In the final 15 minutes of Make Happy, the 2016 special from stand-up and singer-songwriter Bo Burnham, the Massachusetts native appears to figure his whole thing out: “I try to make my show about other things, but it always ends up being about performing.” What follows is a quick riff on millennials and performance, how we were raised to prize self-expression, and how social media and modern advertising have encouraged and exacerbated our tendency to want to be heard, whether we have anything of value to say or not.
It’s not just the cutesy musical-theateriness of the singing; or the rapping, which has that cloying precociousness you get sometimes from chill white bros who’ll have you know they rap well but won’t have you taking them too seriously about it; or the misguided attempted reclamation of gay slurs; or the fact that he’s from exactly where I went to college and represents a specific, somewhat enlightened bro aesthetic that I feel an odd, latent, geographical kinship with.
Inside invites us into Burnham’s hopes and fears, where complex conversations about white privilege and wealth are set to cool synth-pop tracks.
Burnham is not above this criticism, as noted in “Comedy,” a song about reconciling a desire to make people’s lives better with the reality that the comic’s skill set doesn’t include putting out fires or providing health care, the assistance people need most now.
Burnham goes deep with it, singing in a controlled warble, recalling Depeche Mode classics like “Enjoy the Silence.” The sleeper hit of the batch, “FaceTime With My Mom ,” conjures the plaintive, boyish tones of the Postal Service; “Comedy” dabbles in chiptune.
But the challenge of a show with no audience brought something different out of Bo, and in a way, he’s following through on his own advice from the end of Make Happy, where he implored the crowd to get free from the need to be seen and the urge to put on a show for everyone around them.