How Bo Burnham Represents Modern Self-Consciousness

Fourteen days since I first watched the new Bo Burnham special Make Happy and I haven’t had a thought unrelated to it since. So to rid myself of these ceaseless thoughts—to make my way out of this labyrinth—I thought I’d write and write and write about it. I thought I’d think too much about thinking too much. I thought I’d get introspective and make some fucking noise.



So. Bo Burnham. Modern self-consciousness. Existentialism. Metafiction. Social media.

Segways are weird.

Look at the following quote:

“I look at the young people and I feel like, I was born in 1990 and I was sort of raised in America when it was a cult of self-expression, and I was just taught, you know, “express myself, I have things to say and everyone will care about them.” And I think everyone was taught that and most of us found out no one gives a shit what we think. So we flock to performers by the thousands because we’re the few who have found an audience and then I’m supposed to get up here and say “follow your dreams” as if this is a meritocracy. It is not. Okay? I had a privileged life, and I got lucky, and I’m unhappy. They say it’s like the “me” generation, it’s not. The arrogance is taught, or it was cultivated, it’s self-conscious, that’s what it is. It’s conscious of self. Social media, it’s just the market’s answer to a generation that demanded to perform, so the market said “Here, perform everything, to each other, all the time, for no reason.” It’s prison, it’s horrific, it is performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member? I know very little about anything, but what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.”

Ha. Ha. Ha. Classic. Comedy.

But when you’re watching Bo perform, you’re not getting a conventional stand-up comedy experience; you’re being bombarded with conflicting ideas. And what I latched onto—throughout Bo’s work in general but with the above quote in particular—is this melding of two thematic threads: existentialism (knowing that you define your own existence, that you have to extract meaning from life; the anxiety caused by looking for answers in an answerless world) and metafiction (being self-reflexive; a form of art that self-consciously investigates—and highlights the artificiality of—the artist’s chosen medium).

Bo on Existentialism (from what.): “I’m like you guys, once a week I like to slip into a deep existential depression and lose all my sense of oneness and self worth.”



Bo on Metafiction: “The metaness for me […] being self-aware or making fun of comedy or making fun of what’s happening in the moment […] for me that is true, that’s a weird form of observationalism, where like, I think nowadays the way people experience the world is in a very meta way; you know, the way kids are living their lives it’s like they’re living on Facebook so they have a digitalised version of themselves that they are then watching, and they are then watching people watch their own life; they’re tweeting so they’re trying to present their life; and they’re realising how they’re presenting their life looks from the outside.” (Interview)



The self-reflexivity in Bo’s work: they’re comedy shows about comedy; performances about the role of a performer; they’re his attempts to “do a show with bells and whistles about bells and whistles, to make a spectacle about what a spectacle is.” (Observer) It’s pre-written self-awareness; the result of the metafictionist’s skepticism towards both a universal truth and art’s ability to convey real life. Literary Critic Patricia Waugh: “The metafictionist is highly conscious of a basic dilemma: if he or she sets out to ‘represent’ the world, he or she realizes fairly soon that the world, as such, cannot be ‘represented’.” Look at the forms we use, in this age, to represent the world: the stage; the screen; literature; social media: these are all vehicles of fiction. So the metafictionist reacts to this problem by looking inward, and exposing this failing of the form.

The same way metafictional texts stress their own linguistic identity, Bo leans on the artificial nature of his performance: into an autotuned mic he sings “my voice is so fucking natural”; he references receding back into his stage persona; gives reminders that he’s “not honest for a second” on stage; reads from a book before saying, “The pages are blank, why am I lying to you?”; has the world on his stage slow down as he introduces a “slow joke”; drinks an invisible cup of water, only to spit real water onto the stage; accidentally knocks over his water bottle, only to have a pre-recorded track sing, “He meant to knock the water over, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you all thought it was an accident. He meant to knock the water over, yeah, yeah, yeah, art is alive, nothing is real.”

Metafictional works end up generating a sense of unpredictability—the threat of something real suddenly breaking through the fiction. But, rather than merely toy with our attempt to suspend our disbelief, does this self-conscious approach not get at something more real—more akin to the life and the thoughts and the feelings of both the audience and the performer; to our uncertainty in life—in our quest for meaning? The performance piece itself becomes a metaphor for how we attempt to make sense of the world. It’s like when we breach adolescence, and we become self-conscious of this gap between the person we are in our mind and the person we convey to the world. So if an artist doesn’t include any misgivings or self-doubt in their performance, it feels like they’re being disingenuous about their experience during this pursuit for truth, and to make this apparent the artist needs to deconstruct their creation with skepticism. At the very least, it helps Bo convey his individual reality, because any self-consciousness felt on behalf of the artist—specifically the self-doubt they feel towards both themselves and the world, and their attempts at impacting it—is best expressed through the self-reflexive nature of their creation. Bo: “hopefully by the middle of the show, “What.,” you have no idea what’s real and what’s not real. That’s hopefully the confusion I want to stir in people.” (Cravesonline) Bo (the existential metafictionist; the metafictional existentialist; synonyms) intentionally blurs the lines between fiction and reality to convey a truth about life: that no matter what we do to try and live true to ourselves, nothing is adequately defined.

