Photo Credit: James Kronzer
Bo Burnham became my favorite comedian with the album and standup special “Words, Words, Words.” He deconstructed the comedy structure of stereotypical racial and gender humor. He took George Carlin-esque linguistic humor to the next level with wordplay and puns at the same time offering perceptive observations about society and entertainment.
Burnham also plays the piano and sings songs and raps in his shows. “Art is Dead” is a scathing analysis of what it means to be an entertainer, yet Burnham claims the song is not funny. It’s not a joke per se, but it is hilarious and also a damn catchy tune.
When I saw Burnham had a new special coming out, I asked for an interview and got to speak with him on the phone. “What.” will be streaming on YouTube and Netflix starting Dec. 17 with the album version released by Comedy Central the same day. I only got an early copy of the audio, so I’m still waiting to see what visual jokes I couldn’t hear on the album. “What.” still has music and rhymes and naughty jokes, but there are clearly references to things happening on stage that we can’t see. Burnham also tries some new conceptual material, including separating his left and right brain, and telling stories.
NSFW warning, I’ve bleeped the language but Burnham works blue so this interview can be a little blue at times.
CraveOnline: One of my favorite things you do is when you take an expression and turn it on its head. Growing up would you hear expressions and think, “Well, that doesn’t make sense?”
Bo Burnham: No, not really. I guess it was more like when I started doing comedy I guess I kind of figured out this little way of taking idioms literally. It was probably more of an introduction to George Carlin and Steve Martin. George Carlin more. At first glance, it can kind of seem just a little bit cheap and inconsequential, which it sort of is, but I think it’s nice to try to make people look at the language that we take for granted all the time and think, “Oh, that is weird, that phrase that we take for granted.” Even the phrase “take for granted.” That’s a bit weird? What the f*** is granted? I’m taking it for granted? What?
When you started hearing the word motherf***er, did that eventually lead you to “Oedipus was the first motherf***er?”
I think I probably knew motherf***er first and then I probably learned about Oedipus. Growing up in Boston I think you hear motherf***er more before you get classic tragedies.
That’s what I thought, and then eventually you put the two together.
When I was starting young, it was more me just trying to quickly immortalize everything I knew in high school so that I looked smart, because now I forget all those things.
I got the sense from “What.” and from other interviews you’ve given that you were concerned your stage persona was arrogant. I never sensed arrogance. I considered it irreverence. Are you being a little too hard on yourself or am I being a little too forgiving?
It wasn’t so much that I was worried that it was arrogant in the sense that I was worried it was mean. I enjoyed playing sort of an irreverent, arrogant character on stage. It was more that I was finding it slightly limiting. My persona on stage was always coming from a place of I know better than you and I’m going to be a little bit pretentious in your face with these sort of crass ideas.
With this hour, I realized if I want to be a bit of a nihilist on stage, sure you can be a nihilist by being all brooding and being all angry and arrogant, but Bugs Bunny is also a nihilist. I suppose I just wanted to be able to be a little bit lighter and sillier on stage while still exploring the same themes. When I was saying that I was arrogant, it wasn’t so much that I’m judging myself morally, because I don’t really think my persona needs to be held up to any moral spectrum, but it was more that it was limiting it thematically a little bit.
I think I understand, and I think that persona itself is satirical. That’s how I took it.
Yeah, for sure. For me it was a little bit like youth. At the time of “Words, Words, Words,” I’m a 19-year-old getting up feeling like he’s entitled to do comedy and tell you what he thinks of the world, so that’s inherently a little bit ridiculous. It was like if I wasn’t going to be arrogant on stage that would be even more arrogant of me, so I might as well show people that I’m aware of how arrogant it is to even do this in the first place so I’ll just play that up. That’s what I was trying to do with this last hour. I felt like I had done that already so I wanted to do something different.
Is there a balance between the relentless “joke, joke, joke” of “Words, Words, Words” and giving yourself room to breathe a little?
