Bo Burnham: What

Dripping in irony and faux self-satisfaction, Bo Burnham is the crown prince of post-modern standup. Jolting from comic song to clever word-play, through non-sequitur and metaphor, his set is as much about the form and structure of the art as it is about the more substantive topics of religion, love and the balance between emotion and reason that pepper his routine. 

For every joke in Burnham’s arsenal, there’s a follow-up – a subsidiary remark commenting on what he’s just done, how he’s just made his audience laugh. This is self-awareness and self-consciousness taken to the extreme. There’s a removed, almost academic quality to the set; a quality that borders on intellectual masturbation as comic tropes are individually and knowingly performed, sent up or explained. Burnham is fascinated more than anything with the medium of comedy, and at times this can be captivating. But at others, it's self-indulgent. 

All tied together, given purpose, put to use, this lampooning of comic cliche has the potential to say something genuinely interesting. Indeed, there’s a song several minutes in—one that equates the comedian’s perspective on life with acute sociopathy and which strays into a genuine critique of comedy's role in popular culture—that hints at a meaningful, thoughtful theme that could tie these disparate strands together, giving some substantive grounding to proceedings. But it doesn’t develop that way. Perhaps in keeping with this meta-comedy vein Burnham is mining, he instead tells his audience that he intends to send them away feeling nothing. 

And despite the flashes of brilliance, he succeeds.