Comedy

Most Bo Burnham specials (I've seen all of them, which I'll get into later) start out happy, then get sad about 3/4 of the way in. Bo Burnham is showing some artistic growth here--he's sad for two minutes at the beginning, and then he gets happy, and then he gets sad again. Wow.

'Comedy' starts out like the piano ballads Bo uses to anchor his earlier shows, then transitions to a poppy, synth based deal after God (who sounds like the vocals in that Oneohtrix point never song) tells him to make some more comedy. It's supposed to be about how useless comedy is in the face of all that's happening, which is a point we agree on--if anything is going to fix this, it's certainly not fucking comedy--but it ends up falling flat. Really the only trick Bo Burnham has up his sleeve is self-awareness: He knows what he's doing and why he's doing it. At it's best, this lets him cut into his own psyche with amazing clarity, but here it's just annoying. He raises and then rejects the idea of giving away all his wealth, makes jokes about how he, a straight white male, should just shut up (and then doesn't), mentions how much money he's getting for making this, yada yada yada. You filmed this in your guest house, motherfucker. At some point joking about how good you have it stops being cute.

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