Fears of a Clown

“Wait, no, it’s not a pain. Don’t write that,” he says to me. It’s coming out all wrong. It’s just that, well, he’s in a transitional period, and he’s very emotional, and confused, and he changes his mind every day, and he has a hard time dealing with all the attention, and he knows what he wants and doesn’t know what he wants, and, well, he’s 18. Very 18. And he has, in many ways, been tapped to be a spokesman for what it means to be a teenager in America at this moment. But the teenager he is now is vastly different from the teenager he was when all this started, a 16-year-old with a piano and a video camera sitting in his bedroom writing funny songs for YouTube. To understand his mixed feelings toward his own material, you have to go back to that first song, “My Whole Family . . . ,” which began his viral video life and made him pseudo-famous at the mall.

My whole family thinks I’m gay. I guess it’s always been that way. Maybe it’s ’cause of the way that I walk, Makes them think that I like . . . boys.

“When I say that 200 times,” he says, referring to the punch line, “I want to shoot myself in the head.”

This probably sounds disrespectful, Bo admits. There are a lot of comedians who would kill to be where he is. There are a lot of people who laugh at that joke. And for him to sit there in Nick’s Famous Roast Beef in North Beverly and say that his material is bad, well, that’s just rude, and the Burnhams in the nice house in Hamilton are not disrespectful people. He’s still proud of many of his old bits. The thing is, they date from a period that seems like ages ago. There was a time when there was nothing funnier for him than sitting in the cafeteria and coming up with new Helen Keller jokes. As he transitioned from watching Nickelodeon to The Daily Show, he developed a knack for the off-color laugh and combined witty wordplay with brazenly open emotions to make smart observations about the high school experience. He wasn’t afraid to admit to insecurities about hormones and girls, or to the fact that he was pretending to be an adult who knows everything but was really, as he says, “a scared little kid who knows nothing” -- like the character in his song “High School Party” who describes a liaison with a mixture of bravado and fear.

I know your body, and I know how to please ya. Don’t thank me, thank Wikipedia.

But he didn’t “hit that,” as they claim in the boys’ locker room. He flunked it. Miserably.

High school party, senior year. None of that happened, ’cause I wasn’t invited.

That kid became Bo Burnham! YouTube star! (At last count, his videos have received more than 45 million hits there.) And that kid has now been packaged and bankrolled by Hollywood. He is the youngest person ever to have gotten his own Comedy Central special, and was a recent guest on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. But, dude, he’s not in high school anymore. He graduated from Danvers’s St. John’s Prep over a year ago. He’s almost 19 and a college kid now, or at least he should be. He bypassed Harvard and NYU and went on the road this spring, touring in support of his CD/DVD Bo Burnham. And he spends most of his time sitting alone in the third-floor bedroom of his parents’ house writing about high school, even though his heart, and his friends, has already left for campus. Because before he can graduate for good, he’s got to deliver one final assignment, and it’s a whopper. Judd Apatow, the most influential figure in Hollywood comedy -- as a director (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up), producer (Superbad, Pineapple Express), and anointer of a new generation of comic stars (Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill) -- has asked Bo to write the anti-High School Musical musical. As Bo describes it, “the reaction against the Hannah Montana Disney version of teens,” the uncensored story about what it’s really like to be in high school. If it’s good enough, if it gets made, it will star Burnham himself.

Bo thinks he’s up for the challenge. “Who knows high school better than me?” he says with a real confidence in his eyes. “Definitely not a 30-year-old screenwriter.” But this task, this pivotal moment in his young life, has him in a bind. He’s being asked to make a grand statement about high school, but he’s feeling like the old guy at the prom. “I can’t write dirty adolescent songs for much longer,” he says as he looks up from his junior roast beef and gives me a serious look, a long look, a look where he is almost willing the boyishness to disappear from his boyish face. “I’m not ashamed of it. I think it was original because it had never been done by someone that young on such a large stage. But I just feel like ‘you are not doing this when you’re 20.’ When you’re 20 years old, you should be able to do something, you know?”

There’s a lot riding on high school Bo. The problem is that the voice of teenage America just wants to become an adult.

***

We’re eating roast beef in North Beverly because Bo Burnham doesn’t want me in his house. It’s a Friday night, and in a couple hours, Comedy Central Presents: Bo Burnham would be debuting on national television. It’s our first meeting, and I had asked his publicist if I could watch the show with him, figuring the family would be doing something special for the premiere. I was told that Bo didn’t want his parents to make a big deal out of it (true) and that Bo himself wasn’t even planning on watching it (not exactly true). What Bo is doing is smart: He’s feeling me out before he lets me in. As he talks, I take note of the Bo in front of me versus the Bo on his videos. They both have the same flawless comic timing and schoolyard charm, but the real Bo is more intellectually mature than his stage character. He’s definitely aged a bit from his first videos, growing into a lanky 6-foot-4 man-child with peach fuzz on his chin, and there’s enough of the drama-queen-theater-kid lilt in his voice to tickle a few blips out of the gaydar (though his family disagrees, he insists that he wrote “My Whole Family . . . ” because he thought they really suspected he was gay).

