Relevant: Bo Burnham's "Make Happy"

It's been said, by many writers better than I, that this COVID-19 crisis has revealed a lot about our political and governmental systems. As legislation scrambles to figure out how to offer provisions for people, and deemed-essential professionals are clocked into overdrive to serve those who've fallen ill and protect those who might, we're learning a lot about how our various systematic structures work, or don't.

But I think what we're also seeing—which is readily apparent but not as often talked about—is the online response that we, just as individual people, have had to the massive imposition that is this crisis. Social media is flooded with "challenges" and other copied-and-pasted posts, encouraging one another to participate and display how we're thriving or surviving in this stay-at-home mandate. Film yourself doing push-ups; post a picture of yourself before the lockdown next to a current one. Most of my feed is comprised of these templates, or news articles and rants about the crisis itself. Social media and online conversation is just as infected, if not more so, by COVID-19 than humanity is.

Some of us are, without a doubt, in more immediate danger from this virus than others. But there's no denying that it's a serious situation for everyone. As a result, we are all feeling a little boxed in. And we're rushing to social media to remedy our anxieties, fears, and boredom. And I think we're seeing how much of a crutch social media has become—the need to put on a show for one another—for us to feel alive and connected in this age.

In some of my free time at home, and longing for something reliable and familiar, I revisited one of my favorite comedy specials of all time: Bo Burnham's Make Happy, on Netflix. And it felt shockingly resonant in my/our current situation.

I've loved Bo since he started out as a comedy musician on YouTube at age 16. He would sit at an electronic keyboard in his bedroom and perform songs he'd written for fun. He quickly gained a following for his cynical and vulgar (but nevertheless clever and hilarious) songs, and eventually, that popularity would allow him to produce a couple albums, before beginning a career as a touring stand-up comedian. His shows were marked by his signature musical style, and featured a combination of standard mic jokes, songs, and flamboyant theatricality.

In 2016, at the age of 25, Bo's comedy career hit a new level, when he dropped Make Happy on Netflix. It was everything fans had come to expect from the musical comic, and more. But it also marked somewhat of a shift in his attitude. It was now less cynical—perhaps still pretty cynical, but now with a persistent undertone of hope. And this time, Burnham was critiquing himself just as heavily as his audience.

The special opens with a brief intro featuring Burnham as a sad clown waking up in his hotel room, presumably just before the show. He moves to his window, looking out at an empty, grayish outside world, accompanied by the far-off rumbles and screams of an enthusiastic audience waiting for him to take the stage.

A robotic narrator begins speaking to the audience as Clown Bo makes his way to the venue.

"You are here because you want to laugh and forget about your problems. But I cannot allow it. You should not laugh. You should not forget about your problems. The world is not funny. We are all dying. The world is not funny."

The narrator goes on to cite some concrete evidence that the world is not funny: "Guy Fieri owns two functioning restaurants." Classic Bo.

The scripted introduction ends as Bo appears on stage, following an elaborate hype track and light show. He starts in on a call-and-response bit with the audience, eventually casting a spotlight on their Pavlovian willingness to go along with the bit by coaxing them to claim they can divide by zero (which he quickly shoots down) and then to admit that they enjoy smoking weed, which he promptly reports to an imaginary police squad for their arrest.

This is a consistent gag throughout the show; Bo regularly entices his audience to engage in typical audience-to-performer behavior, and when they naturally do so, he criticizes them for playing along, rather than thinking for themselves.

At one point, an excited woman in the audience yells out "I love you," to which he responds, "No you fuckin' don't."

When she insists with, "I love the idea of you," he demands that she stop participating, and aggressively chastises her for interrupting him while he's trying to "immortalize something I've worked on for a very long time."

Burnham's behavior onstage is erratic and volatile. One minute, he's singing about how everyone deserves to find love, and the next, he's angrily spitting into his microphone about why his audience is stupid for expecting certain things out of a performer they paid to see.

It's all a character, of course—or is it?—but Bo is building toward his point. A number of songs and jokes covering a wide and eclectic range of subject matter fly by before he begins pull back the facade. With songs like, "Kill Yourself," Bo criticizes artists for "infringing on responsibilities that aren't theirs," and toying with their fans' emotions by pretending to be there for them in some capacity. Like much of his earlier material, Make Happy spends a lot of time seeming resentful of entertainers and influencers, and seeming disappointed in audiences for being so invested in them. My personal favorite, "Pandering," is a song in which he lays out and mocks the clichés that modern country musicians use to manipulate their audience.

But it starts to become clear that Bo isn't quite the same angry cynic this time. Maybe he was, maybe sometimes he still is, but in this case, the cynic is the butt of the joke—or at least, cynicism is exposed as the less nuanced perspective.

Bo pauses the show and walks to the edge of the stage. He brings the house lights up, crouches down in front of the audience, and asks, "What's the show about?"

He sits on the question for a minute before launching into an impassioned 3-minute rant about the one single subject that pervades almost all of his work: performing. I won't quote it here, because it's a beautifully written speech that deserves to be experienced firsthand, but it's clear now where Bo was going with all of that vitriol about entertainers and their audience: we live in a world now where audience and entertainer are one.

We all go on social media and document, sugarcoat, and perform our lives for the rest of the world to see. Why? For the dopamine rush of a few likes, maybe. For a self-confidence boost when we're lonely, sure. Maybe it's just something to do; a way to interact with people even when we're physically alone. It's all understandable and natural, but is it always healthy for our self-identity? Maybe not.

When Bo wrote and performed Make Happy in 2015, I'm sure he wasn't thinking about a world in which we were all locked in our own homes, ordered not to go outside, and, in some ways, forced to live our lives online. He was just thinking of life as it normally is. We didn't need a global pandemic to become addicted to performing for one another, but maybe we needed it to notice.

If it sounds from my summation that the moral of the story is "technology bad, social media bad, Millennials bad," trust me, that ain't it. Burnham himself is a Millennial through-and-through, having built his career on the Internet, and he has regularly gone to bat for the younger generations, who are often lambasted in the media ( which is, conveniently, mostly controlled by Xers, Boomers, and the Silent Gen), attempting to articulate why Millennials and Gen Z are the way they are. In his words, "it was taught, or cultivated."

But Burnham is a performer by trade, and he sees now that the world is full of performers. And that scares him.

After his ramble, appropriately nickamed "Cult of Self-Expression" on YouTube, Burnham finds himself in the awkward spot of trying to dig the show out of a hole he created, in order to execute one final comedic musical act. It's an auto-tuned rant, Kanye-style, full of jokes and revelations about himself, his dreams, his burrito preferences, and eventually, his own anxieties. It's an impressively mature and wholehearted emotional reversal, the likes of which I've never seen in a comedy special before or since. It also features the most dazzling lightshow and cinematography of any comedy special, maybe ever; truly something to behold.

The first time I watched Make Happy, I think I cried. It's a show about artifice that ends in brutal honesty. Burnham has stated in interviews since that the show manifested some severe anxiety issues in him, including panic attacks during a couple shows. He asserts that his 2018 directorial debut, Eighth Grade, was a way of talking about his anxieties through the lens of a 13-year-old girl. In my review of that film, I state that I believe we can all probably relate to the adolescent insecurities of that film's protagonist, Kayla, no matter our age.

Likewise, I think we can all relate to Make Happy's protagonist, Bo, right now as much as ever—resentful of his own nature as a performer but unsure of how to escape it. Maybe the one thing to do now is to focus more on life itself—our needs and those of others—rather than on the performance or portrayal of it.