#the sunday times really tried to put this behind a paywall and i said nah fam

[oh-bo]

Stephen Armstrong for The Sunday Times Oct 27 2013

Bo Burnham is tall, slim and hunches slightly, so when he walks across stage he looks a little like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. He can seem awkward and clumsy, as if he’s not entirely sure what he’s doing with his angular frame. When he knocks over a bottle of water at the start of his set, your heart goes out to him — the guy is practically still a teenager. But don’t be fooled. As he struggles to right the bottle and deal with the mess, taped music blares over the PA and he springs into a tight, manic dance routine with hip thrusts and gawping grin: “He meant to knock the water over, yeah yeah yeah, but you all thought it was an accident. He meant to knock the bottle over, yeah yeah yeah, art is a lie, nothing is real...”

Which triggers a tight, music-drenched set laced with ironic reversals, sharp self-mockery and unexpected songs. Burnham is very clever, but with that polite wit and careful kindness that served Russell Brand so well as he demolished the news anchors on MSNBC’s Morning Joe recently, or Bob Dylan patiently educating baffled older journalists desperate to understand what it is to be young these days.

Burnham is like a laboratory experiment packed into one stupidly precocious kid. The Massachusetts-born autodidact became an internet legend aged 16 with a collection of deeply un-PC skits and songs that garnered squillions of young YouTube viewers. Barely out of his teens, he played the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010. The comedy establishment secretly hoped he’d fail — but he was a hit. Could have been a fluke, right?

However, this year’s show, What, with that bottle-knocking pratfall, is stronger and more confident, complex, cunning and crude. This month, he kicks off its UK tour and publishes a book of poetry; meanwhile, his high-school movie script is progressing slowly through development with Judd Apatow. He is like a male Lena Dunham — slightly younger, at 23, but both are riding the millennial generation’s wave of instinctive disruption, and casual understanding, of the new world. For instance, having recorded a final version of his debut show, Words Words Words, he has decided to make it available free via Netflix and YouTube.

“When I was 16, I didn’t really have a goal beyond people watching me,” he explains. “I’ve made some money touring the show, and I think the business model is: don’t try to squeeze people dry at every single corner. You sell something here, then you give something there. I feel like the show is very different and weird and a little strange, so I don’t want to cater just to the people who know my stuff. I want it to be accessible for other people to check it out.”

In this, he is echoing Nicholas Lovell, author of The Curve, a book that describes new models for doing business in an economy that has wrecked the music industry, is pummelling books and newspapers and is now weighing up a full-scale assault on Hollywood. Lovell argues that all companies have to identify so-called superfans, consumers who love the product enough to evangelise and pay top dollar for specials. The free audience serves as a defining backdrop for the purchasing superfans. If they buy a tree in a forest and nobody notices, how can they feel cool?

Burnham is a little irritated by the comparison. “The whole point of this gesture is that I want to not think about business models for a second,” he says. “The commodification of everything — even irony — is slightly gross. It’s all about how many Twitter followers or how many sales you’re going to get. I’d just like to have the karmic pendulum swing the other way and have fun. Although now, of course, that sounds like a whiny 23-year-old.” It’s a very Bo Burnham thing to say — he’s acutely aware of his age. “My first show I was performing at 19, but I wrote it while I was a 17-year-old,” he says. “I thought I was being way beyond my years, but it’s the most 19-year-old show ever. Now I’m trying to write a high school kids’ movie about teens before I’m too old, because I feel like even 24 is too old to understand kids now.”

His MTV sitcom, Zach Stone Is Gonna Be Famous, toyed with his youth. Written as a mockumentary, it featured him as an ambitious 18-year-old pouring his savings into hiring a camera crew to follow him everywhere as he tried to hit the big time. “Some people didn’t get the irony,” he sighs. “They just thought, ‘This is like every other 18-year-old on television.’” The show rated badly and was cancelled after the first season. He shrugs it off — he was used to being called “theatre fag” at high school, so the politeness of cancellation didn’t sting. Plus the frustrations of the writing process led to his poetry book. “I was taking network notes and rethinking things and rewriting, and I just wanted to be able to clear my mind for a couple of hours a day.” He lets his breath out slowly. “I’d just go down to the coffee shop and let myself write about whatever I wanted to. I let every page be a completely different story, and then the poetry came out.”

Some of the poems are cute: “How, may I ask, did you get so you / you beautiful true-to-you doer? I’ve met many today but can honestly say / that I’ve never met anyone you-er”. Others are one-line gags: “That guy is sitting on that horse’s forehead. Oh God. That’s not a horse. That’s a unicorn.” The whole book, called Egghead, has echoes of Spike Milligan or John Lennon, although he hadn’t read either when he began it.

It’s a lonely image. A guy just out of his teens writing silly poems at the heart of the LA factory — he has even moved out there, away from the blue-collar warmth of his dad, who’s in construction, and his mum, who’s a nurse. He has a girlfriend, although I ask delicately as he projects a certain sexual ambiguity. “I do have a girlfriend,” he says. “I sometimes don’t even answer that question, because I want people to know it doesn’t matter to me. If you think I’m gay, that’s fine.” Despite the girlfriend, however, he agrees he is lonely, and it’s here he comes closest to speaking — in the way journalists love — as the voice of his generation.

“I have trouble sometimes relating to people, and I think it’s because I’m alone for a long time on the road. I was touring while my friends were at college, so I’d see them partying in Facebook photos. I love having young people at my shows, because when I was feeling particularly lonely or distant, they made me feel less so. They feel like they’re lost, like they’re struggling to find themselves and being driven inward. It reminds me that it’s completely arrogant of me to assume I have this completely specific experience.”

I ask what he’s got coming up. “I have a few songs for a little animated kids’ musical that might be fun,” he muses. “I might try to make a 15-minute short or something.” A brief pause. “I don’t know. Just manage the balance of trying to keep myself entertained and trying not to become a self-indulgent, reckless idiot.”

#bo burnham #the sunday times really tried to put this behind a paywall and i said nah fam #but you need to read this immediately #i don't think that i can handle this right now etc #because he wrote poetry on the set of zach stone and im reeling #and the loneliness on tour just yeet me over a bridge pls #the sunday times #so i can find the damn thing when i want to reference it again