As our conversation progresses, it becomes clear we have competing objectives. I want to learn who Bo Burnham is right now; he wants to talk about who he’s going to be. He holds forth at length about his comedy influences -- George Carlin, Bill Hicks, and lots and lots on the old Steve Martin -- and makes it clear he’s been studying the masters. Bo has a goal and, though he has a tough time getting the words out of his mouth because it “makes me sound like a pretentious [expletive],” the goal is smarter humor. He’s done edgy; he’s mocked the things you’re not supposed to mock (race, disabilities, homosexuality). He took advantage of the easy laughs that come from being a young kid telling raunchy jokes in public, and has lost interest in that. It’s too easy for him, he says; he wants to go deeper, to craft jokes that stagger with intelligence instead of inappropriateness. And he’s tired of telling the story of how his parents just about had a heart attack after he posted that first video of “My Whole Family . . . ” and how they woke him up in the middle of the night and made him take it down immediately (after two weeks of bargaining, they agreed to let him put an edited version back online).

He wants to talk about taking his comedy further intellectually, about challenging the audience’s expectations of him. Most of his creative energy goes into the Apatow movie project -- he just finished the first draft and is now writing the songs -- but he’s still toying with his stage act, adding songs that contain jokes that don’t make him want to shoot himself in the head. Sure, he might open his act with “My Whole Family . . . ” -- give them what they paid for -- but he’ll close it with what he needs for himself: a song like “ Love Is . . .” which is one of the least popular of his songs on YouTube but which contains what he says is the best joke he’s ever written: Love is . . . being the owner of the company that makes rape whistles. And even though you started the company with good intentions trying to reduce the rate of rape, now you don’t want to reduce it at all, ’cause if the rape rate declines you’ll see an equal decline in whistle sales.

When you’re sitting across from an 18-year-old kid riding a gravy train that’s more lucrative than what most parents make -- in addition to the movie deal and cable special, he has small parts in two upcoming movies, Apatow’s Funny People, and American Virgin, with Rob Schneider, and has sold more than 60,000 copies of his self-titled CD/DVD and an earlier EP, Bo Fo Sho -- listening to him talk about how he’s ready to abandon that, it triggers mixed emotions. Part of me wants to say: “Ride that train as far as it will go.” But the other part holds Burnham with a dollop of awe and more than a bit of jealousy -- of his youthful energy and his feverish determination to create and push and risk it all.

“What makes Bo interesting is he’s on his own path,” says Dane Cook, the uber-comedian and Arlington native who sought out Bo to open for him at a show in New Hampshire after seeing his clips online. “When I hung out with him in New Hampshire, I gave him two bits of advice: One, don’t take advice from a comic; and two, the really key advice, was to trust your gut, that little voice in the back of your head. If you do that, it certainly takes you strange and interesting places, and I think that’s part of the fun and part of the ride.

“Your fans will want to go down those creative avenues with you. My fans have taken some risks with me,” adds Cook, who knows all about cultivating a fan base online (he has more than 2.5 million “friends” on MySpace). “What Bo does is he has his own unique spin, and it’s up to him to continue to provide us, you could say, with more glimpses into the twisted world he perceives.”

Bo is already on it. Dave Becky, who manages Bo and such comedians as Tracy Morgan, Amy Poehler, and Louis C.K. (and who managed the late, great Mitch Hedberg, one of Bo’s idols), says that Bo’s willingness to take chances is precisely why he’s going to be more than an Internet flash in the pan. “Two years from now, I don’t think people are going to say, ‘Remember that musical comedy guy?’ ” Becky says. “He’s incredibly smart.” Becky tells me that Bo is not the least bit motivated by money. He’s searching for intellectual satisfaction.

Later that evening, after I’ve apparently passed the test, he invites me over to his house. “This is it,” he says with a grand mocking gesture as he sweeps his hand across his third-floor bedroom. I’ve been allowed inside the room whose blue walls and slanted white ceiling have become so iconic through his videos that Comedy Central had it re-created onstage for his special. And now, well, um, he’s fidgety. He doesn’t know what to show me, doesn’t know what there is to see that will explain who he is right now. “What kind of animal do you want?” he says as he pulls out a thin latex balloon and makes something that looks like an elephant. “I haven’t done this in . . . hours.” He shows me his Rubik’s Cube collection. Then he sits down at his piano (where he spends up to eight hours a day writing songs for the movie) and sings a couple of songs loudly in a failed effort to interest a cat that’s sleeping in a chair. He’s half trying to entertain me and half trying to prove a point -- to show me what his current existence is really like. Downstairs, his older sister, Samm, who recently graduated from Suffolk Law School, had invited two friends over to watch the Comedy Central show. Bo didn’t invite anyone. Earlier, he had told me he hated people who kept saying how much they wanted to trade places with him. Until the show started, I didn’t really believe him. As late-night America gets introduced to Bo Burnham, he barely looks at the screen and spends most of his time sending text messages. “He doesn’t talk about it a lot, but the reality is that he’s sitting in his room alone with no friends, and he really wants to go out and live on his own,” says his girlfriend, Rachel Child, a 19-year-old from Wellesley who just finished her freshman year at NYU. “He’s going through a transition. We’re all going through a transition. And I think he’s outgrowing the old Bo Burnham.”

