Bo Burnham “Make Happy”, More than Just Stand-up?

Bo Burnham’s most recent stand-up comedy show seems to go further than the average stand-up comedy. With a focus on music, Bo jokes around with serious topics, including the ignorance of straight white men, the false show that is current country music artists, relationship abuse, suicide, and his own issues with confidence and loneliness towards the end. This meld between serious and laughter, is only accentuated by the beautiful camera work and high production lights. Even with how it strays from common stand-up it still has the general feeling you get from stand-up comedies.  

            Like I said Bo, focuses in music, with most his acts being songs he wrote, raps, or accompanied by music. However, he does have spoken segments between every song which adds to the insanely tight flow from skit to skit. Even though most topics are unrelated he melds them in a way that makes them seem as if they are all under the same topic.

         Now fair warning he uses some heavy language from time to time, and sometimes his segments are a little over the top. For instance, the song he wrote titled “Kill Yourself” about depression, where the chorus is “Kill yourself, it'll only take a minute You'll be happy that you did it Just go over to your oven And shove your head in it Kill yourself, really, you should do it There's really nothing to it Just grab a mug And chug a cup of lighter fluid” So don’t feel like you should not watch this however because of that. It is supposed to show the stupidity behind the fraise “kill me now” a lot of people use jokingly in stressful situations. But I can see how it can be interpreted badly.

            As an example of the shows high quality style here is a longer skit he did in “Make Happy” as a parody of Kanye West concert rants, which has a good combination of all the things I described in this blog. If you like it give it a watch on Netflix…