Please welcome Bo Burnham.
(cheers and applause)
You're very nice.
Thank you.
Welcome to the show, Bo Burnham.
Happy to be here, Trevor.
It is so good to have you, man.
Your journey has been one that I have watched
and enjoyed from afar for a very long time,
and then I met you in the comedy scene.
But, Bo Burnham, for so many people, was one of the first,
quote, unquote, "internet sensations."
Yeah, Bo Burnham, for most people was, "who?”
But, yes. Um...
For some people, I was an Internet sensation,
which is a term I love.
Yeah, baby!
A sensation.
So, here you are as Bo Burnham.
You are... you're this savant and this comedy genius.
Like, music and comedy and making everything.
-And then you step onto the stage. -Yeah. Mmm.
You know, and what really intrigued me
is when you talk about the stories
of how uncomfortable you were
in a space where you seemed completely comfortable.
Yeah, I mean, I was having panic attacks
on stage regularly, which is chill.
Um, and yeah. I-I don't know.
I-I would talk about my specific anxieties
of being on stage performing,
thinking that they were specific to what I was at the time,
-a 25-year-old male comedian with an audience. -Right.
And I would do my shows and talk about that,
and 13-year-old girls would come up to me after
and say, "I feel exactly like you do."
And I'd go, "What?" No, but truly.
So, you know, if there was a bridge I had to walk
to make this movie, it was built by them to me.
I felt understood by eighth grade girls before...
People-- truly, truly-- people always said, like,
"Ah, he's just a comedian for eighth grade girls."
And at a certain point I was like, "Hell yeah, I am."
-And I made a movie. -Yeah, but you know what's great
is that genuinely, you made a movie
that, like, seems like it's so specific,
and yet I feel like it speaks to everything
that most people go through in life.
And you look at this movie, you have a fantastic story
about a young girl who is going
-through her final week of eighth grade. -Mmm.
And it's also about the impact of social media on her life.
Like, did you find parallels between your life
and the story that we're told of her life in this film?
Yeah. I-I just set out to talk about how I was feeling,
and then I found out I was feeling like an eighth grader.
Truly, I feel like usually
there's a sort of crappy narrative
that the only stories about the human condition
are about some, like, poet in the woods
or some dude with a sword.
Why can't it be about, you know,
a girl walking into a pool party?
-Why can't everyone see themselves in her? -Right.
In the way we usually do for older male characters.
You have been part of Internet culture
-for a longer time than many people. -Yeah.
You've been intrinsically connected to it for a long time.
-Yeah. -Do you, like, do you see that?
Is that what you put in the movie?
'Cause there are parts in the movie where I'm watching it
and I'm going, "Yeah, we do that."
We want to be seen by people,
-like, in the not-real world. -Yes.
But the people in the real world are trying
to have conversations with us, and we don't care.
We're all doing this thing,
-trying to see where the likes come from. -Right.
Is that something you've experienced?
-Is that why you put that in the movie? -Yeah.
I mean, my impulse really was
the more I engaged with the Internet,
the less authority I felt I had over it.
And there's so much commentary about the Internet.
There's so many people getting up
and talking about, like, cyberbullying and Russia.
You know what I mean? And there's a subtler conversation
to be had, which is, like,
how is it interfacing with our hearts?
I didn't want to have a sort of finger-wagging movie.
There's a lot of movies that seem like they're...
you know, they try to, like, shove the Internet into it
where it feels like a Taco Bell commercial
where it's like, "#Chalupa."
You know what I mean? And it's like...
it's like, can you talk about...
can you talk about... Should I not say that?
Taco Bell's great.
Uh, no, but I just wanted to...
There's so much commentary about the Internet.
There's not a lot of description of it.
And just, like, I feel like we're all in it,
and in 20 years when the kids in my movie
become social scientists, I'll be very curious
-to hear what they have to say about it. -Right, right, right.
But until then, it's like,
we just need to take emotional inventory,
'cause I don't think we've even, like, begun
to describe what the Internet is,
let alone be able to talk about it.
Some 50-year-old dusty dude
telling me about, like, you know, social trends.
I'm like, "Just stop it."
If you were to try and sum up the feeling of the movie
in a short sound bite, what would you hope it would be?
What would you want people to walk away from
after watching Eighth Grade?
I hope it feels like eighth grade, which...
Eighth grade is horrible and strange and weird
and my body is exploding and help me and woo-hoo!
You know? So that's what I hope the movie feels like.
Eighth grade feels like right now,
which is scary and weird and funny and sad, so, uh...
Yeah, I hope people just feel. I don't... you know.
-Feel. -Feel.
Woo-hoo.
Chalupa, baby. Thank you, Trevor.
-Appreciate it. -Dude, thank you so much for being on the show.
Eighth Grade is in select cities now.
You really want to go watch this movie.
It'll be in theaters nationwide August 3.
Bo Burnham, everybody.