Stoney Burke (performer)
American musician and comedian
Stoney Burke (born January 17, 1953) is an American street performer and actor based in California. His street performances often emphasize the protected right of freedom of speech in the United States, in spite of his many arrests for speaking freely in public on college campuses, with experts categorizing his work as a form of civil disobedience.
In addition to his public speaking, Burke has appeared in many different film and television shows, including the documentary series The 90's, where he performed unscripted, live street interviews with politicians on the floor of the 1992 Republican National Convention. Burke is also the author of the book Weapon: Mouth–Adventures in the Free Speech Zone (2014).
Early life
Stoney Burke was born Patrick Evans Francis Burke in Highland, Michigan, to a home he describes as "unstable." Social workers removed him from his birth mother and placed him in an orphanage at 18 months old. He was later adopted at the age of three and grew up north of Detroit in Romeo, with Irish Catholic parents who were active in the civil rights movement. He remembers his house being vandalized by racists in the neighborhood at the age of eight. He took the name "Stoney" from the 1962–63 TV series about rodeo rider Stoney Burke, portrayed by Jack Lord.
Career
In 1975, Burke moved to Eugene, Oregon, and enrolled as a dance and theater major at the University of Oregon. He moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1977 to study mime with Leonard Pitt, and soon began performing and commenting on current events.
The public source identifies “Stoney Burke (performer)” as american musician and comedian. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Stoney, Burke and performer.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7619397. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1953, 1992, 2014 and 1962.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stoney Burke (performer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.