Bo Burnham Vancouver Concert — Next Date & Ticket Alerts

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About Bo Burnham

Robert Pickering 'Bo' Burnham was born August 21, 1990 in Hamilton, Massachusetts, the youngest of three siblings in a working-class New England household — his father ran a construction business, his mother worked as a hospice nurse. He grew up in the town's public-school system, played varsity sports, and was preparing to study experimental theater at NYU's Tisch School in 2008 when his YouTube channel turned into a national story. The first videos went up in late 2006, when he was sixteen — short, dense, deliberately uncomfortable musical-comedy bits filmed in his older brother's bedroom and posted under the handle boburnham. The early songs are essentially small-format theater monologues set to a Casio keyboard: 'My Whole Family Thinks I'm Gay,' 'New Math,' 'Sunday School,' a relentless run of internal-rhyme verses and tonal whiplash that read like a teenager who had absorbed too much Stephen Sondheim and too much Eminem in the same week. Comedy Central signed him at seventeen — at the time the youngest performer in the network's history — and Words Words Words, the hour he taped for them in 2010, established the working vocabulary: piano-and-vocals musical comedy, monologue interludes, a meta-aware running commentary on the act of standing on a stage at all. Bo Burnham's second special, what., released on YouTube and Netflix in 2013, pushed the form further into theater-and-multimedia: pre-recorded vocal tracks, lighting cues, dance, sketch, and a closing piece — 'We Think We Know You' — that doubled as a thesis statement on parasocial relationships before the term was in common use. Make Happy, the 2016 Netflix special directed by Christopher Storer (later of The Bear), tightened the technical apparatus into a fully-cued live show and ended with the 'Can't Handle This' Kanye-pastiche soliloquy that became one of the most-discussed comedy bits of the decade. Then he stopped. He stepped off the road in 2015 after a sequence of on-stage panic attacks during the Make Happy tour and spoke publicly about it in interviews — that he no longer found live performance sustainable, that the act of being watched at scale was making him unwell, that he needed to find a different way to make work. He spent the next several years directing: Eighth Grade in 2018, a feature debut shot for under two million dollars about a thirteen-year-old girl navigating the last week of middle school and a phone-saturated adolescence; the script won him a WGA nomination and the DGA's first-time feature award. He acted in Promising Young Woman in 2020, Emerald Fennell's revenge drama, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Then COVID-19 hit. He locked himself in a single guest-house room in Los Angeles in March 2020 and spent the next fifteen months writing, performing, shooting, lighting, editing, and scoring Bo Burnham: Inside — released on Netflix in May 2021, ninety minutes of musical comedy made entirely alone, in one room, with no crew. Inside won three Primetime Emmys (Outstanding Writing, Outstanding Directing, Outstanding Production Design for a Variety Special) and the Grammy for Best Comedy Album. The accompanying album — INSIDE (The Songs) — charted in the top ten of the Billboard 200, an essentially unheard-of result for a comedy album in the streaming era. He released a follow-up film of outtakes — The Inside Outtakes — to YouTube in 2022. Since then his public-facing output has been intermittent by design. Bo Burnham has not announced a sustained return to live touring as of this writing, and any future live work should be assumed to be selective, theater-scale, and infrequent unless and until the live schedule above says otherwise.

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