To weave these threads together, isn’t metafiction a response to existential exhaustion? In 2016, in this era of self-consciousness (and the resulting self-doubt), if we’re in charge of our own meaning, and we’re naturally inclined to seek an answer from an answerless world, then isn’t it understandable that existential themes and metafictional conceits would bleed into the artistic expressions of this generation? (Patricia Waugh: “In showing us how literary fiction creates its imaginary worlds, metafiction helps us to understand how the reality we live day by day is similarly constructed, similarly ‘written’.”) It deepens the message of a creation—whatever that creation may be—and goes further in its inquest to ask: why do we tell stories at all, and why are audiences so desperate to listen?



This artistic self-consciousness allows the performer, trapped in their own art, to break free and remind us “it’s an act up here”. There’s a conflict between wanting to remind everyone everything they see on stage is a performance—an exaggeration—but also having a desire to contribute something significant. (“I wanna please you, but I wanna stay true to myself.”) Bo is trapped in his creation the same way we’re trapped in our minds (from Left Brain, Right Brain: “I have trouble articulating how I’m feeling to other people”). He is compelled to use art, conscious of its failings and its inherent, detached fictionality, the way we’re compelled to live and search for significance and self-definition, conscious of the fact it’s an ever-changing, multifaceted, amorphous thing to strive for. It’s a core existential quandary: who am I? And what is this self I’m trying to convey? And why am I even bothering when there is yet to be invented a filterless way of projecting it out to the wider world? This divide; this conflict; this maddening conflation of desire and automatic-defeat; this frenetic rage and frustration that comes with simultaneously knowing the pursuit is futile, while feeling compelled to attempt it anyway, is visible in Bo’s material, the philosophy of existentialism, and the blueprint of metafiction.

It’s the life of a puppet-master: even if the person behind-the-scenes is your true self, the world will only ever see the self-made puppet you use to perform.

Living a metafictional life means seeing yourself as a character in a fiction of your own making, being an audience to yourself. Patricia Waugh: “The author attempts desperately to hang on to his or her ‘real’ identity as creator of the text we are reading. What happens, however, when he or she enters it is that his or her own reality is also called into question. The ‘author’ discovers that the language of the text produces him or her as much as he or she produces the language of the text. The reader is made aware that, paradoxically, the ‘author’ is situated in the text at the very point where ‘he’ asserts ‘his’ identity outside it.” So every reference to “The skinny kid with the steadily-declining mental health” who “can’t handle this right now” compels an audience, because even if it’s the stage persona we’re witnessing break down, the whole point is that when you bear witness to it, it doesn’t matter if they’re a fictional creation or not; what matters is that the feeling of breaking down rings true in all of us.

The self-consciousness of the modern age can cause a fear of being misconstrued; of having your identity misinterpreted; of being judged based on only one of the many dimensions to your performance. Patricia Waugh (giving us a possible reason for metafictional outbursts): “Occasionally authors may wish to remind the reader of their powers of invention for fear that readers may assume fictional information to be disguised autobiography.” Backed up in an interview with Bo: “it’s certainly strange to be recognizable as this person, on stage, that is called YOU […] That’s not who I am AT ALL. I’m so not that person. That is a weird performed version of myself.” (Observer) But what does he do? What do any of us do in situations of existential uncertainty? We strive to find whatever semblance of meaning we can; we pursue it anyway (“I should probably shut my mouth and do my job so here we go.”).



Bo’s comedy specials reflect those permutations within all of us—whether it’s us over analysing how overly analytical we are, or laughing at a fart joke, or asking the darkest, harshest questions of ourselves when we’re in a room on our own.

Bo: “I am very confused how comedy relates to me, and how it helps or hurts me, and how the audience relates to me. Are they my friends? My customers? Something in between? It’s all very strange and this show wasn’t meant to give answers to the audience as much as it was meant to let the audience in on those questions.” (Reddit AMA) The way Bo simultaneously loves and fears his fans parallels the existentialist’s feelings towards their mind (their own, internal audience). Just like Bo the performer’s biggest problem is pleasing his audience while staying true to himself; the existentialist’s biggest problem is living their life in spite of the self-doubting audience in their head.

