I’m not criticizing him…. I’m criticizing our response to him. If we’re making memes, and I’m the meme critic, well it’s time I voiced my opinion.
I liked the special. I thought it was ok. I thought it was good for what it was and I won’t deny he’s talented. I’ve been a casual Bo Burnham fan for a long time. I liked Words Words Words! I had a couple songs from it on my iPod touch. I watch his new specials when they come out. When they are over I’m happier for having watched them. I enjoy them. I hesitate to call myself a fan though. His fans have created a cult of personality around him that he keeps trying to dispel. Every special seems to include a song about how his fans relate to him and how he doesn’t like it. It makes him uncomfortable. All his capital F fans seem to take from that is “It’s different when I do it.”
There are many contributing factors we can assess to figure out why this boy draws this kind of attention and why exactly, even when he addresses it directly, his fans won’t stop. We can look at fandom culture and how many people have made liking things their whole personality. People who get lost in holes and all they can think about is the things they like. Fandom culture emphasizes having an unhealthy relationship to the media you consume. When the Bo Burnham special drops, we talk about the Bo Burnham special. We make drawings about it, we make Tiktoks about it. We talk about how hot he is and we write fanfiction about him. He’s our friend and we are so proud of him. The common perception of stand up is that it is you, wholeheartedly unequivocally you. We watched our friend Bo and he did such a good job.
Over and over again stand ups will tell you that their on-stage persona is not them. They are playing a character. I don’t blame the fans for not knowing the difference though. What do you mean it's not you? You wrote it, you said it, you edited the special and picked the best parts of yourself to present. It’s all you, everything you touch, everything you pick. So it is Bo, but it's the Bo he wants to see. He can edit out the flaws and leave the secrets in his diary. We think we know because we’ve all read enough theory, we’re always performing. We get it, we’re performing too.
Bo tells us it’s not him and we wink back. We know, silly. We get it. We’re smart. He’s smart for saying these things and we’re smart for laughing. Whether we like it or not, every piece of media we loudly claim to enjoy says something about us. Some of us are fully conscious of this and capitalize on it. “Liking Bo Burnham means you’re smart” is the subtext of every Bo Burnham post. The posters know what their audience will think of them when they reveal themselves to be fans. That’s what all of this is about. We are watching a group of people tell us over and over again how smart they are. How deep, how interesting.
These people who claim to be so high brow fall into the same trap as the Oscars. Being sad means you're smart. Being sad means you are sophisticated. Comedy is for the simple minded. To just laugh is not enough. You also have to obviously be thinking. Sometimes it feels like everyone watching a Bo Burnham special thinks they’re watching a play. They have to let you know that they’re thinking. They have to nod their heads with understanding every time he says something poignant. Since there is no live audience they rush to Tiktok and Twitter to let you know that they got it.
The way they chose to do this in response to the most recent special is fascinating. There are several songs that I would have chosen to represent how smart Bo is and by extension how smart I am for understanding but the “fandom” at large did not choose those.
You would think if the desire to be seen as smart were consistent they’d love the reaction video. It’s meta, and clever. An obvious play for a ”look how smart I am” example. There’s also Hold Me Accountable where he is both sexy and introspective. Hold Me Accountable should appeal to his socially conscious fans. However the narrative is difficult to make work. They have good taste and would never like someone problematic, someone human. They’d rather ignore it than talk about their favorite white man owning his mistakes and trying to wrestle with what his audience expects of him. He’s trying to give them what they want and they are ignoring it. Too complex! Just be good all the time for us and there won’t be any issues.
His criticisms and observations that are more difficult to digest are ignored. It’s almost funny that everyone loves “Jeffrey Bezos pt 2” in which he just sings the name “Jeffrey Bezos” over and over again. That’s as much as they want for social commentary. Say the name of the bad man we all know is bad! And we can pat ourselves on the back for recognizing the evil in the world while doing nothing about it.
The most obvious take is that his straight up songs are the most popular. The easy quick listens. It speaks to his talent as a songwriter, which I think is often overlooked. He wrote some good old fashioned pop songs with some musical theater influence. This would mean that we did not understand some great intellectual undertaking. He employed a little bit of music theory and we bought it, hook, line, and sinker.
The more nuanced approach to figuring why the popular songs are popular is looking at content. Only the ones with obvious easy social messages are picked by the loudest fans to let us know that they get it and they get Bo. Songs that are personal yet universal. The songs about the internet and depression and going outside. We can all relate to that and feel smart for relating to it. Anything where he talks about his personal unrelatable feelings are ignored and anything where he is just silly is also ignored. We only want smart Bo but only if he makes us look smart. We do not care about understanding him and his work, we care about relatability.
