have to stand in line when you just get in a paper in New
York.
You just go, you know, post or daily news and put it down.
So he's like, all right.
And he did it.
And then after that, you know, half hour later, I had him hail a cab.
And I just did that for a couple, two, three days.
And then he said like, like the third day, you only stayed for like three days.
By the third day, he goes, man, he goes, I'm starting to feel like a New Yorker.
And I was, and I was doing that because I didn't get that enough when I was a
kid, just for my personality.
My parents were great and everything.
We just had a million kids, so you couldn't really-