Bill Burr SNL monologue labelled 'sexist, racist and homophobic'

Comedian Bill Burr has come under fire for his monologue on Saturday Night Live this week.

Viewers may know Burr for playing Patrick Kuby in Breaking Bad, although he has also fronted comedy podcast The Monday Morning Podcast since 2007.

Saturday marked his first time hosting SNL, and it's fair to say it's divided opinion.

Burr's monologue took aim at "woke culture" starting off by making jokes about being "cancelled", which may not be the most original but at least aren't particularly offensive.

But barely a couple of minutes into his routine, he went of on a rant about "white women", referring to them as "my bitches", implying they are all rich and saying they have co-opted the activism of people of colour.

The concept of white feminism failing at intersectionality is not new, and it's true that movements such as the Women's March or the #MeToo have largely centred the experience of white women despite being originated by women of colour.

However for many, a white man at the peak of his career using this as the punchline to a joke did not sit well, and be was called out for the misogyny that drove his comments.

One Twitter user in particular, author and speaker Feminista Jones, explained the issues with his attitude in a thread.

Jones also highlighted the complicity of white men in the oppression of women of colour, which Burr did not seem to understand or address.

And his "joke" about white women accusing Black men of rape was also a source of contention.

A white man making light of the prejudice in law enforcement and engrained racism which has for centuries led to the conviction of Black men for crimes they didn't commit didn't strike people as that funny. Neither did the idea of a man promulgating the suggestion that women lie about being sexually assaulted – a persistent myth which has caused women to be disbelieved and silenced throughout history.

However, others thought that the fact that he was a white man meant he was more likely to be heard, and that him using such a huge mainstream platform to highlight the issues facing people of colour was to be celebrated.

But it didn't end there.

Burr went on to describe learning about Pride Month for the first time last year, and suggested that it was "unfair" that LGBTQ+ people "get the whole of June" given that it's "a group of people that were never enslaved".

He then suggested that Black people should be given July instead, because February is shorter and colder. This bizarre "joke" completely erases the fact that February is the month which celebrates Black history in the US because it coincides with the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation which legally ended slavery, and Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and prominent abolitionist movement activist.

Pride Month is celebrated in June to mark the anniversary of the Stonewall riots on 28 June 1969.

His comments were widely panned by LGBTQ+ people, many of whom saw them as homophobic, and pointed out how counterproductive it is to try and "compare oppressions" of different marginalised communities.

Some also suggested that his rant about celebrations of oppressed minorities might better have focussed on those whose visibility is even more limited.

All in all, the whole thing was a bit of a car crash.

His opening line about being cancelled may have been more prescient than he thought...

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