Talking comedy between sets with Adam Burke - Chicago Reader (2024)

Adam Burke had an hour between Laugh Factory sets to talk to me. The 48-year-old Chicago comedy iconoclast and I exited the noisy theater and began walking down Broadway, on the lookout for a quiet bar for an interview. It was a chilly Friday night in late May, the first truly nice night of the summer, and the street was packed with people looking for a way to spend it. Before we’d left the Laugh Factory, Burke asked why he was being interviewed. “What prompted this?” he said.

It was a mystifying question considering the guy’s history. Burke has been a Chicago comedy scene staple since he started slinging jokes in 2009. He had just released his second comedy album, Weaponized Empathy, in February through A Special Thing Records. He had opened for giants like John Mulaney, Hannibal Buress, Maria Bamford, and John Oliver. Scene geriatrics will remember that 2009 was also when he and Cameron Esposito started the popular open mike at Cole’s Bar. He was a writer on WGN’s Man of the People With Pat Tomasulo and is a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! Goddamnit, he was even voted 2014’s best stand-up by the Chicago Reader (the paper you are Chicago-reading!).

“Because you’re everywhere,” I’d told him.

Weaponized Empathy
A Special Thing Records, astrecords.com, $8.99

Before the interview, Burke had laid out his weekend to me as we coordinated a time to meet over Messenger. It included two Laugh Factory sets on Friday, along with shows the following Saturday and Sunday. Though he had always been interested in comedy, the “four stand-up sets in three days” lifestyle was never the long-term goal. “I liked making jokes, but I liked making them quietly at parties,” he explained.

A “shy” (his word) person from Northern Ireland by way of Australia, Burke spent time in Texas before landing in Chicago in 2004. As the legend goes, in 2006 Burke was tasked with covering the city’s stand-up scene for Chicago Social, and it would inspire him to take a crack at the open-mike circuit.

Adam Burke, the résumé, is prestigious and venerable, but don’t let that scare you. Adam Burke, the man, is down-to-earth, humble, and self-aware. The latter was partly the inspiration for the title of Weaponized Empathy. The album is all about coming to terms with the self-serving element that guides our predispositions, morals, and opinions. “If anything, it’s about calling out my own bullsh*t,” he said. “We can be morally correct, but that doesn’t always make us right. Rightness is such a human, fuzzy-math kind of thing.”

Burke and I found a noisy bar a block and some change down from the Laugh Factory. I shouted a question to him about why his first album, Universal Squirrel Theory, also released via A Special Thing Records back in 2012, hasn’t received a follow-up until now. “I can’t explain the ten-year gap,” Burke shouted back. “I’m not bragging, but I say I’ve probably gone through about two hours or three hours of material [in the last ten years]. . . . There might be like three minutes that hang around, but stuff gets shunted out.” The high joke turnover works well within the quick and dirty 20-minute sets Burke is accustomed to, but it can make the task of wrangling an hour seem more complicated.

There’s no wrong way to do a comedy album, but Burke said that his favorite albums focus on capturing a moment within a comedian’s career. “I just relistened to No Respect, Rodney Dangerfield’s 1980 album. He’s got ten years of just killing it on the [Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson], and then he finally puts out this album. It’s one of the most perfect comedy albums, but it’s not the modern conception of a comedy album. It’s just his f*cking set at his nightclub.”

Listen to No Respect and you’ll be surprised by how small the crowd feels, a far cry from Kevin Hart–style stadium specials. At one point, Dangerfield runs out of jokes and starts taking audience questions. In his sets, Burke will often build up a scenario for a joke, then deconstruct that scenario for a few more jokes, and end with a jab at himself deconstructing everything like a nerd.

“[No Respect] truly is the perfect record of what it would have been like to see Rodney Dangerfield at that moment in time,” he said. “You want someone to hear your album and go, ‘Yeah, that’s what they’re like.’”

You can judge someone’s passion for something based on their ability to talk shop about it. That’s when you really unearth those grimy details about the process that fellow geeks run toward and Tinder dates run far, far away from. I asked Burke about his writing process, and without hesitation he threw a tiny notebook on the table. “I’m one of these guys,” he answered. Burke’s joke flow state comes in waves, more often than not on a bus or train in between gigs. You can still find Burke regularly testing material at open mikes, where he works to break chunks of new ideas down into digestible bits.

“It sounds so pretentious—it is kind of like you’re at the potter’s wheel, where you get it down to kind of this smaller shape of the vase you want,” he said. Though he stressed that it’s wrong to apply a single writing philosophy to all forms of comedy, Burke said that a telltale sign of a good joke is when both the audience and the comedian can easily identify that it’s over. “It’s a combination of the magic trick and the point of the presentation.”

He needed a moment before we left for the interview, so to kill time I leaned up against the wall opposite the Laugh Factory bar and pretended to be on my phone so I could eavesdrop on the other comics as they’d swap praise and feedback on each other’s sets. Once again, pure shop talk—no different from engineers working on the Blue Line or scene kids after a Beat Kitchen set. Burke was among incredible company that night, sharing the bill with vets like Hannah Roeschlein, Ian Abramson, and Deanna Ortiz. A lot of our interview time was spent praising other comics, which Burke admitted is more exciting than talking about his own material. (Our mutual conclusion: it’s unf*ckingbelievable the amount of comedy talent in Chicago.)

The inside-baseball stuff makes for a fun conversation, but Burke said that he and every other comedian would prefer it if you just caught one of their shows. “The great thing about comedy is I can do the bit the best I can, and there are still people who are like, ‘I don’t get it.’ And that’s great. If there were a formula, what would be the point? If everybody likes it, then who gives a f*ck?”