If you’re like me, you enjoy comedy shows a lot. It doesn’t matter too much to me who is performing as long as they’re able to make me laugh and bring the audience along for some fun stories. I’ve seen a good many of them, and you probably have too, and after a while, they seem to lack originality. So let me ask you: when is the last time a hilarious comedy show made you introspective, contemplative and sad, but a little bit giddy and excited about it anyway? Bo Burnham and his recent show “Make Happy” do just that, and it’s wonderful.
First off, to call it a comedy show is slightly disingenuous because there’s nothing funny about many of the things he says on stage. Topics include depression and suicide, emotional illiteracy, discrimination, and bigotry, how we undervalue the importance of what we give our attention, and the inability to love one’s self. That’s not to say the show is sober. Most of it is quite upbeat, and Burnham mixes up serious topics with humor very well.
Burnham's sense of humor tends to be dark, self-deprecating and sometimes pretty vulgar, so this is a fair warning to anyone who chooses to look him up. Personally, it has never bothered me when Burnham employs these comedic techniques because he does it with a purpose, not just to be crude because he can.
The show is a series of short bits, each wildly different and seemingly unrelated to the one before and after it. His talent as an artist becomes apparent as the show goes on; comedy, singing, piano, and smart use of lighting and sound are all included. Much of the charm and uniqueness of his style comes from just how much he breaks the fourth wall. Many times he will swing very suddenly from one bit to another (for example, going from dancing around and singing to a laser light show, to sitting down at a piano ready to sing a quiet somber song, all in the span of about a second and a half).
Some of the most memorable parts of his shows are the songs he writes. “Make Happy” had two that I loved: “Lower Your Expectations” and “Pandering.” The first is a funny song about how ridiculous people’s expectations of love are, and to stop wanting so much, because “Prince Charming would never settle for you”. However, it ends on a hopeful note that we all deserve honest love even though we are all imperfect. The second song is a satire of popular country music, where artists that Burnham calls dishonest repeat country sounding phrases to pander to their audience for profit.
Nothing compares to the end of his show, though. Inspired by the end of Kanye’s Yeezy tour (which he went to), Burnham ends his show by doing a part song, part rant over an instrumental with autotune on his mic. He starts into an autotuned rant on Pringle cans being too small to fit your hand in and goes on for almost too long about that before switching to a story about over-filling a burrito he made at a burrito place. He starts singing that he wouldn’t have gotten ingredients if he knew they wouldn’t fit, and as he repeats that I realize he isn’t just talking about condiments. The song shifts to Burnham sharing, through song, that his audience is his biggest problem; he loves, hates, fears and wants to please all of them while struggling to express himself without caring about the audience’s opinion. He says he wants to give them the happiness he cannot give himself. As he shifts back to the burrito verse one last time and finally closes out the show, I looked away from the screen wondering how a song about Pringles and a burrito could have an impact on me like this.
So would I recommend Bo Burnham? Absolutely. He’s not exactly a comedian, though he is funny. Dark, witty, chaotic and smart, he is one of the most honest performers I’ve seen.
