list.co.uk/festival Bo Burnham | FESTIVAL FEATURES
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Bo Burnham has gone from a YouTube phenomenon to the star of his own MTV sitcom. He tells Brian Donaldson that being back at the Fringe is still an intimidating prospect
T here have been few Fringe comedy debuts quite like Bo Burnham’s. Back in 2010, he was widely known as the kid who performed silly songs in his bedroom to virtually patent the term ‘internet sensation’. For those who awaited his arrival in August of that year as a chance to shoot down this young pretender, Words Words Words left most onlookers speechless. One rave review after another greeted his very literate, very musical, and extremely funny hour which had him tearing up newspapers and ripping a hole in the theory that originality and wit are mutually exclusive entities.
Burnham’s spectacles don’t need to be tinted with rose for him to look back on that month with extreme fondness. ‘I had no idea that was coming,’ he insists of the overwhelmingly positive reaction to his run. ‘That would be sociopathic of me to have expected it. I had all these ideas about my stand-up and about my show that I’d been working on for years, and I had never really heard anybody articulating it back to me; so I didn’t know if I was doing it right or not. Sometimes in
the US, comedy isn’t examined in the way it is in the UK, and I was blown away that people would be looking so closely at my ideas. I am hugely l attered and intimidated to be going back, but I’ve spent three years making a show that can only be disappointing. And I’m probably playing a room that is slightly too big, so I’m setting myself up for a colossal failure.’ Immediately after his 2010 Fringe glory (the judges somehow failed to adorn Burnham with the main Edinburgh Comedy Award, but instead handed him the consolation ‘panel prize’), and having just left his teenage years behind, he resumed a working relationship with Hollywood’s comedy-i lm behemoth, Judd Apatow. Those sessions turned out to be a proi table experience which helped Burnham grow as a writer rather than a collaboration yielding a concrete project.
‘I learned something so valuable which was how to write a script from one of the best writers around,’ Burnham concludes. ‘That was a huge gift. I’ve been working on scripts since then and if they have
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8–15 Aug 2013 THE LIST FESTIVAL 15