Comedy Central Presents: Bo Burnham (2009)

I mentioned elsewhere that I was writing an essay about AI. For the last two weeks of February, I wrote what ended up being the first quarter or third of the essay, and that ended up being over 30,000 words. So instead of publish an essay that may eventually be around 90,000 words here on substack like some absolute freak, I’m sharing a discrete essay that was originally going to be part of that longer essay.

This is about Bo Burnham, who I think is a good case study in the way the internet has infiltrated and shaped our lives. Though it’s more accurate to say that this is a part of a part because the whole bit about Bo Burnham is about the length of a short book on its own.

And so I’ll be releasing this little investigation into Bo Burnham over the coming months.

Will it end up in the actual book? Who knows!

Probably not.

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A little thin. A little awkward. A nasally voice that’s a mix of untrained and obnoxious. A shy young kids who looks like a little boy, yet occasionally sneers with condescension at the audience.

At his audience.

His stage presence is a mix of self-deprecation, antagonistic sneering, aw shucks humility and awkwardness, and he uses this to try to jar you with vulgarity and offensiveness.

Which interestingly works pretty well. There’s something about an awkward teenager so clearly from an affluent suburb with an oversized intellect bombarding you with overt sexual wordplay while he raps or sings.

Bo Burnham became, perhaps, the first real viral youtube star and he managed to transition this into a comedy special when he was eighteen.

Life sure was different between 2006 and 2009.

I remember when this special came out because I remember discovering him on youtube, the way millions of others did.

In his Comedy Central special, he really plays up the awkwardness of being an eighteen year old kid on stage performing comedy for adults. And, I mean, this may have helped cover up a lot of the potential terror of being on stage and performing for people who paid money to see you play the songs you first gave away for free that you recorded in your bedroom when you were sixteen.

And I do think this is an important aspect of understanding Bo Burnham.

As a teenager, he began recording himself and then sharing these with the world. With the novelty of youtube and the ability to easily share these videos with other people, he became famous on college campuses and high schools.

Not famous like an actual movie star or comedian. No one was confusing these songs with, like, a Chris Rock special.

But these unadorned, lofi, humble performances invited us into Bo Burnham. We were literally in his bedroom. His bedroom was in millions of other people’s bedrooms.

Seeing him move from his bedroom, from youtube, to Comedy Central felt like watching your high school friend become famous.

Some of you might have been eaten by jealousy over that, but even you would probably also feel a sense of ownership over his fame.

I was there when he was nobody. Look at him now.

That’s a surprisingly resonant feeling.

Enormous, really.

The internet made Bo Burnham famous. It gave him a career. Gave him the life he has. Which, in a way, means all of us who shared his work, who watched it, who laughed along to it, paved the way for him to leave his bedroom and see his name in lights on auditoriums across the country.

For those of you too young to understand what Comedy Central meant in the 90s and 2000s, this was basically the proving ground for comedians. Especially Comedy Central Presents, which featured the first recorded performances of some of the biggest current names in comedy, from John Mulaney to Nate Bergatze and Jim Gaffigan and all the way back to Wanda Sykes and Mitch Hedberg and on and on.

I remember sitting with friends in my parents’ basement and watching Comedy Central Presents, excited to see who came on. Excited to discover a comedian we’d never have heard about otherwise.

It’s worth noting the kind of content of Burnham’s early songs. They were deliberately offensive and reliant upon certain kind of cultural signifiers. But I think they also relied upon something that’s very real.

Take My Whole Family… which may be the true breakout of the youtube era, which culminated in this Comedy Central Presents special.

If this doesn’t feel funny to you now, in 2024, well, I think we can all recognize how culture has shifted in the last fifteen years. Also, this kind of humor plays different when you’re seventeen or twenty compared to when you’re over thirty.

But he begins his special with this song and then brings attention to the rainbow tiedye shirt he’s wearing.

You guys like my shirt?

Back home they called me the tiedye shirt kid. Well, that and faggot. So on that note I’m gonna rap.

Now, reading that may feel quite jarring! While no one uses the f-slur much these days, I don’t think I went a single day in high school and middle school without hearing it. And I’m just three years older than Burnham. I can’t imagine his experience growing up was much different.

I was a generally well liked person in middle school and high school despite being an absolute disaster of depression and I sometimes joked, once upon a time, that my nickname in high school was faggot. I’ve mentioned before how a coach at my high school called me that word to my face in front of a bunch of people and no one—even other adults!—batted an eye at it.

But if reading that word used twice in a few sentences made you cringe, I got bad news for the kind of content Bo Burnham built his career on.

I do think there are things to appreciate still in this early work.

And I think, even though he’s deliberately trying to offend and shock, there’s a certain kind of honesty to this. Like, I can tell you without a doubt that Bo Burnham probably had people calling him a faggot almost daily.

I can tell just from looking at him because I was there, babies. Some people meant it cruelly, some meant it as a joke, or even used it as a term of endearment (a girl I loved, who kind of loved me in 2005, called me faggy as a pet name).

But time marches on, changing how we relate to certain words, and no one really says that anymore.

I mention all this because Burnham, even as a teenager, was grabbing something very real about daily life, and especially about language usage. And his early work is very linguistic. There’s a real AP Lit kid feel to much of it. I can recognize every reference he makes and I could do it when I was twenty because I was only a few years removed from the exact same kind of education he had. Gifted and talented—wow! How novel!

And I think this is part of what resonated with us when Burnham came over our laptops while we sat in dorms. So many of us took the advanced classes, received college credits, and we grew up on a select kind of signifiers, of books and poems and ways of thinking that was common to AP Lit programs across the country in 2006-2010 (and maybe even still).

I grew up lonely and depressed and the things I knew and the grades I performed sent me in different directions through high school and so when I entered college as a Freshman, I was almost a Sophomore.

And even though college was bright and full of new people and possibility, I remember wandering empty streets alone at 3am because I hadn’t slept in days.

When I looked at Burnham then and when I look at the kid he was now, I see the kid I was. A mouth full of big words and grand concepts set to the Eminem style of insulting vulgarity of the Marshall Mathers and Slim Shady LP era.

It’s all about the sound and shape of words and the ways multiple meanings can stack to surprise and delight and offend and shock.

There’s a lot of wordplay and a powerful density of language happening in some of these jokes. The way he begins his album telegraphs what kind of comedy you’re getting into.

He’s ironic and satirical and self-deprecating and trying to keep you linguistically on your toes while also making frat boys laugh and other people cringe.

Ultimately, it’s all a bit thin. He didn’t have a lot to say, which is fine, honestly. I don’t think comedians need to do anything besides make us laugh, and this was very funny to people in 2009, and especially for people between the ages of 14 and 22.

Is it still funny?

Well, maybe not, especially if you’re getting old like me. But if you’re sixteen or twenty, you may laugh a lot.

And that’s really good enough. I don’t really recommend going back to revisit this performance, but it is an interesting artifact in time. A snapshot of a young man finding his voice and trying to figure out what works in real time.

But if you do want to watch it, you can find it here.

Next, we’re onto Burnham’s second special Words Words Words which you can watch here.