Karl Puschmann: Can Bill Burr’s Old Dads learn any new tricks in his woke-roasting comedy?

Woke. Culture wars. Cancellation. What a time to be alive! Forget PC gone mad. PC has gone absolutely, stonkingly bananas.

The thing is, it had to. The anti-PC brigade has gone so far off the deep end, you’d need a structurally sound, James Cameron-approved deep-sea submersible to have any hope of ever dragging them back up to the light.

It is in this combative climate that comedian Bill Burr has released his first feature film as co-writer, director and star. It’s streaming on Netflix now and is called Old Dads, presumably because if it carried the more accurate title of Bad Dads, people might have thought of it as a spin-off to Mila Kunis’ moderately successful, moderately humourous franchise.

If you’re familiar with Burr’s cranky stand-up material, then Old Dads is exactly what you think it is. Burr essentially plays himself. His character, Jack, rants and rallies against the world, with every slight against his narrow view of common decency escalating to explosive levels.

Just like Burr’s stand-up persona, Jack finds particular ire with the smug displays of virtue signalling that are so often associated with woke culture. Of course, here it’s elevated to cartoonish levels of righteousness, making them enjoyable targets for Burr’s stinging commentary, to all but the most right-on among us.

Burr’s whole shtick may be that of a cantankerous grump, but to be able to write such devastatingly funny mockeries of PC tropes, you have to understand them and agree with at least the point - if not execution - of them.

Because the thing that seems to bother Burr most is hypocrisy, whichever side of the political divide it comes from. In Old Dads, he goes off on a sarcastic spiel when the snooty, ultra-PC principal of his child’s preschool equates the C-bomb as being as harmful as that most offensive of racial slurs. It’s a bit lifted straight off the stand-up stage.

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Millennials also come under heavy fire for being soft, unbearable or both. Along with the preschool principal, the movie’s second antagonist is the woke corporate tech bro who’s just bought the sports clothing brand started by Jack and his two mates Conor, played by Bobby Cannavale, and Mike, played by Bokeem Woodbine.

Despite them all being in their 50s, they are all at different stages of life. Jack has his preschooler and anger issues, Conor is struggling to accept that he’s no longer the cool young dude that he once was, and Mike is reeling from the fact that despite having a vasectomy, he’s just got his girlfriend pregnant.

The movie plays out almost like three episodes of a sitcom stitched together, with a build-up to an outrageous situation before quickly shuffling on to the next set-up. How funny you find the movie will depend entirely on whether Burr’s abrasive comedy tickles or offends you.

I laughed a lot. Old Dads does not break any new ground, but it achieves what it sets out to do. It’s well-made, if nearly entirely predictable, and because Burr essentially just transplanted his stand-up set straight into Jack’s mouth, it’s often laugh-out-loud funny.

It definitely won’t be for everyone. The professionally offended would be advised to give it a wide berth. But it’s an incredibly easy, mostly funny, watch. And for an old dad like myself, that’s pretty much all I’m looking for out of a Friday night movie.