Bo Burnham: what.

When I first saw 'what', I was expecting levels of brilliance which were on par with his previous special 'words words words'. Did it surpass my expectations? Indeed it did. There are many highlights to this daring, creative and catchy comedy special. When you watch this special, it truly gets ingrained in your mind. This has happened to me so much that I can do the entire opening segment by heart(not as good as Bo). Notable songs include, repeat stuff, from god's perspective, we think we know you, sad and left brain, right brain. This comedy special will keep you laughing and have you talking about it for a long time. Overall, 9.2/10.

After seeing Bo Burnham's "Words Words Words" I became a bit hooked on his style and musical taste. And then seeing another person call this new special a "masterpiece", I had to see if he could pull it off again. My initial opinion is no.

With a voice that sounds more like Weird Al every day, the show featured a large amount of pre-recorded material. While the bits surrounding that material was funny at times, it stretched on a bit long and really took away from the natural spontaneity of stand up comedy.

Burnham has also become more obscene. While his misogyny is clearly ironic, he pushes the sexual humor to a new level. Funny? Yes. But also a sad thing, because he is smarter than this and going for a laugh with a sex joke is the easy way out.

The "God song" (title unknown) was a high point, and he still has plenty of musical creativity in him. I would gladly see Burnham live and look forward to the next special. This was not perfect, but it shows he has not run the well dry just yet.

Bo returns to the stage, and delivers on his multiple talents - playing instruments(mostly "air" ones) and comedy - musical(including making it largely out of sampled sounds), verbal and physical. He goes for wordplay, the clever, and the silly, with universal jokes, rather than ones that will date this.

As usual, he prioritizes being consistently funny and challenging over having one specific focus - with that said, he does get rather introspective(such as the "two halves of the brain" bit), and one can tell that he has grown since he launched on the internet. Of course, this doesn't mean that he is unrecognizable, far from it. His brand and identity remain intact, and in-between, sometimes even in, the intellectual parts, he gets just as immature as we want him to.

Awkwardness is embraced, not shied away from. That of himself, and some of the things that go into shaping a show like this - yes, he does go as meta and self-referential as usual(a child of YouTube, that much is clear). We can follow his line of thinking, and yet he throws curve-balls our way. Plain and simple, we never, for a second, know exactly what he's going to do next, and whenever he jumps tracks in his train of thought, the audience(including the live ones for the video recording of this) loves it. It is simply that carefully crafted.

Among his material are social problems(with an indictment of himself and other artists, making this simultaneously the illness and the cure, the reason for needing, and the actual pursuing of, therapy), integrity, religion, sexuality, etc. At the time of writing this, the entire well-paced 60-minute presentation is up on, and thus endorsed by, his own channel, so legally free to watch.

There is brutal and disturbing imagery in this. I recommend this to any fan of Burnham. 8/10

Much like Make Happy, I had a lot of fun with this, but I can't help thinking that this may have landed on the side of those things that Bo isn't all that proud of anymore.

There is definitely a lot of clever stuff in this, but equally there's a lot of stuff that feels like it relies on edge over wit and good writing, and if I thought Make Happy slightly lacked a focus, holy hell is this all over the place.

Bo himself performs it as flawlessly as ever, but it still goes from dark fairytale, to left brain/right brain craziness, to poetry, to frog pedophiles, and it felt more like a series of his "lol random" YouTube videos than something with any kind of connecting theme.

There are some really great songs and jokes here though, and I wouldn't say I was disappointed as much as I was intrigued by him having gone from this to Inside, and seeing the evolution - even if I did see it going backwards.

Something I did note as being more impressive in this than in Make Happy is the sheer amount of times he must have rehearsed this to make sure he had it absolutely perfect, because I think this must have relied much more on the background sound effects and Bo's ability to know exactly which ones were coming and how to react to them with such precise timing...especially the ending bit. That must have been a nightmare to get right.

But it's a worthy entry in his stand up for sure, and equally worthy in his discography, even if it does seem like a bit of a relic from the age of random = funny that we've thankfully seemed to have moved past.

I enjoy stand up. very much. but whenever i watch a stand up performance or a comedy special, i look for something not as usual of what in use to seeing. bo burnham exceeds this greatly. out of this world creative and different from just watching someone do stand up. it's more then stand up honestly. this special and his other are very good. another comedy special with this type of boy the usual stand up performance is the middleton and shwartz improv on netflix.