[Bo Intro Song]
0:00 [Bo singing in heavy autotune] My voice is so fucking natural. It's naturally good! [Off Key] It’s naturally good. [Heavy Autotune Resumes] It's naturally good!
This is the end of the song, and the beginning of the show! Welcome to the show :)
Hello~ I am back, and I’m back with more sweet sweet Bo Burnham content [laugh]. I loved adventuring with you guys through the last podcast where we broke down just one song: “How The World Works”. That song in itself just deserved it’s own episode. It was my favorite, and it dealt with a lot of International Relations jargon which I love love love.
So, today, we are gonna be talking about the metamorphosis of Bo Burnham’s entire career and how all 3 of his comedy specials actually intertwine with each other, as they are very connected content wise. So, We’ll be talking about Bo’s struggle with his own concepts of himself and his authenticity. And if his special “Inside” represented a Pretentious Self-Importance, disguised as Woke Self-Reflection. Uh Oh [laughs] So, we’re gonna kind of break it down and---and evaluate his authenticity, and if it was supposed to be authentic, and these weird feelings that people got after finishing his special, we’re gonna deep dive on that.
So, welcome to the Adventure With Me Podcast where we take deep dives through media, art and literature to explore exactly why we think the way we think, question what we believe and learn something new. I’m your host Reese! And I’m SO EXCITED you decided to adventure with me today. You can visit HewwoReese.com for more blogs, podcasts, YouTube Videos, Deals and more. Thats HewwoReese.com H e w w o r e e s e .com
1:37 So, Bo Burnham… [giggle] his brand in itself is a doozy. He has a career in a niche brand of self-aware musical comedy. So let me give a brief background on our comedian here, he is very self aware, if I have not mentioned it enough, so much so that it hurts. And he focuses on musical comedy, and usually performs stand up comedy. So it’s like musical theatre one man show type of stuff.
As a kid at 16, Bo Burnham started on YouTube in 2006, doing YouTube parody music that was edgy & honestly it just didn’t age well like most things from the internet from that time frame. And Bo himself considers his early work quote “offensive” [laugh] and we’ll go more into that later as we talk about like cancel culture, personal responsibility, personal morality change and accountability.
So, Bo went viral early and completely on accident. He wrote a parody song ("My Whole Family..Thinks I’m Gay.") and filmed himself performing uhm and singing, doing piano in his bedroom. And he uploaded it to YouTube, which in 2006 was relatively…like…not known? I don’t think I knew about it back then. And he uploaded it to YouTube so he could send it to his brother. Before he knew it, the video amassed over 10 million views. So, Oops :)
3:20 His career was springboarded since then. Bo has a long resume but some of the most well known are Zac stone’s gonna be famous in 2013. I’ll grace yours eyes and ears from a clip from that:
Andy: I’ll come back later”
Bo: No, really? Brother :) What are you Talking about? Come In~
Andy: No, really….it can wait”
Bo [imitating Gordan Rmasey]: Andy seriously, Come in. *sniff* GET OUT OF MY F****** KITCHEN M8. GET THE F*** OUT YOU LITTLE S***. BORN AND RAISED IN LONDON. SWEEPING F****** CHIMNEYS. COOKIN’ ON COBBLESTONE M8. YOU DON'T KNOW ME. GET OUT OF MY F****** KITCHEN *kiss*
In that same year of Bo’s MTV show [2013], we get his first stand up comedy special “What”. It was a standard musical comedy performance. Though Bo definitely was not the first musical comedian, Bo Burnham was still shockingly different for his time. He was a one man show and incorporated live voice editing such as autotune as long pre-recorded material, which was very very different for the time. Here’s an excerpt:
Voice in the Distance: My friend's old roommate's friend said he knew you in high school and you became a real asshole once all this comedy stuff started happening. Wh--what is it man? You think you’re better than us? You think you’re better than us cause you’re tall? Wow congrats man, you’re tall. WOOOOW.
His 2013 special “what” hits as very run of the mill musical comedy compared to his next live comedy special “make happy” released 3 years later in 2016. Where Bo Burnham really takes a sharp artistic turn in subverting our expectations of what his musical comedy special is expected to be. I do want to add that people say that “what.” was a better show but I don't think it's a fair comparison to compare the two. “what.” was more for the people and Make Happy was more for himself. He spoke about things he felt strongly about rather than stuff the people could relate to. I loved both shows in their own way for different reasons
5:04 That being said, I did prefer make happy, his later special, and he lured us in from normal jokes about huge chipotle burritos the size of your head and hands to big to fit inside of a pringles cans, and then in that same song hits us with this:
5:23 Bo Singing in “Make Happy: “Come and watch the skinny kid with the steadily declining mental health and laugh as he attempts to give you what he cannot give himself”.
