Emerging comedian cracks jokes for good cause

  Bo Burnham performed for a packed crowd at the Campus Center Ballroom at the University at Albany on Thursday, Feb. 25. The proceeds from the event, reaching upwards of $5,000, will be donated to the Students of Albany Against Cancer’s Relay For Life benefit for the American Cancer Society.

   At the young age of 19, Burnham has already recorded a Comedy Central half-hour special, released a CD/DVD that reached number 1 on the Billboard Top Heatseeker chart, and is currently writing a movie for Judd Apatow.

   Burnham started off the show with a brand-new song called “What’s Funny” and then alternated playing new songs with new stand-up for the first portion of the show. The new songs, although not all finished, were both funny and smart. Burnham’s stand-up could best be described as Mitch Hedberg meets David Sedaris, or a great mix of fluid one-liners and puns.

   In addition to non-musical stand-up, Burnham also performed a number of humorous haikus, silly statistics, and even some comic monologues written in Shakespearian prose.

   After trying out all of the new material, which seemed to be more mature lyrically and in a comedic sense, Burnham played a few old songs. While it was cool to see some of his YouTube songs performed live, what really made them great were the new lyrics he added to a few of them.

   At one point, he asked for a word from the audience for him to free-style with. Someone in the back yelled out, “Dildo!” Instead of free-styling about dildos, Burnham just made fun of the guy who yelled it out for giving him such a difficult word to rhyme.

   Opening up the show was the Sketchy Characters, UAlbany’s sketch comedy, improv, and stand-up comedy club, hosted by Martin Cahill. They played a few improvisational games, including Four-Square and The Dating Game.

   Finishing up the opening act, Dustin Howe came out and did a few minutes of stand-up. The themes he picked, drinking and picking up girls at bars, are ones that are often over-used, especially in this area, but were ones that an all-student audience could definitely relate to and find funny.

   Burnham’s father, who was present at the show, said this was his first time seeing some of the new material, and is only the fourth time Burnham was performing some of the material.

   In mid-April, Burnham will be filming an hour-long special for Comedy Central in Boston. He mentioned offstage that he’s trying to time his show to be an even 45 minutes, because that’s how long an hour-long special would be when you account for commercials.

  Burnham is a real talent, and has quite the career ahead of him after already accomplishing this much at such a young age. Burnham said in a published interview that he didn’t care if people illegally download his CD off the Internet or buy it, as long as it’s getting out there.

   Be sure to watch out for Burnham in the future, as you can expect to see more great things out of this rising comedian. More information on Burnham and his upcoming tour can be found on his website at www.boburnham.com.