Bill Burr jeers insurance companies post wildfires: "Free Luigi!"

Bill Burr has always had a provocative streak while representing a “common man” perspective in his comedy. So it might be fair to say it’s indicative of the attitude of the average American that Burr would feel comfortable shouting “Free Luigi!” on a nationally broadcast late night television show. Insurance companies, which never had a great reputation to begin with, have emerged as the villains once again in the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires, and Burr didn’t miss an opportunity to snark about them during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Burr’s commentary on the post-wildfire social and political landscape was pointed, to say the least. “I love how all the chatter out there is about bands of illegal immigrants and homeless people lighting fires. They light fires everyday, they’re living outside, it’s fucking cold. And this theory that some homeless guy without a car went all the way from Altadena to the Pacific Palisades, what’d he have? A hang glider?” Burr scoffed. “They talk about looting, but CNN and Fox News are not going to bring up the insurance companies that are just going to keep everybody’s premiums and still give themselves a bonus.” After an enthusiastic call to free alleged United Healthcare CEO assassin Luigi Mangione, Burr added, “I love how they acted surprised” about the murder, “like, ‘Uh, why did that happen?’ … He wrote on the bullets why it happened!”

From the smirk on his face, it’s clear Burr enjoyed treading into controversial territory (“I never left Luigi,” he joked at the end of the bit). But that’s not the only thing he enjoyed. “The funny thing when that CEO got whacked was watching CEOs have to be uncomfortable,” he told Variety in a recent interview. “I’m sure they didn’t learn anything, but it’s like: This is how you make everybody feel day to day as you apply pressure because ‘that’s how business is done.’ How you leave this burning wreckage of destroyed lives as you ‘restructure’ and ‘consolidate.’ It was fun to see them worry.”

The online support for Mangione in the wake of the violence would suggest that there are others out there sharing Burr’s schadenfreude. In the same Variety interview, Burr said that all sides of the political spectrum are targets (for jokes, in this case). “I make fun of the whole thing because I don’t feel that politicians work for us. They work for the super rich, and they’re grossly underpaid so they’re open to bribery. It gives regular people something to get mad at,” he explained. In the case of the fires, he theorized that most of the criticism of the disaster response “is just bots,” adding, “I think it’s treasonous behavior to politicize everything, keeping regular working people at each other’s throats. That is only good for one group of people, and it’s not working people.”