Bo here, is experimenting with questioning the notion of “what is funny”, a question that he loves to ask in all of his shows. And he’s showing us this gray area exists in comedy. He takes a song that starts on the surface level issues such as Chipotle burritos [being huge] and [hands too big to fit into] pringles cans and then connects it to how we want to talk about those things as a means to escape, and how that makes him feel guilty. Because he has a captive audience who will listen to him and discuss. And he admits that theres a lot of luck that got him where he is today. So should he be using his influence for something greater? The song itself is representative of his internal struggles as a performer, and he can freely point out why that makes him uncomfortable and we can all still laugh because it's not like it's something we didn’t know, It’s just something that isn’t openly talked about especially by performers themselves.
6:35 Part of being an influential artist usually comes with this belief that you’re a type of “role model” or in your little way you’re “healing the world with comedy”, but Bo struggles with those platitudes.
7:00 So it is very apparent that Bo at this point in 2016 is struggling with his personal identity both as a person and as a performer, and at this point Bo decided to take a break from performing. His next comedy special isn’t until 2021, almost 5 years after Make Happy. And at the beginning of his 2021 special “Inside” Bo is honest with us and tells us that he stopped performing onstage due to his anxiety because he would have panic attacks on stage. So during this break from performing for us in front of the camera, Bo writes and produces: 8th grade.
In 2019 his film"8th grade" is about kids who grow up with social media, and how the world differs widely between 2 generations of kids, namely gen z and the younger millennial crowd, that they’re age wise- so close but have hugely different social experiences because of technology, and the prevalence of social media, and that generational divide is something that Bo hones in on in his movie, here’s an excerpt from highschoolers asking the 8th grader when she first got snapchat:
8:00 Highschooler: When Did you first get Snapchat, like what grade?
8th Grader: 5th Grade
Everyone: WHAT? 5th GRADE? Yo. See.
I’m the same age as Bo, around the same age, and I didn’t have social media until I’ll say…highschool? Maybe freshman year? When I got a myspace? Hehe. And Youtube just started like a year before that I think and, so, I saved myself some embarrassment being tardy to the party on that, and Bo goes in on that a lot.
8:30 But for people who have had access to social media at a much younger age. There’s not only the pressure of a perceived importance of an attractive and likable online persona, but there’s this unspoken expectation to keep up with those appearances when you go to school, and the stress that type of performance brings on a child, especially as young children growing into adult hood and as their learning and growing and developing, so is their concept of self. So they’re susceptible to be pressured to live up to an incredible standard where nothing else matters except likability and acceptance from peers at the detriment of their wellbeing.
And as we know, entertainment is widely used as a form of escapism. And though social media is not entertainment per say in terms of self expression, Bo still recognizes the performance aspect that comes with self expression because of the expectation of expressing yourself through social media platforms. So, you don’t just express yourself as a person on social media you write, rewrite and perform the ideas or concepts of self in the hopes of interaction and praise by others. You post with the expectation of likes, hearts and follows by either people you do know and love or people you don’t.
10:00 And for Bo, as a performer, in a social climate where people are expected to play characters of themselves online and live up to that persona, he struggles a lot with his own concepts of self and his authenticity. And I so believe that is why Bo took such a long 5 year break from performing to do this film. If he, as an adult struggles so much with feeling this intense pressure of likable performativity, how debilitating must it be for a child to have kind of unlimited access to a perpetual appearance and personality mirror that comes in the form of a phone or a laptop.
10:30 It’s important to bring up that during Bo’s last performance in “Make Happy” Bo is first introducing these concepts of not only his own experience performing in comedy, but how in life how we perform for eachother all of the time. So this is an excerpt from his 2016 special.
11:00 [Bo performing: Me Generation] .I was born in 1990 and I was sort of raised in America while it was a cult of self expression. And I was just taught, y'know, express myself and have things to say, and everyone will care about them! And I think everyone was taught that. And I was just taught, y'know, express myself and have things to say, and everyone will care about them! And I think everyone was taught that. And I was just taught, y'know, express myself and have things to say, and everyone will care about them! And I think everyone was taught that.
They say it's like the “me generation” it's not. It's not the arrogance is taught, or it was cultivated it's it's self-conscious. That's what it is it's the it's conscious of self. What social media is…it’s just the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform. So the market said here, perform everything to each other… all the time for no reason, it's prison. It's horrific. It is performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member. I know very little about anything, but what i do know is that if you can live your life without an audience… You should do it.”
