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.