Peel

Comedian, Youtuber, filmmaker, and author Bo Burnham released the poetry book Egghead: Or, You Can’t Survive On Ideas Alone in Oct, 2013. A collection of humorous micro poems and illustrations from Chance Bone, it was a New York Times Bestseller and was critically well received.

Not to be gratuitous, but doesn’t the existence of Bo Burnham prove my point? Besides being a sexy, brooding, sentient piece of twink linguini, Bo Burnham illustrates the intersection of poetry and comedy. Since his YouTube days, Burnham’s shtick is being a musical comedian. That means songs, lyrics, ironic language. A career-long trust that comedy and poetry compliment each other.

Let’s take a look at the poem to your left, “The Fall.” Appearing on his 2010 stand-up special Words, Words, Words, “The Fall” is a brief lyric composed of two tercets that describes a fall day and perhaps the autumning of a relationship. The joke gives us our time and place, our son out of gas on the 101. Moving into sensory details we find the first tercet threadbare and almost avoidant with metaphor, the fall and its “...leaves spilled / like colored pencil shavings–” (2-3). 

But then. And this is how I know this joke is poetry. While watching the stand up special for the first time, I remember curdling with envy as Burnham read the lines, “the streets dicing our town / into neat unfair portions–(4-5)”.  Briefly, Burnham pauses after these lines in his special; poet’s breath, allowing me to parse “unfair” up and down my fingers like a coin. The gravity emanating from “unfair” in his couplet at once creates the affective propulsion in the poem we have been lacking, while simultaneously halting us with its caution. Watching him I thought, and still think, what a better poet this comedian is than me.

To resolve this moment he says “and me, eatin’ that pussy” (6), and I’m allowed to laugh. At the absurdity of it all. Absurdity that I find it so unfair that i'm not the most talented person I know, absurdity that this homunculus of Abraham Lincoln and Justin Bieber just gave me pussy eating advice, absurdity at the percussive bliss of the word “pussy” evoked and then celebrated.

…

I am so bored of poetry. The poetry I deal with (yes deal with) in my grad program and in papers. These academic poems that read like 

“in the church of my undoing

there is bread, a lung of cobwebs 

there is my unfair mother 

with the salt-blue of our shared tongue.”

and oh, Lord God, do I want (and this is true so please listen and listen good when I tell you I want so bad) to die. The self-serious. Every thought slathered with a million new codes of paint until how the fuck am I supposed to know what you mean? And you, you brain worms, you have infected me with this expectation to also sound like Wallace Stevens jacking off to 13 Ways forever and ever, ah-men. 

Poets, we hold our irony against our audience; as if it must be wielded like a fancy meal nobody else at the table can afford. But comedians. They slap down irony as blunt as they please and, miraculously, everyone at the table will rejoice at nothing but an open can. 

“It’s like why you gotta try so hard!” they tell us, poets. “I mean: Am I right!? Am I right!?”

…

A clementine is not funny. When it's split in half, you find the vulva and all its bush. A clementine is boring and is only good at PREVENTING sickness. Yes, bitch. That's right. This essay is anti-Emergen-C™ agitprop. Fuck labels. Fuck, my wife’s a bitch. But I love to devour her pussy. Vore the rich. Bless my cunt. Goodnight, y’all. I’ve been great, really.

p. 5/5