***

It’s two weeks after his Comedy Central premiere, and the night before his sold-out show at the Wilbur Theatre, and Bo and I are standing in his living room having a very teenage moment.

“What do you want to do?” he asks.

“I don’t care,” I say. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t care.”

We go candlepin bowling and, when that’s done, have the same conversation. So we head to the Northshore Mall. Bo immediately puts his hood up so he won’t be recognized. He gets spotted anyway -- by a mob of a dozen teenage boys - and flees into a Sunglass Hut. I ask him about his reaction to being recognized, and he doesn’t want to talk about it. From the mall, we go to Laser Quest and meet up with two high school friends who have come home for Easter. We play a 45-minute, every-man-for-himself “Ironman Mission” with 32 people inside a black-lit laser-tag arena. What happens afterward is something that Bo had tried to explain before but which only becomes clear to me when I see it for myself. As we stand around, reading our score sheets (Bo had the highest score by far), I hear a group of girls next to us talking about Bo. Then one of them approaches.

“Are you Bo Burnham?” she asks. He says yes, and then the girl says, “I don’t know what that means, but I was supposed to ask.”

And there it is. Bo shrinks. His shoulders drop reflexively, trying to make himself smaller, less noticeable. He looks uncomfortable in his own skin, and he ushers us to the door. “What is that ‘but I was supposed to ask’?” he says to me under his breath. “I just saw that girl say to her friend, ‘There he is.’ What is that? I don’t understand that.”

This is why Bo Burnham is ready, desperate even, to move on. Because to be famous for being a teenager means that fame is dependent on teenagers. And teenagers are appallingly cruel. This teenager got what she wanted. Now she has something to write on Facebook: Dude, I totally just cut down Bo Burnham.

Good luck to you, kid. Bo Burnham is out of here.

***

The following night, backstage at the Wilbur, Bo is putting on deodorant and drinking Red Bull. He’s excited to show me something he’s been working on, a new bit he’s going to do even though he’s pretty sure it’s going to fly over the heads of much of his young audience: a spoken-word piece about Shakespeare.

He had puns and quips and tons of trips of sons and ships and nuns with hips and buns and lips. But I had something Shakespeare never had.

Penicillin.

See, it hadn’t been invented back then. Back then they only had quillicillin.

He stops and looks at me and lets out a groan like a drunken seal, anticipating the audience’s reaction. I ask him about the movie script, about whether that isn’t enough of an outlet to satisfy his craving for writing more intelligent humor. “That’s the bitch,” he says. He gets paid either way, but he’s not in his room alone with YouTube anymore; he has a real fear that all that creative energy could get buried if the movie doesn’t get made. “It’s hard to think that someday all that material could be nothing.”

My seat is right next to a kid wearing a St. John’s jacket. He’s a 16-year-old sophomore with dirty blond hair named Matt Chesley. “If you go to St. John’s, you know every word to all his songs,” he tells me. Bo comes out, the audience goes wild, and when he sits down at the piano to begin “My Whole Family . . . ,” he says, “This one’s called ‘Sing Along and I’ll [Expletive] Kill You.’ ” Chesley nudges me. “See?” he says.

Bo kills with it. The audience is overrun with teens, and he gives them most of what they wanted and a little bit of what he needed. He sings his hits and amuses himself by picking on the audience in between. (To a dad in the front: “You’ve got the collared shirt and the slicked-back hair. I’m guessing Peabody, Northshore Mall. Ten years ago, you used to lean against the Cinnabon saying: ‘What the [expletive] are you looking at?’ ”) When he gets to a bit in the show where he says “I just graduated from high school. Seniors ’08!” he stops himself and talks about how he didn’t just graduate from high school and that he has to stop saying that. And there, onstage, he continues our conversation and talks for a bit about how he’s getting bored with his act, how he hates himself for doing Helen Keller jokes. Then he does the Shakespeare piece. Matt Chesley doesn’t laugh at that one.

Except for Bo’s older brother, Pete, who is finishing his senior year at Cornell, the whole Burnham family is waiting in the lobby after the show. His father, Scott, who owns a construction company, is behind the merchandise booth selling T-shirts and posters. His mother, Pattie, a nurse, is surveying the grandparents (all four made it to see him live for the first time). The Burnhams had 30 of the 1,100 tickets, and there is a graduation vibe among them, as if they are all standing back and admiring what their boy has become. Rachel, his girlfriend, says to me, “It’s kind of surreal, because he’s this kid who’s into Rubik’s Cube and now . . . ” She waves her hand across a line that extends up the stairs to the mezzanine, filled with many, many teenage girls waiting to get their picture taken with Bo.

As the meet-and-greet stretches into its second hour, Bo darts over to me and whispers in my ear, “I’m dying inside,” a bit of a smirk on his face.

“Are you really?” I ask.

“Well,” he says and thinks about it for a second. “My back is killing me from standing in one place for too long.”

Freelance writer Billy Baker is a frequent contributor to the Globe Magazine. E-mail him at billybaker@gmail.com.