To say this the fans just fell for the pop songs is a little unfair. It is certainly an element of it but it's not the whole thing. It does not account for the wild misinterpretations of his other catchy songs in the special. White Woman’s Instagram is a catchy song but the viewers, who are mostly women, caught a hint of misogyny and are choosing to ignore the song entirely rather than engage in any way. They constantly misunderstand “How the World Works” to prove how socially aware they are. Yet his fans still think they are smart. Any time he makes anything approaching a spicy take they ignore him or willfully misinterpret the irony as endorsement. Once again, He’s onstage and that's him. We know his true thoughts and his true opinions. They watch his special and take it as gospel rather than someone thinking out loud. He is trying to make sense of the world. To criticize it and talk about it and point out how we feel about something, especially when there is some element of cognitive dissonance. His fans don’t want to think, they don’t want to be told anything they don’t already know. We want Bo to tell us how good and smart we already are. God forbid there’s introspection or disagreement.
This problem is not unique to Bo Burnham. They don’t care about Bo. They care about themselves. He is the vessel. He is the most current iteration of someone to project on. Fandom is an extension of the self, but in the worst way. My likes and dislikes, my taste in things reveals who I am and that’s all I need to invest in. I am who I am because I like the thing.
That’s not to say fandom is a purely narcissistic endeavor separate from creativity. It mostly is, after a certain point but there’s nothing wrong with being inspired by someone. There’s nothing wrong with watching something and wanting to draw pictures and write a little fan fiction. Art inspires more art, that’s how it works. What I’ve seen in the weeks since the special is not art. It’s not even a single person’s creation. It’s not commentary. The fans' creation cannot exist without him. He made the words and melody and the visuals. It’s not even a remix. It’s a reenactment. But in the world that gave Sarah Cooper a tv show, maybe that’s all that matters. It doesn’t have to be all yours, you just have to participate.
Of course this special does elicit a unique reaction because it does seem like Bo is talking directly to us and is uniquely ours. His fame comes from the internet and was legitimized by Comedy Central and Netflix. We feel he belongs to us first and foremost. We watched him grow. He was 14 when WE found him. WE made him famous. He’s our most democratically elected celebrity. He’s the most interesting person to say these things because he’s experienced them first hand. Who better to talk about the dangers and pitfalls of the internet than him. He’s best case scenario for internet fame and now for the rest of his life he has to tell us about it. He is Daniel reporting live from the Lion’s den. We want to hear what he has to say from down there so badly, we would be disappointed if he ever left.
By and large the best song from the special is Welcome to Internet. Bo puts on some funny glasses and a disco light. The music is fun with a dark edge to it. The speaker of the song is offering us something we’ve already said yes to. The longer he sings the faster the song gets. We are falling down the rabbit hole faster and faster. We want to view Bo here as an observant singer. He’s making more of his commentary that he’s known for but this one is more obviously a character than the others. Here he is not his usual self talking about the world as we (both us and him) experience it. He is talking about our (the audience’s) experience of the Internet but not his. He is presenting it to us. He’s been inside it much longer than we have. Once a regular teenager with an internet connection and now a famous man with a Netflix deal. The Internet cursed him to be like this and he’s telling us all about what can happen. But we won’t listen. We hear the song and say “we get it, we understand”. His offer falls upon deaf ears. Nothing changes, we don’t realize. We scroll and we listen and we have an internet centric response to his work. We simply cannot help ourselves.
His talent is above this. He doesn’t have to keep doing this if he doesn't want to. While he’s maybe the best and most self aware person to talk about the age of the Internet, he doesn’t owe that to us. He could keep working and stay in Hollywood and have a perfectly good career without saying one more word about his origins on youtube. My particular take away was that if the Internet is causing you personally, our talented prophet, so much anguish… go do a play. I think his boyish looks and attitude can be best translated to Jack in Into the Woods. He’s too old but I believe he could still hit “Giants in the Sky” as well as Lucas Hedges did in the Lady Bird auditions. But for something more age appropriate he could be Charlie in a revival of Merrily We Roll Along. If we’re worried about his singing talent, Lin Manuel Miranda did it and he also can’t sing. My general point is, if we’re not listening, leave. If we will not heed his warnings, he has to save himself. We don’t deserve the message if we can’t understand it.
This deserves to be behind a paywall
Loved this!! I will say that he would be a better Frank than Charley. While his inherent cynicism could totally pull off the Franklin Shepherd Inc. meltdown, I think his filmed performances have been skewing towards the corruptible guy with a heart of gold