That’s definitely what this one was. “Words, Words, Words” was very much its title. It’s just words, words, words and trying to show that I can pack as much material into an hour as I possibly could word count-wise. With this one, I just wanted to try to let it breathe a little bit more. I think there are definitely dense parts in it but “Words, Words, Words” for me was a bit of a motormouth monologue. Some of it is set to music, some of it is poems, some of it standup.
I just wanted to try to build a show that was a little more theatrical, a little bit more of a show because that’s what I grew up doing. I grew up doing theater. I love doing theater. I miss listening on stage because I used to listen on stage when I did theater and standup sort of excludes that, so then I figured I could synthesize these backing tracks into the show so that I could be a victim sometimes on stage rather than just constantly being on the offensive, which standup comedy always is. You’re always talking, you’re always leading the audience. It was nice to be able to subordinate myself.
I certainly noticed that with the production quality of “What.” If “Words, Words, Words” was deconstructing the format of comedy, are you now deconstructing the production aspect with jokes about auto-tuning and tracks repeating?
For sure. A lot of “Words, Words, Words” for me too was deconstruction and talking about things in comedy that I didn’t like, me sort of making fun of comedy that I thought was bad. You can fall into a trap that way of just constantly showing people negatives, just defining yourself by what you don’t like rather than what you do. “What.,” this new one is also me trying to actually build something fully rather than just constantly commenting on what I don’t like.
But yeah, also like you said, it is a lot about deconstructing just what it means to go see a show. For me comedy is constantly presented as this fake casualness, like a guy just walked on stage going, “This crazy thing happened to me the other day.” And he’s in front of 3000 people and he’s acting like an everyman and he’s getting paid so much money. It’s all very, very strange to me so I wanted the show to kind of grab people by the shirt and shake them until they realized how weird this is, and also at the same time entertain them in the same way that hopefully the best comedy does, if that makes sense.
You hear about people going to see the same comedian twice and they’re surprised it’s the same material, because they don’t realize it’s a prepared act.
Right, right, and to me that’s very funny. If comedy is about surprises, about tension, there’s a lot of tension and surprise there, in the fact that people are expecting this to be natural. Then hopefully by the middle of the show, “What.,” you have no idea what’s real and what’s not real. That’s hopefully the confusion I want to stir in people because I think “Words, Words, Words” was a lot about me being 19 and feeling like I knew exactly what I wanted to do and exactly what I thought comedy was.
Now that I’m a little older, I’m more just life and experience has only made me slightly more confused about everything so that’s why this show is called “What.” It’s all very confusing and I don’t know if being a comedian is a good thing. [Laughs] I don’t know if this is all bad. At the end of the day I can only say, “What?”
I do wonder if your father was actually supportive of you becoming a comedian, because you make a lot of jokes about your father’s disapproval.
Oh, he definitely was. Everyone in my family is very supportive and any mention of family in my show is just in my idea the funniest version of the family of the guy of who’s performing. I really don’t like to tweet or Instagram anything about the people in my life just because I feel like I signed up for this, and I don’t even know what this is yet. I do know that it could go anywhere and I really don’t want to sign other people in my life up for it without their permission or consent.
It gets a little ugly and people start to feel like they know you and your life. People start to pay attention to you for the wrong reasons. Just for me particularly, I just want to be the guy that does stuff and makes things. I don’t want to be the son in everyone’s mind or the brother or the boyfriend.
That’s the stuff I love to see you play with. I don’t need it to be true. I love you making fun of the comedian who’s still looking for his father’s approval.
Yeah, exactly. It is also the feeling, is this thing that I think is so profound, which is comedy, is this profound art form actually just a father shaped hole in all of us, something I’m actually really honestly open to. That’s what this show is about. At once I feel that comedy is this amazing sort of transcendent thing and I’m also open to the fact that maybe it’s just an evolutionary hiccup, something that upright apes do in their free time.
