MAKE HAPPY by Bo Burnham (2016)

"I just hope I don't get more from this than you do." - Bo Burnham, Make Happy

Disclaimer: Firstly, if you’re going to engage with any discussion of the ideas of audience and celebrity Make Happy examines, I would much rather you watch this interview than read the review below. Bo says what I do in a similarly not-concise, but far more articulate manner. Secondly, I recognise that I went way too hard on the pull quotes in this, but to be honest, you’re lucky I didn’t transcribe the entire hour. Finally, this review is constructed upon my personal reaction to the special. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

What does it mean to have an audience? As the 70s and 80s gave way to the era of self-expressionism in the 90s and 2000s, the answer inevitably changed. Comedian Bo Burnham, light of my goddamn life and born in the 1990s, is one of the most qualified people working today to talk about what the concept of the ‘audience’ has become, and this he does in his breath-taking new comedy special, Make Happy, which I have already watched three times since it aired on Netflix on June 4 and which I literally cannot stop thinking about. Is having an audience a good thing? Let’s get introspective.

I’ve always found how Bo interprets having an audience incredibly interesting. To me, the dynamic between Bo and his live audience in Make Happy was noticeably different to his previous show, what. (2013). Burnham’s YouTube channel (and his content) have been popular since 2006, currently sitting at 990K subscribers and 169M views, but what. projected Burnham into ‘fandom’ territory, because it was accessible in a way Burnham’s previous work hadn’t been: the entire hour was uploaded to YouTube. Make Happy responds to this dynamic change, examining what Bo’s new audience expects from him. “You want me to get introspective? Let’s get introspective”, he says, referencing what a typical Bo Burnham show is ‘supposed’ to be: dick jokes interspersed by philosophical introspection. Bo’s audience has come to expect, maybe even demand, certain themes or ideas be developed across Bo’s discrete comedy shows. To me, comedy is a medium that can, and should, stay top-down: the performer controls what the audience receives, but this line shows how the tables have turned, how comedy can become bottom-up, with the audience demanding a certain quality and quantity from the performer. This backs the performer into a corner, which Bo dissects in Make Happy’s powerful closing number, Can’t Handle This:

I wanna please you, but I wanna stay true to myself / I wanna give you the night out that you deserve / But I wanna say what I think, and not care what you think about it…

A certain anxiety toward performing develops when your audience builds expectations of what content you should be making, and the ideas that content should represent. Burnham has stated in multiple interviews that Make Happy is largely focused on the anxiety he faces as a performer, but it’s visible in much of his previous work, too, notably in Art is dead from Words Words Words:

I am an artist, please, God, forgive me / I am an artist, please don’t revere me / I am an artist, please don’t respect me / I am an artist, feel free to correct me...

And the stunning closing piece from what., We Think We Know You, in which an archetypal LA agent describes the direction in which Bo should take his comedy in order to “take his career to the next level”:

You’ve got all these young fans, which is great, because young people, they’re very passionate, and they’re very reliable consumers, and what you gotta do in order to take your career to the next level -- you gotta cater more heavily to them […] Write a silly song about Facebook... write some jokes about Twitter, or sugary cereals, or Razor scooters. Relate to them.

“Relate to them” is the controversial statement. Bo says in Make Happy that he entered theatre and performance as a teenager, and that as a comedian, he is supposed to talk about what he knows and is good at, which is performing. To talk about Facebook and Twitter and sugary cereals and Razor scooters would be disingenuous, yet a show about performing wouldn’t be relatable to people that aren’t performers -- but what Bo found is that “I don’t think anyone isn’t”. He goes on to explain this further:

I was born in 1990, and I was sort of raised in America when it was a cult of self-expression, and I was just taught, you know, express myself and have things to say and everyone will care about them, and I think everyone was taught that, and most of us found out no one gives a shit what we think! So we flock to performers by the thousands ‘cause we’re the few that have found an audience...

We, Generation Y, have been taught our whole lives to perform as if people care what we have to say -- dance like everyone’s watching, so to speak -- and when we realise no one gives a shit, we flock to the people who’ve managed to get others to care. Thus we arrive at my original point: my fascination with how Bo interprets the concept of having an audience. The performer-audience relationship is a bizarre, complicated, and entirely human phenomenon -- a cycle of idolisation, a cult of expressionism. The rise of the Internet encourages this culture. Turning up the house lights and kneeling at eye level with the audience, Bo says the same in Make Happy:

Social media is just the market’s answer to a generation that’s demanded to perform. So the market said, “Here, perform everything to each other all the time for no reason”. It’s prison. It’s horrific. It is performer and audience melded together [...] I know very little about anything, but what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.

