Bo Burnham posted songs for his brother and became an early YouTube star
In December 2006 a teenager in suburban Massachusetts wanted his older brother, away at university in New York, to hear two songs he had written. A friend suggested filming them in his bedroom and uploading them to a new site called YouTube. One clip spread fast, and Bo Burnham had a career.
Burnham was born on 21 August 1990 in Hamilton, a Boston suburb, to a hospice nurse and a construction company owner. Because his mother was the school nurse, he attended a Catholic prep school in Danvers for free, acting in plays and joining campus ministry. He won a place at NYU's Tisch School to study experimental theatre, deferred it for comedy, and never enrolled.
The breakout song, My Whole Family, took off after being shared on Break.com. Playing guitar or keyboard, he kept producing what he called pubescent musical comedy, deliberately homemade and filmed mostly in his bedroom, taking on race, sexuality and religion with a stage persona he described as a more arrogant version of himself. That edge drew a protest by fifteen students at Westminster College in 2009, to which he replied that his satire meant well but could not make its intentions too obvious. At 17 he became the youngest performer to record for Comedy Central's The World Stands Up, and in 2010 his Edinburgh Fringe debut won the Panel Prize, worth 5,000 pounds.
Specials followed in 2010, 2013 and 2016, and in 2016 he stepped back from live shows, later explaining he had been having panic attacks on stage. He turned to directing, writing Eighth Grade, which premiered at Sundance in 2018 and scored 99 percent on Rotten Tomatoes across 326 reviews, and directing specials for Jerrod Carmichael and Chris Rock. His view of that job was that it mostly meant getting out of the performer's way.
During the pandemic he made Inside entirely alone in his guest house, with no crew or audience. Netflix released it on 30 May 2021; it took three Emmys from six nominations, a Peabody, and a Grammy for All Eyes on Me, and three of its songs went platinum in the United States. A year later he posted 63 minutes of outtakes.
Source: Bo Burnham