Here he is, a widely successful performer, telling people to live without an audience if he can, yet he admits he craves that same attention and acceptance from that same audience. So he realizes that irony and in some way the hypocrisy but at the same time he’s being genuine about his sentiment of living without an audience and these thoughts end up really destroying him in his special “Inside” because of how much they clash.
Remember Make Happy subverted our expectations, giving us a balance of comedy and existential dread concepts but the tone in inside was clearly much darker. That being said, Eighth Grade was an excellent film for anyone at any age. Especially if you’re someone who finds it difficult to empathize with younger people and their experiences, this movie would be a fantastic watch.
And then after Bo’s finishes his film 8th grade he moves on to make his brand new comedy special “Inside” for 2021. Bo said that he was ready to come back and perform and well, the pandemic happened and he just wasn’t able to perform live anymore. Life’s irony is so cruel, but there are some things in life that you cannot control and with that Bo made his first non live comedy special “Inside”.
And something that I loved so much about Bo Burnhams live stage performances was how good he was at controlling, manipulating and engaging the crowd. But even with his edited content, his non live content, in his non live medium, he’s still able to manipulate and engage with us, and this was something I wasn’t expecting coming into his special “Inside”
14:00 So although we had a 5 year gap between “Make Happy” and “Inside” the specials work as a direct transition and literal progression from one special into the other. Bo makes this clear visually as he is seen exiting one door at the end of make happy in 2016 and entering the same door into the same room in “inside” in 2021. And i loved that because it makes complete sense content wise.
But remember, make happy subverted our expectations, starting light and getting heavy but inside however, is a direct transition into that existential dread from the last 15 minutes of make happy as he is struggling with his own concepts of self and needing the approval of an audience. Bo in the very end of Make Happy ends by addressing the audience with this song:
15:00 Bo Singing “Are you Happy”
So if you know or ever knew how to be happy
On a scale from one to two now, are you happy?
You're everything you hated, are you happy?
Hey, look Ma, I made it, are you happy?
We felt like Bo was willing to be sad if it made us happy, and he’d figure it out, because as he admits after all he’s privileged he has money, fame, attention, and after all he gives people that escapism of entertainment and I genuinely think he felt like that was enough for him and he’d end up figuring it out, if we’re happy he’d be alright.
16:00 But Inside’s tone walked a line of cynicism and he really struggled between overthinking and his desire to be apathetic. And that type of struggle is something that a lot of people face in the wake of this “woke” culture we’re experiencing. I think this work exists as a commentary to challenge the type of binary that currently exists within this woke culture. The binary being Either being woke is good or being woke is bad. You, as a person, and as a performer, you are either 100% unproblematic or you did something wrong once so you need to be deplatformed. I genuinely believe he regrets some of the things he’s said in the past, such as the “My family thinks I’m Gay” video that made him rise to fame because though the video was not done in malice, it was done in ignorance and he was complicit in prejudice against the LGBTQ community.
So here, living most of his life in the public eye, we see him struggling to forgive himself because he knows that he was sixteen and didn’t know better, and he wants to do better now, but even though he’s doing better now, and he tries not to punch down with his comedy is that even enough. These are the things that he’s asking himself in this special.
So he can’t stop these deeper existential thoughts but then at the same time he’s thinking I wish I didn’t care so much so I wouldn’t have to think so much but wait does that make me a bad person if I don’t consider these deeper issues.
Bo really fears being a tone deaf celebrity. For example, you guys remember when in the wake of the pandemic with celebrities singing imagine in their mansions, generally removed from the harsher realities of the pandemic, they sang while most citizens are wondering if tests are coming and if their doctors will have enough masks, if they’ll still have a job in 2 weeks, how they can possibly afford a hospital stay if them or their child gets sick. Ellen saying isolation in her mansion was “like a prison”. And they could genuinely be struggling, sure, people with privilege can struggle and feel isolated but its more of a “damn do you not have eyes and see what the rest of the world is going through, read the room”
17:42 So, I really do think Bo struggles with even saying he’s struggling or lonely because he feels like he doesn’t deserve to. Bo begins his 2021 special “Inside” with the lyric: “Roberts been a little depressed nooooo”
Interestingly enough he refers to himself as Robert instead of Bo for the first time in any of his specials. I find this as a nuanced way to let us know, his persona as Bo has been causing his own self Robert to become depressed. In his prior works we see him express that living as a persona as Bo can cause harm to your sense of self.
And he continues with the song.
