Bo Burnham greets his audience

(For the next few weeks, the Wednesday freelance newsletter is moving to Fridays, as I continue to recuperate. Each week, I’m publishing a new pop culture essay from a freelancer. Remember: Your subscription fee helps me pay these freelancers for their efforts! This week: Tiffany Babb, on Bo Burnham's shifting relationship to audience expectations.)

We live in a world that deifies stars who go out of their way to shake every hand, take a picture with every child, all the while crying, “I owe everything to my fans.” That’s the price they’re expected to pay for the wonderful gift of our attention and money. They should smile when smiling is required, jump when jumping is required, and even live in a way that fits our image of them.

What is the responsibility of the artist beyond simply telling a story or entertaining us? Are they supposed to stop when you ask them for a photo? Are they supposed to respond to fans on social media (and if so, how often)? Are they allowed to make mistakes? To take breaks? When is the artist allowed to stop giving? And at what point will fans stop trying to take?

From the beginning of his career, comedian Bo Burnham has attempted to address this strange transactional relationship between artists and their audiences. Because his career began on the internet and because the internet has changed the way artists are expected to interact with people, he’s perfectly poised to raise these questions.

Over the last decade and a half, YouTube and Youtubers have turned the “creator-audience relationship” into a commercial machine, but Burnham has never really seemed comfortable with that move. In an early song titled “art is dead,” he sings, “So people think you’re funny, how do we get those people’s money?” He also doesn't seem comfortable with what it means to be on stage and face people who expect something from him. But that ambivalence hasn’t kept him from making things and putting them out into the world. This paradox of discomfort has only grown more central to his work as time has passed and expectations of his skill have grown alongside his art.

Like most early YouTube success stories, Burnham found his fame accidentally while using the site to share funny videos with his family. He was a teenager when his first video went viral in 2006, and in 2010, at 20, he became the youngest comedian ever to tape a half-hour special for Comedy Central.

In “art is dead” (from that 2010 standup show Words Words Words), Burnham draws a parallel between artists and a child acting up for attention at a party. He points out that “I must be psychotic, I must be demented to think that I’m worthy of all this attention,” before listing all the other ways that the money used to make the evening happen could be better spent. He ends the song by singing, “But I’m just a kid, I’m just a kid, I’m just a kid, and maybe I’ll grow out of it.” As he clangs on the piano, it’s hard to ignore that he is just a kid, clad in a white t-shirt and jeans on a big stage.

Five years after “art is dead,” Burnham continued to question his role on the stage, this time with even more desperation and hopelessness. Burnham’s “Can’t Handle This (Kanye Rant)” from his 2015 special Make Happy mostly consists of an extended parody of a Kanye-style rant about the too-small size of Pringle cans and the perils of overstuffing Chipotle burritos. The title “Can’t Handle This” implies a pop star urge to show off. But a few minutes beyond the song’s halfway point, Burnham reveals that it’s he who “can’t handle this,” as he turns to his audience and sings “I can sit here and pretend like my biggest problems are Pringle cans and burritos. The truth is: My biggest problem’s you.”

The faux confessional becomes a real confessional, as Burnham continues on about how difficult it is to want to please the audience and maintain his artistic and personal integrity. But Burnham doesn’t stop at singing about the audience as his problem; he addresses them while he’s referring to them too. When he sings, “Look at them, they’re just staring at me,” he’s singing both to the audience and about the audience, forcing them to be subject and object, shattering the audience’s natural passivity.

Just when it starts to feel like it’s getting too much, Burnham stops himself, stepping back into the role he’s already identified as his problem, singing, “I should probably just shut up and do my job, so here I go.” He launches back into his burrito rant before ending on a haunting “Thank you. Goodnight. I hope you’re happy.” The tone of “I hope you’re happy” isn’t fully accusatory, though there are hints of accusation. It feels mostly sincere. He does seem, despite all his misgivings, to want to make his audience happy. But there’s something about that slide back into the determined role, this time with the audience aware of the cost, that adds a tone of morbid voyeurism to the ending, reminding the audience that they are culpable in this dynamic.

After Make Happy, Burnham stepped away from the stage for five years, taking time to heal (he had been suffering from panic attacks on stage). He also worked on films like his directorial debut Eighth Grade and Promising Young Woman (in which he co-starred). Burnham’s return to comedy, the special Inside (2020), was also a return, by necessity due to the pandemic, to his original medium — video.

