I would say don't take advice from people like me who have gotten very lucky. We're very biased. You know, like Taylor Swift telling you to follow your dreams is like a lottery winner telling you, 'Liquidize your assets; buy Powerball tickets - it works!'
Bo Burnham
I've always liked the format of YouTube, sharing things for free, which is a nice exchange between people.
Once a week, I like to slip into a deep existential depression where I lose all my sense of oneness and self-worth.
The average person has one Fallopian tube.
Uncharted territory is a good place to be in.
A few people know me, and the few people that do know me only know me because they dig my stuff.
I think it would collapse my heart if I was super famous. I don't have the nerve for it, I'm too anxious. I don't know how you're not obsessed with how people perceive you, because they're real people, you know? You can convince yourself that they don't really know you, and that's true, but how can it not hurt your feelings?
You got to take a deep breath and give up. The system is rigged against you.
Being famous is complete luck, and that's something you can't bank on.
'what.' is bombastic introspection. It's large, colourful, and loud but hopefully intimate at the same time.
I'm not as incredibly prolific as Louis C. K., and I'm definitely not doing a completely brand-new hour probably by the beginning of the tour.
I grew up listening to Steve Martin and Robin Williams, so I didn't ever intend to be a musical comedian. I sort of stumbled into it.
I'm grateful for every stupid mistake and dumb joke I tried to make.
Please don't stick with me if I start sucking.
Not enough comedy makes you feel something.
Postmodern comedy doesn't work well with very old audiences, because it's making fun of the comedy they enjoy.
I think because of the Internet I was able to study comedy from quite a young age and watch a lot of comedy.
I don't want to put meaning on what I do because I don't know what it is.
Life, to me, doesn't feel like a straightforward story; it doesn't make sense for me to get up there and just tell a story. Life feels like what my show feels like: chaotic and strange and disconnected.
I just look at Miley Cyrus, and I'm like, 'Great, you've doubled your audience. But you've also doubled the number of people that hate you, and doesn't that hurt?' It takes a crazy person not to be affected by that.
For me, comedy is constantly presented as this fake casualness, like a guy just walked on stage going, 'This crazy thing happened to me the other day.' And he's in front of 3000 people, and he's acting like an everyman, and he's getting paid so much money.
I like to joke about being gay because it's something teenagers would never joke about.
At once I feel that comedy is this amazing sort of transcendent thing, and I'm also open to the fact that maybe it's just an evolutionary hiccup, something that upright apes do in their free time.
I have a pretty good math mind, so I can see patterns, but I don't have a great ear. It's like a tragedy - I can see so much more natural musical ability in so many other people.
In high school, I worked eight hours a day just so I could get into the college of my dreams and say that I got in - and I never went.
My career was exploding at the same time that social media itself was expanding. But when my online videos were taking off, I didn't think, 'Oh, great! I'm going to be able to parlay this into a career!' I just wanted to be a comedian. I just wanted to perform live.
At the time of 'Words, Words, Words,' I'm a 19-year-old getting up feeling like he's entitled to do comedy and tell you what he thinks of the world, so that's inherently a little bit ridiculous.
I have a show on MTV called 'Zach Stone Is Gonna Be Famous.' I think that's a secret to a vast majority of America.
I just like to write and then perform.
You can give poor people this royal wedding to watch and make them feel good about themselves, or you can give them something useful like, I don't know... a toaster.
I really like The Beatles.
It feels like we're always juggling many pieces of information at once or trying out many personas at once. It makes life slightly nonlinear.
I'm bored way too easily. I'm staring at screens half the day. I need to be overstimulated. And how will that express itself artistically?
I was doing theater in my high school, and I started writing sort of silly songs on the piano backstage in summer theater. I eventually put them online and started getting this little following.
I fully embrace myself as a hypocrite.
I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.
I've always liked TV shows that have slightly unlikable leads, where you root for them in spite of a lot of things. I know it's not common with shows with young people; they have to be so likable. But, I mean, teenagers just generally aren't very likable. I know I wasn't as a teenager.
I think the comedy clubs tend to homogenize the acts a little bit, because they force them to be palatable in way too many environments.
I don't want you to think I'm better than people or that I know better than people.
I like the idea of conceiving a show and putting on a show, and especially when I got to the place where I could play theaters.
I'm clearly doing what I want. I hope kids can see my act and feel like they can be slightly more comfortable in their own skin because I'm being so ridiculously comfortable in mine. I'm not that comfortable in my skin the moment I walk offstage. But I try to project that while I'm on it.
I'm still a kid in his bedroom, writing songs and playing them.
Comedy doesn't really matter that much; I know that. I treat it like an adult - I don't treat it like a child or a god, which some people do. This might just be in America, but 'stand-up comedy' is something very particular that I don't particularly relate to.
If a comic is himself, there'll be things he can't do - because he has to adhere to that persona.
With 'Words, Words, Words,' that show was me experimenting with something, and then there was a clear direction for me.
I don't worship comedy; at the end of the day, I don't fall to the altar of comedy unquestioningly.
I've kind of stopped valuing laughter as the end-all measurement of what I'm doing.
I've come across people referring to themselves as 'Vine famous.' Some of them started out by putting up Vines just for fun, then all of a sudden they get a bunch of fans, and a week later their Vines are totally different. They become obsessed with how their videos will be perceived.
There's tons of dudes - like David O'Doherty, Tim Key, and Alex Horne - I made a lot of friends with people who are really incredible comics.
There's only one rule in stand-up, which is that you have to be funny. Yet 99 per cent of comics look and talk exactly the same.
