Jessica Harper Uncanceled

One of the little Netflix warnings tags for this movie is “discrimination”. You know those warnings I’m talking about: the ones that flag things like “alcohol” and “smoking” to help weakling adults make their viewing decisions. What kind of grown-ups benefit from these? “Marty, it says there’s alcohol in this here movie, switch off this minute!”

This is the kind of modern nonsense that Bill Burr despises but his comedy thrives upon, of course. And now he’s been given his own feature-length film (except it’s not a real film, it’s a Netflix film, but let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth) in which he gets a generous 1hr 44mins to expand upon it.

Burr plays Jack (but he might as well have just been called “Bill Burr” for all the difference there is) who had his first kid aged 46 with his wife and is expecting another. His best friends are played by Bobby Cannavale and Bokeem Woodbine, both late-to-fatherhood themselves and both likeable as jaded, put-upon fiftysomethings.

The story opens at a barbecue that Burr and his wife are hosting. When his son cuts his elbow in the garden, Jack / Burr advises him to rub dirt into it. Did this used to be a thing? I presumed it was some old school “cure” but no explanation is offered. When a young dad with  trendy specs comes over and questions the logic of this (there’s a case to be bad for this; minor child abuse?), the fireworks kick off. 

As in his stage act, the laughs are to be had from the disproportionate level of his anger (and there are some good one liners), such as his rant about 30-year-old men on scooters in the road (spoiler: at the end of the movie Burr and chums get scooters to speed to hospital for the birth of Burr’s baby).

So, the story. Yes, there is one. Burr and friends have sold their baseball jersey-manufacturing company to a douche called Aspen Bell (“I’m gonna break eggs because I’m a disruptor”), who’s painted as more of a tech billionaire asshole than someone who’d bother buying a T-shirt company but it’s a small point. His mission is to turn their company into a “gender neutral, carbon neutral, 21st century apparel brand” and he starts by “liberating” everyone born before 1988.

This sets him up as the pantomime villain, with his next act being to send Burr and Co on a mission to the desert to look for someone he wants to use in an ad campaign. They’re forced to take Bell’s serious young deputy, who, when the toxic masculinity gets too high (aka too much fun), encourages them to “evolve”.

“Like your generation?” protests Burr. “Filming yourselves flipping water bottles? That’s progress!” Ha, touché.

The rest of the story concerns the approach of Burr and Woodbine’s impending babies and his – let’s use that word again – toxic relationship with the wokier-than-thou principal of his son’s prestigious school. This involves a scene where he drops a c-word, which many women find beyond the pale, including myself, and put my sympathy for him temporarily on hold. 

“Do you understand that using the c-word is like using the n-word but for women?” says one mom. His answer to this is funny but entirely misses the point. Much as I love Burr, his logic is flawed and when challenged in interviews he sometimes offers simplistic answers that don’t bear scrutiny (can’t find the link to comedian Stuart Goldsmiths telling podcast interview with him, think it must be behind a paywall).

Thankfully the result of the incident is that he has to face “restorative justice” in front of all the other parents (we’re meant to laugh at one mom being upset because her child heard the c-word, but her anger seems entirely justified to me!). 

One of the things Burr must do to make amends is help organise a party at the school. This leads to a parents meeting in which he and Cannavale brainstorm ideas, notably an 80s party, “Miami Vice and blow”. The woke parents of course suggest United States of Gender and when Burr suggests they keep it more mainstream, the PC parents go wild when he adds “and not like turning it into a tranny bar”.

“You can’t say tranny!” says one mom.
“Why, what should it be?” he asks.
“Trans!” all the parents chorus.
“Well, I was close. Trans, tranny… It’s like, ‘Mike, Mikey’…”

He and Cannavale chuckle at this and indeed throughout this meeting at their own dumb ideas, and the fun times they used to have. They laugh in the way young people don’t seem to any any more, probably because most things that are funny might be “offensive” to someone.

Like many stand-ups before him, Burr’s great on screen. We don’t have many spokespeople in film and TV for the over 50s and he of course is more than willing to take on the mantle, and sublety be damned.

Most critics didn’t like Old Dads. There’s a whole raft of negative reviews available. “Old Dads is a smug and puerile attack on millennial life and ‘snowflakes’ — what is it for?” asks The Independent, subscription required. It’s for making people laugh, which is probably why you didn’t get it.

And sad liberals’ bible The Guardian called it “Bill Burr’s angry, unfunny Netflix comedy” and gave it one star (wup, wup waaah). Unfunny? How would a liberal newspaper know what’s funny? Liberals stopped doing funny about 20 years ago. Gooey-eyed lapdancers telling Burr he’s going to make a great dad isn’t funny?

Old Dads made me laugh more than 90% of other films. I loved it. If you think all the woke modern horseshit in the world is great and you can’t get enough of it, you won’t.