About “Are You Happy?”

“Are You Happy?” is the closing song in Bo Burnham’s standup special, Make Happy. Playing after the conclusion of the live, taped portion of the set, the song bookends the Netflix special with a very intimate, unaffected vision of Burnham as he asks the audience a critical question, the telos of the show as the title implies – are you happy?

In 2016, Bo Burnham knowingly left the world of standup comedy, partially in order to write and direct his filmmaking debut Eighth Grade, with the intention of having Make Happy be his final foray into this medium. With this in mind, the question of if the audience is happy now that we’re “on [our] own” is even louder and more relevant, and the song may even be a personal reflection on having spent 10 years on the type of career path that relies heavily on chasing the euphoria of stage performance and often correlates with (or possibly, stokes) addiction and mental illness.

Throughout, the song’s central question remains fluid in meaning, shifting from genuine bewilderment about what happy means, to acting as a bitterly rhetorical accusation, to the simple question of if a comedy show served its purpose – if happiness was, in fact, successfully ‘made’.