Bill Burr’s Old Dads Counsels Men to Submit to their Bitchy Wives

Don’t expect to laugh after the first 20 minutes

Up until a month ago, I thought Bill Burr was a cheeky rebel who had earned justified fame by telling hard truths for laughs—especially about how our present moment encourages women’s worst qualities and turns men beleaguered and suspicious. Hilarious spots like “Epidemic of Gold Digging Whores” gave comic zing to the frustrations of men confronting the stacked deck of modern marriage.

From the first few minutes of Old Dads, the movie Burr co-wrote and directed, it seems as if the story will offer more of the same outrage humor. But it doesn’t. Either Burr couldn’t sustain his satirical edge for the movie’s entire length, or he decided it was a story not worth telling. The results are deeply un-funny.

The main character in Old Dads is Jack, a Burr-like fellow, sarcastic and perpetually enraged at the stupidity of a world increasingly run by feminist viragos and their male lackeys. He is himself under the thumb of his wife, mother of his much-loved son and pregnant with their second child. Jack’s wife is perpetually annoyed with him, happy to mock him to her girlfriends. As a man who has come to family life in middle age, Jack realizes that it is worth any sacrifice. “The fear of losing my family,” he says in voice-over early on in the movie, “is worse than anything I’ve ever faced before.”

Unfortunately, the point of the movie seems to be that at the present time, Jack and every other man alive will have to sacrifice his very soul in order to avoid that nightmare loss. And he will have to be glad to do it as he disciplines and disavows the former self who chafed at bending the knee. It’s a gruesome setup. The women in the movie, moreover, have undisguised contempt for their men. One of them sums up masculinity: “They need us. They know it. It bothers them” and “When it comes to guys, there’s not a lot of layers.” This isn’t apt, funny, or true, but it seems to have resonated for Burr, and it is the ghoulish lynchpin of the story.

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At first it seems that Jack is not quite as badly off as his friend Connor, who is husband to a crazy woman (author of the above quotation) who encourages their little boy in prima donna screams and violence as he develops his personal “ever-evolving moral code.” Connor cannot properly intervene when his son acts out because to do so is to endanger his (already second-class) standing in the family. In one brief, pathetic confrontation between he and his wife at the movie’s end, Connor’s most clearly articulated demand is “I would like to be less afraid of you,” but there seems no likelihood of that in a future in which he will continue to be stifled by his wife’s demands.  

Jack’s other friend is Mike, recently divorced and with grown-up children, seemingly living the good life with an independent young woman—that is, until she discovers she is pregnant; and then the walls of obligation close in on Mike once more. There is some confusion in the script at this point; it seems as if the problem of paternity fraud might be addressed (he has had a vasectomy); but the issue is quickly dropped. All the men’s lives are mirrors of each other at different stages of disenchantment and servitude.

The Burr character is more jauntily defiant than his pals, and in the world of the movie, that’s about the best that can be hoped for. A couple of minutes late to pick up his son at a swanky preschool that his wife hopes will catapult the boy into elite schooling and success, Jack is humiliated by the sweetly all-devouring school principal, who berates him with smug sorrow in front of the other parents. Jack’s temper flares, and for a moment he gives it right back to her.

But it’s only for a moment, and that is ultimately the message of the movie. It’s not worth it to lash out. Soon enough, his wife finds out what he has done, and upbraids him for his alleged indifference to his son’s future well-being. Soon enough, he is making a public apology to the principal in a scene in which she gets her own back and in which her various enablers lecture Jack on how his words harmed them. Soon enough he is ingratiating himself further, volunteering to fundraise for the school.

When he loses his temper one more time, he finds himself locked out of the family home by a wife determined, it seems, to bring him to heel once and for all, or eject him permanently. These are the only choices.

For a few moments, it looks as if Jack, Connor, and Mike have come to the point of a jail break. They’ve all been browbeaten and threatened, humiliated and emasculated long enough. But their escape is tainted from the beginning, a silly casino romp with some cartoonish hookers and blow. It can’t even last a single night; within hours the men are apologizing their way back into the lives of their fed-up and self-justified women, without whom they are lost indeed. At the nadir of his humiliation, Jack sobs in front of his son, “I messed up, I messed up.”

The last we see of Jack, he’s back in the situation he was in at the movie’s beginning, playing with his son on the front lawn of his house under the moderately-approving but always judging gaze of his wife. Now taking anger management therapy, he has his temper more firmly under control. He loves his family too much to risk losing it, and if that means swallowing his pride at the effeminizing tyranny that envelopes him, so be it. The message to men is clear: whatever you think, don’t say it. Concentrate on what it would be like to lose your kids forever.

It’s an understandable position given the punishment for rebellion in our societies. But there is the rather large problem that quietism and obedience are no guarantee of success: the wife may leave anyway, taking one’s money and kids. Maybe she’ll leave because of her husband’s submissiveness. More fundamentally, the solution is no good for kids, especially boys, who need role models of masculine honesty, courage, and truth-telling at least as much as they need an Ivy-League education (and with the recent House Committee grilling of the female presidents of top-ranked schools, we have confirmation that these too are now run by mediocre managing females of the most unprincipled sort).

What’s the point of being in a family if the price one pays is one’s very ability to be a dad? What’s the point if one’s son grows up seeing how dad has been thoroughly cowed by mom?

The depressing Burr message is that modern men have no choice. Anglophone societies of the west are now largely controlled by intersectional feminist teachers, family lawyers, academics, social workers, HR personnel, journalists, and politicians. This establishment serves the needs of the feminist managerial and pundit class—and no one else. In the process, it emasculates men, frustrates women, and imperils children.

In pushing this message, the movie articulates a certain truth, but it is not the whole truth.

The truth is that men do have a choice, if a difficult one. Men can stand up for what they believe in; they don’t have to submit to their own nullification.

I know men who said no to crazy. They got out of abusive relationships, rebuilt their lives. They fought against false accusations. The walked away from demeaning jobs in which they had to assent to lies. Some of them have fought in the divorce courts for years against attempts to prevent them from being a father to their kids. (They did this for their children—but the effects will ultimately be felt by other men and women too.) Many of them are going their own way and creating communities where other men and families can.

It’s not good for men to submit to unjust, unhealthy laws, and Burr is way off base in suggesting that it’s the only sane course of action.

Rumor has it that it’s the course of action Burr chose for himself. Having married actress Nia Renee Hill in 2013, with whom he has two children, Burr has seemingly reveled in his role as a frustrated, grumbling hubby who can never finally get the better of his bossy, quarrelsome wife. He may comically rebel, but she’ll always have the last word because she is the admitted pivot around which the family revolves. Burr may be acerbic and profane, strutting and fretting, but she’s the boss and never lets him forget it. I’ve tried listening to the dialogues in which they (allegedly playfully) duke it out, but I’ve found them entirely banal (if I’m wrong about the rest of Burr’s oeuvre, I’m interested to be pointed towards good work.)

Perhaps Burr is happy in his role despite his frequent carping and bad-mouthing. Perhaps he enjoys making comedy (he’s certainly made a good living) out of masculine frailty and helpless venting of spleen. His encouragement to other men to give up their manhood, however, deserves to bomb with self-respecting viewers.