Stand-Ups 2 Watch: Bo Burnham

A sixteen-year-old kid in his bedroom singing about homophobia. A fairly average sight, at least by YouTube standards, right? But, what if I told you that kid now has a very successful stand-up career because of that video? Oh, you’d believe that too? Well, I was just asking! Gosh!

Bo Burnham is one of the smartest, most talented and most clever performers out there right now and he is only two years older than I am. He first made a name for himself on the internet when he was a year younger than me! I, like most people, found Burnham on the internet. He immediately found his way into my heart because he preformed musical comedy (consult the chart for more info). But, I soon realized that Bo was not a “musical comic”. He was a true stand-up who just happens to sing songs. His albums are live, while Weird Al’s are studio albums. No offence to the great Weird Al Yankovic, but this is the difference between a “musical comic” and a comedian who plays music. Burnham is the latter.

It has been fun to watch Bo Burnham’s act evolve over the few years that he’s been a comic. His act is constantly evolving mainly to keep Burnham from getting bored. He’s moving away from silly songs about Helen Keller and switching them out for thousand-joke-a-minute raps that need to be listened to three or four times to catch every joke and play on words. The keyboard and guitar are what made him famous, but more and more he is moving away from them. Sure, he still writes new musical material, but his routine is becoming much more stand-up alternating with songs than simply song after song. Bo does what he finds funny, even if Salvador Dali jokes and "Sonnet 155 or If Shakespeare Had Written a Porn" are over his target audience’s heads. As far as Bo is concerned if he doesn’t find it funny then there’s no point in performing it. He believes firmly in staying true to who he wants to be as a performer.

Burnham also strongly believes, as I do, that nothing should be off-limits in comedy. In fact he is one of the few comics out there in this age of political correctness who truly believes that nothing is sacred. If you can’t make fun of everything then you can make fun of nothing and as long as it’s more funny than it is offensive it’s fair game. That being said, if any of my readers are easily offended they might want to use discretion when watching any of the clips posted in this blog entry. Like this one:



Bo Burnham’s stage persona is that of a dick. He hates the audience, calling them names and shooting them dirty looks when they laugh at certain jokes or, worse yet, when they sing along to a song. “If you know the words please feel free to shut the f*** up!” The only person Burnham hates more than the audience is himself. He reveals embarrassing “facts” about himself onstage and obviously resents himself for going into showbiz. This was never more apparent than in is relatively new song “Art is Dead” in which he calls himself (and everyone else in entertainment) a self-obsessed, attention-starved child who never grew up and is only in it for the money. “Art is dead. So people think you're funny? How do we get those people’s money?” A great example of Burnham mocking both the audience and himself was when he preformed at YouTube Live where he sang a song entitled “Welcome to YouTube” which made fun of YouTube Celebrities such as himself and the majority of the people there. Let’s watch, shall we:



Bo Burnham has only been at the stand-up game for 2 years, but has already found a voice for himself. With razor-sharp wit and some of the cleverest word-play I’ve ever heard, young Burnham is a comedic force to be reckoned with. At the age of nineteen he already has an EP, a live comedy album and a comedy central special with another album and special on the way. He has even been drafted by Judd Apatow (the current king of comedy who has jumpstarted many young comedian’s careers, notably Seth Rogen) to write and possibly star in High School Musical parody film. For all these reasons and more Bo Burnham in a STAND-UP 2 WATCH (watch, watch)!