And so, today, I'm gonna try just
Getting up, sitting down, going back to work
Might not help, but still, it couldn't hurt
I'm sitting down, writing jokes, singing silly songs
I'm sorry I was gone
But look, I made you some content
What we all try to do when we’re not feeling right is get up, sit down, and get to work, and it doesn’t help. But you get by a little bit everyday. What makes this line disturbing though is because Bo isn’t just sitting at a desk filling out forms like I do, his job is to make us happy. His job is to make us like him, and present and perform for us. And we can think that sounds easy, but Bo has shown us its not for him.
20:00 As we saw in his 2016 special make happy it made him happy to make us the audience happy, but here, it doesn’t anymore. Instead of being proud it sounds like a chore or an obligation. In the song he apologizes for his absence. And he spends the entire Inside special miserable because he knows it’s his job to make us happy but he’s struggling to do that in good conscience now because of this hyperawareness of the inequality, pain, and general unhappiness that most people face. So, he struggles with comedy now because his awareness and self reflection causes guilt.
And the viewer really feels that struggle from Bo. and it feel uncomfortable because of this
metanarrative that messes with the viewers ability to know when we are seeing a genuine struggle vs. artistic expression or if this is all a meticulously staged fictional breakdown. And I think this blurred line of authenticity sits a bit off for most people because Bo definitely can come across as pretentious, but the thing is is that he’s aware of it. He goes between this tension of wanting so badly to be honest and authentic and the factors which make it difficult for him to do so because of his money, his fame, and white privilege. Because I have followed Bo’s growth as a performer, I personally believe he actually want to help people, but is bound by his own narcissism and greed, which is a theme that is explored so much in his past work.
But I can’t help but KNOW that Bo has this opportunity if he wanted to, to not be honest at all. Because after all, this is a show, a performance. He’s PERFORMING being vulnerable. He’s carefully deciding how to look and sound vulnerable. It’s written, planned, and rehearsed, and edited. But when are we not? We dress, speak and present ourselves differently in different situations. Sure this special is 100% performative; but it doesn’t exactly matter if his emotions and breakdowns are real or for show, because it's about the concepts of how disillusioned performance feels.
I've live-streamed myself singing, I’ve streamed video games and gotten anxious and frustrated and sad when people would join and leave. But why do I bother live-streaming instead of just singing alone or playing a game with my friends and family? Why bother setting up my laptop to even edit this video and record a podcast for people I’ll never see on the other side?
I must be crazy, or neurotic or this egotistic maniac who wants attention. Or do I just have a desire to share with people myself, and my thoughts, and my experiences. I get what Bo is getting at. On any scale, we just want to be seen as authentic, and for some more than others creativity and expression is one way to give the world a little window into what makes us, us.
I’ve seen some really harsh internet criticism of Bo’s work, especially inside, people saying his special comes off as Pretentious Self-Importance Disguised as this Woke Self-Reflection. Or criticizing Bo for struggling at all with this “white guilt” and having “white existentialist dread”, which Bo would agree with these sentiments, and of course is all true, but it is not all that his art encapsulates. What makes Inside unique is that there’s a self-aware about his privilege, and his luck. And we watch what happens when someone who is used to getting all that attention is starved of it. He's a YouTube kid who was able to rise to the top through talent. But that comes with a dark side, and he's just trying to engage with all of those challenges while challenging himself with the literal deconstruction of his identity and sense of reality.
The question of Bo showcasing his struggles of showing his authenticity and actually being sincere vs. being pretentious is fair. And we can have our evaluations but we wont know his intentions. What we do know is that he tried to make a comedy special, and failed, because it goes off the rails asking what's funny, if he has the right to laugh at a time like this. Even if he was a complete egomaniac and an insufferable person, you see all of that be stripped away and what's left is a sad man who craves attention and praise, and got lucky and has everything he ever could’ve want but he’s not happy. And as he’s alone and left to deal with serious mental health issues.
If you have any compassion at all, despite what the authenticity of the performance itself, the sentiment is real, and it's a really devastating thing to watch.
The very last minutes of his special end with the song “it'll stop any day now". A sentiment we all tell ourselves not only since the beginning of this pandemic but it is something we tell ourselves to get through rough periods in our life “it'll stop any day now” witch is of course, a comfort but it's not true, at least in the way I have experiences healing.
And that’s what makes art so fun right? It’s all interpretation. There isn’t a right or wrong way to feel something, we’re all just working through our self awareness of WHY something makes us feel a certain way. And we expect things to work the same with comedy. We just wanna laugh because something is funny, we don’t want to think about it, we just want to escape.
And even this whole time when Bo was pointing the camera at himself, he manages to make me think more introspectively as if he’s pointing the lens at me asking, well...what are you laughing at?