Teenager of the year

BURNHAM DOWN THE HOUSE Yep, Bo Burnham’s career is definitely on fire.

Bo Burnham has finally graduated. Not from high school—that was so last year. We mean graduated to the big time. The witty singer-songwriter teen comic, who posts his short musical comedies on YouTube, recently inked a four-CD deal with Comedy Central Records (the first, Bo Burnham, hit stores March 10), is penning a movie musical that Judd Apatow will produce and is in the middle of a world tour that hits the Lakeshore Theater Friday 8. He’s 18 years old.

Burnham grew up in the Boston suburb Hamilton, where he studied theater at an all-boys Catholic school. Self-taught on both guitar and electric piano, he began writing songs—no-holds-barred comic reflections on his adolescent life—and, in 2006, filmed and posted them on YouTube for his older brother, who was in college. In 2007, Break.com, which bills itself as offering “free videos, pictures and comedy for guys,” began posting Burnham’s clips. His dozen or so YouTube videos have gotten more than 40 million hits.

Burnham’s videos boast much more than ramblings on teen life. The wordplay is sly, commanding and audacious, especially considering Burnham was just 16 when he started posting these tunes. In the rap song “Bo Fo Sho,” he offers up an exaggerated version of himself with the lyric, “I get more head than grammar-school lice. I’m like a walking glacier, I’m so decked out in ice.” In “My Whole Family (Thinks I’m Gay),” the straight jokester sings, “Maybe it’s because of the way I walk that my whole family thinks I like…boys.”

Not surprisingly, Burnham—a devotee of foul-mouthed comics including Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Eddie Murphy—has had a hard time impressing his parents with handheld-camera videos of himself singing dirty ditties about sex, masturbation and religion in his bedroom (nevermind that he’s also deferred college for a while). “They were kind of weirded out at first,” he says, “but they’ve got a good sense of humor. My mom is never going to be happy with Jesus jokes.”

Burnham admits musical comedy wasn’t in the game plan. “I just stumbled into this weird medium,” he says. “I find that when I write jokes, I tend to think lyrically. [But] I’m not talented enough to have any [musical] influences. I just know a bunch of chords and sort of hack my way through them.”

He’s currently hacking his way through a musical parody of High School Musical with Apatow, which he may also star in still, not every comedian has taken to him the way Apatow has. “It seems like [I get] a pretty polarized reaction from comics,” Burnham says. “The vast majority are very nice to me and want to mentor and look after me. Other ones are looking at me like an 18-year-old hotshot. I can understand both points.”

Comics aren’t the only disgruntled parties. In March, an appearance at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, prompted protests from a group of about 15 students who picketed his show for its politically incorrect content. So far, Burnham has taken it in stride. “I don’t really care,” he says. “If people are up in arms about an 18-year-old singing songs, then life’s going to get really rough. Kids my own age want to stand for something. They form these college awareness groups, and then they protest my show. I’ve always had a pet peeve for these college kids who are like, ‘I’ve added the Obama Facebook application so I might as well be a political analyst.’”

While college students—at least the unoffended ones—constitute the bulk of his fan base, Burnham is eager to move beyond his own adolescent musings. “I’m embracing the fact that I can’t perform this material for much longer,” he says. “I wrote it when I was 16 and 17, and an 18- and 19-year-old’s opinion is worlds away, which I think for comedy is a great thing. It forces me to change my act really quickly.”

There’s one other thing Burnham’s tired of: riding the YouTube wave to fame. Though grateful, he indicates his Internet postings will become less frequent as he seeks the kind of live feedback he’ll get when he entertains the Lakeshore crowd with his guitar and piano. “I want to be able to debut material on stage. I’d rather have 200 people laugh than 1,000 people type ‘ha-ha-ha,’” he says. “I don’t want to be the YouTube kid forever or even for the next week.”

Bo Burnham plays the Lakeshore Theater Friday 8.

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