In-groups, out-groups, and comic synchrony in Bo Burnham’s Make Happy (2016)

Abstract

Examining Bo Burnham’s stand-up comedy special, Make Happy (2016), this article proposes the concept of comic synchrony, a mode of discourse used to speak both ironically and sincerely at once. Initially, audiences read Burnham’s utterances as wholly ironic or sincere depending upon their membership in an in-group or out-group. Comic synchrony occurs through the layering of concurrent discourse communities that complicate the use of shared rhetorical modes between speaker and interpreter. I argue that audience membership in coexisting and permeable discursive circles catalyses audience evolution so they come to understand each of the Burnham’s utterances as ironic and sincere simultaneously. Through this model, the comedian levels biting critique toward the assembled audience and, more broadly, contrived performance—meaning each attack and not meaning it at the same time. The result is a rhetorical configuration that interrogates the ambivalent relationship between irony and sincerity, emphasizing the contradictory and conflicting experience of acting out one’s life for an audience.