If you can live your life without an audience, you should do it. An ‘audience’ has become a void into which one can scream to find validation and success. In Can’t Handle This, Burnham sings, “Part of me loves you, part of me hates you / Part of me needs you, part of me fears you”. As performers, we project onto this disembodied stage, clinging to the hope that someone will give a shit about us, and as audience members, we pretend to give a shit about each other, but we don’t, not really. As Burnham says, the arrogance of the Me Generation is taught, or it is cultivated. The performer-audience relationship is one big circle-jerk, and yet we’re stuck here, jerking each other off, because we have never known anything else. We have become slaves to a lifestyle we never even chose. “Everyone wants to express themselves”, Bo states in an interview; “everyone wants to be heard.” We are all performers by nature and by upbringing and by habit, yet if there is one thing we should not do, it is perform. We can all have an audience if we choose one. The question is: should we?

TL;DR: On that thoroughly depressing note, I’d like to remind you that I actually loved Make Happy. There’s been talk of calling it genuine art, and Bo a genuine artist. I would not contest that for a second. Some have suggested that Make Happy transcends comedy and is actually performance art. I’d agree with that, too. Make Happy is electrifying -- poignant, cynical, self-deprecating and ruthless, but above all, it’s triumphant, in the ideas it wants to represent and the style in which it does so. Bo is one of the best in the game. I hope he’s happy.

WORKS CITED

• Burnham, Bo. Make Happy (2016).
• Burnham, Bo. what. (2013).
• Burnham, Bo. Words Words Words (2010).
• Burnham, Bo. Interview by Chelsea Locascio. YouTube. LCNJ Lions Television, 3 Mar. 2016. Web. 6 June 2016.
• Zielonka, Adam. "Bo Burnham’s Message for the Social Media Generation He Epitomizes." Medium. Medium, 6 June 2016. Web. 7 June 2016.
• Zoglo. “Bo Burnham: An Entertainer [in an industry he can't stand].” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 6 March 2016. Web. 7 June 2016.

TWILIGHT by Stephenie Meyer (2005)

“I like the night. Without the dark, we'd never see the stars.” - Stephenie Meyer, Twilight

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

Disclaimer: This review is constructed upon my personal reaction to the book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

My entire life, I have been devout about one thing and one thing only: my hatred of Twilight. Given that my lord and saviour is Her Ladyship JK Rowling, there was really nothing else I could logically do: liking Harry Potter and liking Twilight were two mutually exclusive phenomena. Neither could live while the other survives, shall we say. Thus, for as long as I can remember, my life's work has been bashing Twilight with everything I've got. I’ve long considered it my passion, if not my profession.

It came to my attention a month ago that I had never actually read Twilight.

The following question was then posed: how can you hate something you’ve never read? Easily, I argued, but the table had already been set. Being the kind of person who likes to be informed when they absolutely demolish things, I begrudgingly decided it may be in my best interest to actually read Twilight, so with high skepticism, I proceeded to do the one thing I thought I never would: I read Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.  

If we're being completely honest, I did not hate Twilight. This, however, was due to the fact that my initial expectations were really, really low. The only reason I expected to enjoy this reading experience was because I am a stone cold bitch who wholeheartedly thrives on ripping shit into things, but there were, admittedly, some things that I didn’t outright hate: Edward’s family history was vaguely interesting, and I thought the ending was well-paced in consideration with the tone Meyer was aiming for. The rest, however, was terrible. To quote a friend of a friend (out of context, but it’s fine sshhhh), Twilight was a “piece of shit mess”. The monotonous plot -- a tawdry account of a mortal teenage girl and a 100-year-old vampire falling in love -- did nothing but meander until the last quarter. Before then, Bella just mooned and moaned about how much she loooooOOOOOoooooved Edward, even though she had known him for a grand total of 5 minutes. There were entire sections of the book I simply crossed out, so pointless did I feel they were to the overall progression of the story. Bella is petulant, miserable, irrational, unreasonable, and childish, while Edward’s mood and characterisation are about as consistent and reliable as that one friend you haven’t seen in 5 years because they always cancel on your catch-up plans at the last minute. The concept is ridiculous, the book takes itself far too seriously, I could not for the life of me give you a strong reason as to why Bella is so clumsy and why Edward finds it so damn charming --  all this and more gave me endless grief as I struggled through Twilight, and yet amazingly, I still have not mentioned the actual focus of this review: the infantilization of Bella.

