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 You-Tube ended up being the platform where Bo gained his popularity, and he got popular faster than he expected.

“I went ‘viral’ or whatever, and that was even right when that term was entering the vocabulary and weirdly I got an audience before I started performing,” Bo says.

At that point, it was his goal to learn how to perform in a way that he thought would justify him having the audience that he did. He ended up deferring from NYU for a year, where he was going to go to study theater and focus on his comedy. He found success in the path he had taken and has been focusing on his comedy ever since.

Bo is known for his witty, extremely detailed, fast-paced, and usually crass comedy songs that make fun of everything from math to the disparities between men and women. When he first started out, Bo included a lot of jokes in his songs that could be taken as offensive to some and received his share of backlash.

When he was 18, Bo was performing a show at Westminster College in Fulton, Miss. when a group of 15 students decided to protest his show. The group, including members of the Gay- Straight Alliance, Black Students Association, International Club and the Cultural Diversity Organization, held signs outside the show saying things like “Gay bashing is wrong,” and “Ignorance is not amusing.”

“I will be the first one to apologize for my earlier stuff,” Bo says. “I think it was like, trying to be too edgy and maybe it was offensive but [the Westminster College protesters] were clearly over reacting.”

Over time Bo’s need to be edgy subsided. “You know, everyone is edgy, Geico commercials are edgy,” Bo says. He was doing comedy for himself, not to make anyone else happy.

Some comedians, and entertainers in general, get upset when people don’t like the way they perform, but, as Bo points out, people’s opinions are subjective and “that’s the whole point of it.”

“People that don’t like my stuff I’m like, I totally get it, it’s more when people get furious about not liking it, it’s like, ‘no just don’t like it, just watch something else. I never told you that you had to like my things,’” Bo explains.

Currently, Bo draws his inspiration from things that piss him off and from people that don’t inspire him. “I think my generation is a generation that’s continually inspired and trying to inspire each other and it’s all sort of empty and doesn’t mean anything to me,” Bo says.

That’s why he’s presently focusing on making fun of the entertainment industry as a whole and making fun of different types of performance. “[I’m focusing on] what it means to perform for people and what entertains people and why does it entertain you and when are people manipulating you to be entertained when you shouldn’t be or when are people being honest with you,” Bo explains.

He suggests that the way entertainers relate themselves to their fans is by being an inspiration and trying too hard to connect with everyone in some vague way, as he expresses in his song “Repeat Stuff.” “It’s all about positive energy and relating to the fans and I kind of want to pop that a little,” Bo says. “I kind of want to go against that because it just seems really just sort of gross and sycophantic to me.”

Experiencing a Bo Burnham show is unlike any other comedy show – mixing jokes with song, dance, poetry, sound effects, lights and an overall dramatic theater performance. “A lot of my show is just trying to squeeze theater elements into the show,” Bo says. “It’s me just trying to Trojan-horse it kind of.”

In his previous show, what., Bo was experimenting with new elements like backing tracks and lighting cues. He is now on his Make Happy tour where his goal is to perfect the use of those elements in his show. He wants to give his audience the show they paid for. “Sometimes I watch a comedian in a big theater and I might as well be listening on CD. I know this is great but we’re in a gigantic theater and you’re not really taking advantage of the space,” Bo says.

With such a theatrical performance comes different reactions from each audience and the show is bound to be a little different each night. Bo’s favorite part about performing is connecting with each specific audience and creating a special moment between them. “Hopefully every night, a few things happen where it feels like, ‘Oh this is something new that only we’re experiencing,’” Bo says. “If you feel like you’re grooving with the audience, if you feel like you guys are like a band and you’re like in sync with each other, then it works.”

As Bo finishes up the second half of his tour in December, he’s making plans to film another special. Similar to what he did with what., Bo hopes to release this special online, and hopes it will be as popular as what.

“I got lucky [that what.] was released right during a snowstorm on the East Coast, so everyone was inside watching stuff [and] it was on the front page of Netflix while everyone was inside,” Bo says. “So, hopefully there will be a snowstorm in June when this thing comes out.”

For Bo, comedy is a fun form of art. “It’s sort of a leech, sort of a barnacle, just sort of making fun of other stuff,” he says. “It’s not necessarily from my heart.”

Bo says that he might just be kidding himself that his material is anything but “fart noises and dick jokes” but in his fans’ eyes, he’s a genius. NKD