BO BURNHAM Words by MERISSA BLITZ Photos by CATHERINE POWELL
“It’s so funny because it’s now insanely, nine, ten years ago,” says Bo Burnham about the beginning of his career as we sit in his dimly lit greenroom at the PlayStation Theater before his show in New York City that night. “I don’t know what part of the story is what I remember telling or what actually happened.” Bo grew up in a little town, 20 minutes north of Boston, called Hamilton, Mass. where his “slightly pretentious” theater director made Bo and his peers perform in classical Greek tragedies and obscure plays like Henrik Ibsen’s five-act play in verse, Peer Gynt. He started writing and performing his ”comedy songs” backstage for his theater friends and in 2006, he started posting his videos on YouTube before it was even popular to do so. “[YouTube] was just like, you can show them to your brother who’s at college if you post them here on this weird site, and I did,” Bo says. The “weird” site that was You6
