what. (2013)

Catch up here:

• Comedy Central Presents: Bo Burnham (2009)

• Words Words Words (2010)

The world’s so sad, bros.

That just makes me laugh every time.

This show is distinctly different from what came before, which makes sense since he had a few years to write it and work it out. In some ways, this is the first one that really feels like Bo Burnham to me.

He comes out with a terrible haircut like usual and seems very awkward and fidgety on stage like he did in the previous two specials.

There are a few things that are very noticeable to me in this as well. For one, his voice is simply better. Less nasally. He has a fuller and richer voice, more capable of holding a melody and tune.

And while the show relies much less on wordplay, he is deliberately offensive from the very first non-musical joke.

Wordplay still drives a few jokes, like his poetry recital, but most of the show moves past this style of comedy and relies more on irony, meta commentary, and visual and editing gags. Which is why this comedy special feels designed to be filmed rather than simply performed. The fact that a joke relies on an editing cut really drives this home.

The entire show is also choreographed very tightly. It’s the first special where blocking matters. And rather than just being him on stage telling jokes and singing song, there’s a lot of pre-recorded bits played over his choreography.

This is pretty odd for a stand up comedy show! I’m not entirely sure anyone else has done that to the degree that Burnham does it here. These pre-recorded bits become an interactive aspect to the special, where Bo has dialogues with the pre-recorded voice.

He’s breaking the fourth wall but also attacking the conceit of a performance and the reality of the situation.

Stand up comedy often relies on relatability for jokes to land, and here he’s taking direct aim at that concept. And so he’s performing stand up while attacking the premise itself and even, in a way, attacking the audience for showing up.

He is a performer aping sincerity while also constantly reminding the audience that this is a performance, tearing down and ripping apart the veneer of reality that this whole thing is meant to rely upon. And in this way, he breaks down the space between performer and audience, between passive and active engagement and participation.

He’s also taking aim at comedians in general, and especially those with a sense of self-importance who believe their job of telling jokes is meaningful in any way beyond the laughter.

And yet Burnham seems furious that his audience is there at all, laughing at all.

And he is way more aggressive here towards his audience. While homophobia, racism, and misogyny have been a part of his show since the beginning, these were always meant to be ironic, in that you were meant to be shocked that he would say these things because you know it’s wrong.

And so he often explains his joke as if you, dear viewer, are an absolute idiot who can’t understand.

Which makes his homophobic, misogynistic, and racist jokes that much angrier. I imagine this comes from realizing that many people listening to his jokes took them at face value.

When Dave Chappelle quit The Chappelle Show, he said part of it was realizing that people in his audience were laughing for the wrong reasons.

Which is quite a thing to experience.

And so Burnham builds a show on a foundation of artifice, of artificiality. He is breaking down the show and comedy itself. There’s a sense of hatred here. And, perhaps, we should take Burnham’s statements on stage seriously in which he describes his collapsing mental health. And there’s reason to believe this is true, based on things he’s said outside of his comedy, in interviews, but, as an audience member in a show about artificiality, with pre-recorded choreographed bits that attacks the idea of fame, of comedy, of stand up, you’d be forgiven for believing this is still part of the act.

Fame kills empathy. Humor is the death of empathy.

He’s in a fight with his audience, forcing them to understand that none of this comedy just spilled out of him in the moment. Rather, it was tightly written, constructed, acted, and directed.

He reveals the artifice of the show, thrives on it, forces us, the audience, to contend with it. To accept it but also to deal with his anger, with our complicity in a system that he tells us is killing us and culture.

In this show that is about him as a subject, in which Bo as a person, as a concept, is at the core of the hour, he also demands that we destroy him. And rather than be relatable, he forces us to understand that we do not know him. That we never will. That we can’t.

That everything you believe you know about any famous person is a lie.

There is no Bo in this show that has an extended joke about the makeup of his brain and about the people he knew, who knew him before his fame, and how even they cannot see him, cannot understand him.

That he has become a canvas for us to project ourselves upon, for us to invent a version of him.

This mask he wears, this constructed persona, moves to the fore and fills the stage. Becomes the Bo that we know and watch.

And all the while he throws spears at us to remind us that the Bo we’re watching is a fake.

That it’s all fake.

He rejects our projection and notion and conceptualization of him.

The desire to be unique. To be seen. To be heard.

The reasons he got into comedy and yet now that all his dreams are in his hands, now that he commands the stage, he finds a vast emptiness inside himself and all around him.

I think we see this most clearly in Out of the Abyss, a sequence of short jokes, and Repeat Stuff.

The reduction of art to commercialism, the manipulation of youth, the way songs written for children are designed in a lab by adults to be addictive and destructive. He compares this to indoctrination and takes it as far and offensively as possible when he gets the crowd singing the chorus along with him and then stands up and sieg heils.

Which is to say that these adults creating culture are using the same tools that Nazi propagandists used to transform Germany into the Third Reich.

This exact topic will arise again and again in future shows.

And rather than simply point this out, he’s also pointing the fingers at himself. He describes his appeal to the youth early on in the special, the importance of relatability, the brand of self, and the control and power this gives him over you, his audience.

And the fact that he designed a show that tells you that this is all a lie becomes part of his brand as a performer.

It’s all quite Mark Fischer of him.

There is no longer a self. No longer a Bo. Only the performance, the brand, the false idol of fame.

And yet along with this, he has also constructed a show about collapsing mental health, about this trap he’s found himself in, that he built himself. His emotional instability requires the strict structure, the tight choreography.

While Bo Burnham has always sounded like an AP Lit kid, he’s using his intelligence to bully us, to overpower us, to indict us for liking the show that he designed specifically for us.

And so rather than find salvation in his own art, in his own show, he instead drags us down into this hellish vortex with him.

The end of the show feels like a thesis, like an explanation to himself, to us.

This deconstruction of self, of fame, of the show itself also just becomes an absolute smashing song tightly choreographed, destroying the artifice of the show, but, importantly, also handing power back to Bo. Which is also something that he leans into in the future.

But this is really, to me, the first real Bo Burnham comedy special. Everything before that feels like it was made on the internet of 2007 by a teenager addicted to the internet in 2007. Here, with what., he interrogates all that he’s done before.

Both rejecting it and all of us who loved it while also drawing a straight line from that older work to where he is now. He wants us with him, yet he can’t stand that we’re here.

He needs us.

He hates us.

He turns this statement of powerlessness, of lack of control, and uses it to tell a story, visually, sonically, in this final song about creating something new. Something beautiful. Taking control and rising through the chaos of expectation, of projection, and leaving us with something strangely resonant after an hour where he all but attacks us for caring, for believing, for hoping.

It is, I think, his most aggressive show.

Watch it here.