Make Happy balanced sincerity and humour so incredibly and delicately, it's impossible for anybody who watches it to not give the guy his due and recognise his natural aptitude for language. I sound like a fucking teacher, Jesus. Anyway, I think the highest accolade I could give anything as amazing as Make Happy is, that it made me happy. I know, it's a comedy show, wtf, shock. But if you watch the show, Bo says something along the lines of, that he's struggling to decide whether the best thing to do is just to perform, to crack a few jokes, sing a few songs and make people happy, or to actually talk about things that are important to him - the things that people paying to see a comedy show, might not necessarily want to hear. Damn, that was a long-ass sentence. But I think he does the impossible, because he manages to do both. He manages to uplift but also soberly remind his audience to be self-aware and active, with the final monologue-almost-soliloquy rendering me speechless.
Because you expect it to turn into a joke. You expect it to turn on its head and make you laugh, have that one last punchline that people walk out the doors and tweet about. But it doesn't, and he owns it. I've never seen a comedian like him before. I've never seen anyone in the whole arts industry like Burnham before. And it doesn't matter how many shows I watch, how many other comedians I laugh at, how many time my phone corrects his fucking surname to 'burnt ham' in this blog post, there will never be anyone else who emulates or even touches what he does. I'm not saying that he's 'The Greatest Comedian to have Ever Lived', because comedy is much more subjective than that, more diverse, with different genres just like music and film. But right now, he's there.
Because you can't compare people like Bo Burnham to, say, Peter Kay or Russell Howard, because all three are amazing in their own right. Burnham couldn't pull of a Kay set, and Kay couldn't pull off a Howard set (etc. etc.). Because when somebody's good, they're good. I know that kind-of retracts the 'comedy is subjective' thing I talked about, but it also doesn't. It made sense in my head, fuck it.
Looking back over this now, I realise that the whole thing's been pretty shambolic. I don't profess to be an expert, just somebody who enjoys comedy and amazing writing. But hopefully it made sense to at least two people, and if it reaches two people, at least that's an improvement on the last post. But anyway, in answer to your question, Bo, on a scale of 0-2, I'm at about a 0.85. And thank you.
R.
- the amount of times I looked up 'synonym for show' on Google for this was embarrassing.