It’s this, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I disliked most about this novel. (Okay, it was actually the time when Bella, in typical Bella fashion, let snow ruin her good day, but that doesn’t found the basis of a good essay.) When Stephenie Meyer released Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined in time for the 10-year anniversary of Twilight, she claimed to have reversed the genders of all the characters because Bella’s damsel-in-distress complex in the Twilight saga had “always bothered [Meyer] a bit”, but I feel like it goes beyond Bella being a damsel in distress; she’s actually characterised as an infant. Bella is handled, both literally and figuratively, as if she is a newborn baby. Edward repeatedly cradles her in his arms -- ‘cradle’ being the buzzword due to the unmistakeable connotation of a baby’s cradle. She also spends most of her spare time sitting in his lap. Meyer had Bella constantly pouting whenever things didn't go her way, and I also noticed Bella had a real habit of throwing tantrums and sulking at the mere prospect of Edward leaving her side. Just put her in a diaper and get it over with, Meyer! Of course, I’m me, so there’s a feminist angle to this. Gwen Sharp put it really well in her blog post, Infantilizing Women, Sexualising Girlishness:

On the one hand, women are portrayed as little girls, as coyly innocent, as lacking in power and [maturity]. On the other hand, child-likeness is sexy, and girls are portrayed as Lolitas whose innocence is questionable.

This could not be more true when it comes to Twilight. On the one hand, Bella is portrayed as a little girl, peevish, immature, and inexperienced (yet also deeply grave and averse to any kind of fun, a ludicrous dichotomy). Yet Bella is also incredibly sexy -- aggressively and uncontrollably lustful, a trait for which Edward often scolds her. What is he: her parent? Bizarrely, I think that's actually what Meyer was going for. Bella's innocence is ferociously alluring to Edward. He coddles her and cuddles her and speaks to her as if she is five years old, yet it's also blaringly obvious he desperately wants to jump her bones. Lisa Wade says it so well, I won’t even bother trying to paraphrase:

The sexualization of girls and the infantilization of adult women are two sides of the same coin. They both tell us that we should find youth, inexperience, and [naivety] sexy in women, but not in men. This reinforces a power and status difference between men and women, where vulnerability, weakness, and dependency and their opposites are gendered traits: desirable in one sex but not the other.

Bella’s naivety and babyishness are paradoxically equated with sex appeal. The fact that Edward totes her around like a child and yet still finds her incredibly sexually attractive creates a power imbalance, with an aggressive, powerful, dominant Edward towering over a submissive and innocent, but still promiscuous Bella (which, incidentally, is the premise of 50 Shades of Grey). The notion becomes that it’s okay for older men to associate innocence and youth with sex, that’s it okay for middle-aged pervs to be turned on by the innocence of teenage girls, that it’s okay for older men to prey on young girls. It's creepy, it's objectifying, it’s disempowering, and it's sexist as hell.

That's enough actual critical analysis for this review. We now return to your regularly scheduled programming: committing the gleeful murder of Twilight. If I were to sum this book up in a word, it would be the one I repeated endlessly whilst I was reading: garbage. Unfocused, self-indulgent, babbling, incoherent garbage. Even aside from its analytical flaws, Twilight is not a good book. I wasn’t sustained or entertained, I didn’t root for or care about anyone; I read to the end simply because I knew I’d be reviewing it. I would not recommend you do the same.

WORKS CITED

• “Piece of shit mess” - Sam Hogan on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, 24/03/16
• Sharp, Gwen, PhD. "Infantilizing Women, Sexualizing Girlishness - Sociological Images." The Society Pages. 15 May 2008. Web. 26 May 2016.
• Wade, Lisa, PhD. "Power, Mickey Mouse, and the Infantilization of Women - Sociological Images." The Society Pages. 8 Aug. 2013. Web. 23 May 2016.