And what are we doing, as an audience, when we analyse Bo’s deconstruction of performance and truth, and cherry pick what we feel are the honest moments in it? Why is it that we latch onto the more tragic content? (“It’s funny that I do something crazy and funny and people are like ah he’s kidding and then I do something dark or whatever and everyone’s like this is him, this is absolutely him. Both are exaggerations of something.” Interview) Is this a desire to witness something significant? To throwaway the one-liners and hone in on the confessions? Doesn’t this mirror the existential quest for significance? Is it because the thoughts he’s espousing speak to us? Is it because, with the advent of social media, these multitudinous voices have actually increased our self-doubt about the value of the life we’re living, instead of alleviating it? We’re bombarded with these digital identities everyone keeps stamping onto the world, and it’s maddening to figure out the truth amongst all the performance.

This metaexistence only serves to increase our self-awareness about how we present our lives to the other performers. How can we, in 2016, reach any kind of truth? How can we be true to our self when we’re living in an age where our concept of self is perpetually put under a microscope and analysed through the slides we willingly upload? This is our own real-life performance—to take part in this self-perpetuating cycle: we doubt ourselves, so we contribute to the digital world, clinging to whatever control we have over our perceived value (every post to social media is, no matter how small, proof of existence); we compare our contribution to everyone else; we worry and question how we come across; we combat our fears by making more contributions to self-define more specifically. This hyper-awareness contributes a new way of framing existential quandaries; the angst we feel about the crippling nature of choice can only be exacerbated by the timelines we see of everyone else making their own.

What did the existentialists of the past know about judgement, living in a world without these self-reflecting screens? Nowadays our life consists of this existential call-and-response (let me hear you say, “hell yeah”), where we communicate with each other via these timelines made up of carefully-chosen statements and images, and what we end up with is a sea of endless digital stamps that represent the mark we’re leaving on the world, and even though that sea is ceaseless, those stamps are hard to rub off—as is the paralysing fear we get when we look at the milestones of our life like it were not just a timeline on social media, but like the ones you find in history books (only now we’re creating our own in real-time).

“I do hope my sort of frantic, the–floor–is–lava type of comedy is a mimic of what it feels like to be alive now – for me at least, and hopefully for other people my age. Because” – thanks to the ubiquity of social media – “it feels like we’re always juggling many pieces of information at once, or trying out many personas at once. It makes life slightly nonlinear.” (Telegraph)

And in our own individual existential pursuits, we’re all slipping into the abyss, wandering through, and latching onto people who project an answer; the refreshing and compelling thing about Bo Burnham is that what he’s projecting is the truth about a lack of answers; for him it’s about exposing the questions. Maybe it’s Bo’s desire to get us to look at the performers with an audience critically, to question if they have truly found an answer in an answerless world, or if their performance is just as fictitious—even if it doesn’t acknowledge its fictionality. It’s a fight against the disingenuousness of the implication that these celebrities have somehow found a way to wipe away every filter—to convey themselves realistically, and honestly, rather than in any calculated way. Just like the existentialist’s issue with people not living life authentically (according to the definition we give ourselves), Bo highlights the inauthenticity of modern performers who maintain an act to perpetuate the idea that they have answers, that they have a life worth being in the audience for. Bo’s self-conscious performances compel us because, rather than pretending to have the answers, there’s something more captivating about a performer telling you you shouldn’t be captivated. In this age, which conflates the performer and the audience, where the lines are blurred as to appear almost singular, where celebrities exploit that ambiguity to give off a false senses of “realness”, it’s easy, from the perspective of an audience member, to be duped. I mean—fuck—we’re spending most of our life duping each other, convincing everyone—and ourselves—that the person we present to the world is who we truly are.



We don’t know when Bo is putting on an act or not, just like how we don’t know when the world around us isn’t populated with people acting out and pretending they know the answers to these existential questions. (Consider the multitude of fictions we encounter in our day-to-day lives.) The audience participates in this quest to find the “real” Bo; we share the existential pursuit of the performer. But, in modernity, there will never be something that conveys the complete truth of an individual; even a seemingly-honest confession in a comedy show could be, like many metafictional conceits, just another layer of fictionality. Because within the confines of a frame—be it a camera lens, a YouTube video, a social media account—isn’t everything at least one layer away from who we actually are? As we watch Bo struggle to bridge that self-conscious gap between what’s in his head and what he gives to the world—“I think people of my age want – at least, I want – something real. All this is almost me desperately trying to prove that there’s something there.” (Telegraph)—we struggle along with him, aware that this gap will never be bridged, that we will be forever shouting from one side to the other; but we struggle on anyway, in pursuit of any brief glimpse of truth or happiness that might make its way across.