What especially stands out in Inside is how Burnham navigates the idea of an audience when he’s sitting alone in a room, using the lack of a live audience to comment on its role. This is most directly shown in the song “All Eyes on Me,” which echoes the “Can’t Handle This” format of parodying a specific type of ego-centric song.

This time, we already know that something’s amiss when the song begins, because the lead into “All Eyes on Me” consists of a short scene of Burnham stroking his beard and saying, “I am not… well” before bursting into tears. As he sobs into his hands, we hear the song's first few notes and a recorded audience applause track. The camera zooms past Burnham’s crying figure and into the inky black circular lens of a camera behind him. Another voice appears. It’s Burnham again, but this time, he’s calm and confident with the platitudes that regularly appear at the end of any concert. “Thank you. You guys have been incredible,” Burnham graciously calls out. “You’ve given me so much, but I need you to do one more thing for me. Can you do that?”

And he asks them for that one last thing.

“Get your fucking hands up, get on out of your seats, all eyes on me,” he sings, bathed in blue light, clutching a microphone to his mouth. The camera is zoomed in and focused on his startling eyes. It’s the closest we’ve been to him, and it’s impossible to look away. His voice is modified, lower than his usual sound and a little echoey with reverb. As the video continues, footage is layered over footage, and there are two blown-up “live” projections projected over Burnham as he sings, so that his auditory reverb is followed by a visual one.

The effect is reminiscent of the lag of the Jumbotron at a live performance, the artifice of watching a closeup from a hundred yards away. We’re close to Burnham’s face, closer than we’d ever be in life, but we also aren’t close to him at all. We are separated by a screen and camera and time and careful planning and editing. As Burnham pauses to monologue about his time away from comedy, about his failing mental health, and about his attempt to return to performance right before the pandemic began, the faux audience reacts with callous, artificial laughter. It feels hollow and rote and even predatory at times, as if the audience needs something to laugh at, so they’ll grasp at anything, even if it’s not funny at all.

Because everything in the video (including the audience) is so controlled, it’s even more jarring when, toward the end of the song, Burnham stops singing to scream at the camera, “I said get your fucking hands up. Get up! Get up! I’m talking to you; get the fuck up!” He stalks towards the camera, picking it up from its stand. The action is startling, again breaking the easy passivity of an audience watching a performer going through the expected motions.  It launches the song out of its slick music video style. It transforms into shaky amateur concert footage, as Burnham swings the camera around to face himself, to face his shadow on the wall, to capture a close up of his arm, his microphone, his hair. It feels personal and raw, even though the song hasn’t changed much. In response, a crowd track in the background swells with screams of excitement and awe before abruptly dropping away, replaced by the lonely discordant sound of microphone feedback and leaving behind a strange sense of emptiness.

In “All Eyes on Me,” Burnham addresses how strange a performer’s demand for attention is and how strange it is that an audience gives in to that demand. He points out that, when singers ask for applause, it is never just applause, and when the audience asks for a performance, it’s never just a performance. The performer and audience both give and take more than that. And the audience, seemingly so far away from the performer, can still cause hurt and pain. In Inside, Burnham controls when and where the audience laughs, and he uses that to highlight how little control he has over how the audience actually reacts and how that reaction affects him.

Burnham isn’t just a shocked young kid trying to figure out how to react to fame anymore. He’s got experience with it. He’s a seasoned performer and a director, controlling every frame, how we see him, what we hear and what we don’t. And he uses all of that, the lights, the laughter, the silence, to question what it means to watch and be watched. To question why we expect so much from our artists. To wonder whether or not we’re causing harm when we do.

In Inside, Burnham serves up just enough laughter to maintain that the special is comedic and that he’s a comedian. But he also serves up a stark depiction of past and ongoing pain that makes us wonder whether asking someone to go through all of that, for our amusement or even for our artistic benefit, is worth it. And even if it was, Burnham leads us to wonder whether we’re more responsible than we think for the perpetuation of a relationship that seems to do nothing more than take.

Episodes is published three times per week and edited by Emily VanDerWerff. Mondays feature her thoughts on assorted topics. Wednesdays offer pop culture thoughts from freelance writers. Fridays are TV recaps written by Emily. The Wednesday and Friday editions are only available to subscribers. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of Emily's work at Vox.