Saviors of 2016: Bo Burnham and Make Happy
Saviors of 2016 is our series where we recap the year by discussing its most redeeming players.
It felt strong to use the word ‘saviors.’ Does this year really need a savior? Maybe not, but then again, “Heroes of 2016” seemed a little too pat.
A savior could be anyone this year. Some of them were fresh and inventive. Some of them were old standbys. Some of them were surprising. Some of them were called into service. What they all had in common, in some form or another, was an answer. This year was challenging, confusing, infuriating, and sometimes just really sad. These saviors didn’t make everything better, but they made some things better, and that can be enough to hold onto for now.
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Bo Burnham is a 26-year-old comedian. His newest special, Make Happy, was released on Netflix in late spring after taking it on tour for a good part of 2015. Describing it means saying a bunch of things that have become meaningless in culture writing in the past five years, but understand the sincerity behind these phrases: Make Happy isn’t like any other comedy show you’ve ever seen. It’s smarter. It’s more dynamic. It’s more interesting. It has an honest-to-goodness thesis statement. It might be one of the great modern hours of comedy, and it could only exist—only exist—in the year 2016. It doesn’t belong to any other time; it belongs to this time. It’s for right now. This makes it daring and bold and exciting, but it also makes it dangerous and compelling and precarious. That’s fascinating.
To sell you further on Make Happy by means of explaining what it does or what it contains is counterintuitive. This is a show you want to see blind. The jokes are blink-and-you-miss-them sharp. The ending is resonant and lingering. The performance—Bo Burnham’s multi-dimensional, complex, hilarious performance—is for the record books. You haven’t seen a comedian on a stage do things like this. It’s that intelligent and that different.
There it is; there’s the hype. Let me come out from behind the writer’s curtain here and tell you that Make Happy is one of my favorite hours of entertainment in a long, long time. I love it unabashedly and I recommend it to everyone and I am here to ride for it. Watch Make Happy. You might love it, too. You also might hate it, but it’s still worth seeing, just for that potential.
Make Happy is about performing—it explicitly says as much—and as a result it dives deep into the Bo Burnham well of meta-jokes and circular comedic critiques. It’s performance art that continually takes down the relationship between performers and audience members, and the climactic set piece—forced, forceful, and final—strikes an awful, awe-inducing note on the creator’s relationship with his audience members: us. It’s the kind of thing you see once and remember for a long time.
The wider point of Make Happy feels intrinsic to our time: We are all performers. We perform a trimmed-down, carefully cultivated adaptation of our lives for our followers, meaning our families, our friends, and our other friends are all reduced to our personal audience. Not only do we perform for our audiences, but we perform for ourselves. How many times do we check our own Twitter feeds and Instagram accounts?
But the idea that everyone is a performer isn’t new: Cultural commentators have been finger-wagging and making this point for years, it seems. What’s new in 2016, however, is that everything has become a performance. You don’t have to reach far for examples.
How many meals do we truly eat alone now? How many thoughts do we keep to ourselves? How many vacations or road trips are actually pure family affairs or pure moments between friends? How many books, records, or movies that we experience are held in a private standing? The answers don’t need to be spelled out. For goodness’ sake, we just endured a year-plus election cycle that was, to its absolute core, a performance. Remember when we wanted to go back to the issues? Can you even remember when it was ever about the issues in the first place?
But here’s the thing that Make Happy says that no one else has: Performing is exhausting. Aren’t you tired? It takes too much energy to think of that abbreviated joke or that perfect caption. It takes too much energy to always be on, always be posting, always be commenting and sharing and snapping and liking and thinking of just that perfect response. It’s crushing us. We aren’t supposed to walk through life with stage fright; it’s not healthy. We’re practically all living with performance anxiety, and even though we might be aware of this, we never retreat from the limelight. The show must go on. Build the brand. Keep up.
And we’re not a good audience for each other, either. We heckle. We throw dirt. We don’t really look for ways to support one another—it’s easier to join the applause than start it yourself—as much as we look for ways to take back center-stage. We all share platforms (literally—they’re platforms!), and as a result other people’s success feels like it’s going to take away from our own. We’re all jostling for the same space under the spotlight. The spotlight is never going to feel big enough.
This is where Make Happy secures its greatest triumph; it’s seemingly a punctuation mark. Bo Burnham—one of the most creative, expressive, inventive young players in entertainment—has stepped down and away. Make Happy might be his last performance. He might be back, but no one knows when. He doesn’t really announce much or say much these days. He’s quiet. He just lets it all be. It’s remarkable—celebrities don’t do that. They aren’t allowed to do that. Bo Burnham did it.
In a time where all great things last too long, Make Happy stands as a beautifully singular work. It’s contained and focused and determined, and its precision gives it a counter-cultural power. Its creator, no matter his future, has accomplished something momentous and powerful. Bo Burnham had a lot to say onstage, but his retreat from performing might be the most impacting move yet. His show can make you laugh and laugh. More significantly, it can stun you into silence.