Cover art for ​haikus/sonnet/shakespeare by Bo Burnham

​haikus/sonnet/shakespeare

Producer

Oct. 19, 20101 viewer40.5K views

​haikus/sonnet/shakespeare Lyrics

We've been doing a lot of laughing, which is good, uh, for a comedy show on a comedy CD, but what we haven't been doing is a lot of thinking, and I'd like to do that now.

I've written some haikus. Haikus are Japanese poems consisting of 17 syllables, three lines - five, seven, five - and I find them to have a certain philosophical construct. There's a certain, uh, soundness in their simplicity, a clearness in their cogency if you will.

So hopefully what we'll do right now is read these haikus, think for a bit, and then when we go back, uh, to the, you know, the jokes and the laughing, they'll have benefited, uh, from the time we took to think. So um, you guys just sit back and indulge me and just think for a bit, and then we'll go back to the jokes. Uh, can I get some blue light to set the mood?

Perfect.

For those of you listening on CD, the lights didn't change which made it funny.

I saw a rainbow
On the day my grandma died
Fuckin' lesbian

(*Ding*)

For fifteen cents a day
You can feed an African
They eat pennies

(*Ding*)

Old peoples' skin sags
Because it's being pulled towards
The underworld

(*Ding*)

"Do unto others
As you would have them do to you"
Said the rapist

(*Ding*)
I said, "What light through yonder beaver breaks?
It is the yeast,
and now my belly's yellow"
My pole gives cause to storms and earthy quakes
But 'tis not massive, I am no Othello


And when that final moment came to pass
Like Christ, I came, arriving on an ass


Thank you very much

William Shakespeare, uh...
William Shakespeare was a verbal cunt-ortionist
He could bend his words in the way a contortionist bends his frame without hope that he could with a name like William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare, some, some of you seem lost, look
Say your name was Robert Frost and you couldn't write, that would suck
Well, I guess you could always go as Bobby Frost and own an ice cream truck
He was balanced like a simile and could stack metaphor five, six at a time and rhyme into the very last line of a soliloquy which finally said, outright what the previous 77 were only hinting at
He had puns and quips and tons of trips of sons with ships with nuns with hips and buns and lips, but I had something that Shakespeare never had:
Penicillin

See, it hadn't been invented yet, back then they only had "quill"-icillin
Hey, it's not that hard, bard
I'm sorry, I got a bone to pick with you, William
So if you could just listen up here and listen to this theater queer's theater query here and maybe act like a real artist for once in your life
Say, Van Gogh, and
Lend me your ear

You're not a writer
You're a writer like fucking Hulk Hogan's a street fighter

You write these dramas, you accumulate your wealth
You hold nature as to a mirror of yourself
Just because you're messed up doesn't mean we are too
Just because you want to bang your mom doesn't mean that Danish princes do, what?
Who? Yeah, Hamlet, Shakespeare. That's right, the young prince whose father died at the hands of his uncle with whom his mother lied, sound familiar?
It's the fucking Lion King
You stole from a Disney movie, you androgynous douche!
What's next? The story of a French king on a quest to find his lost son, Nemo?
Oh, and by the way, poetic talent is really easy to fake when thy sentences doth no fucking sense make

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Genius Annotation

Bo Burnham goes into the depths of Shakespeare’s poems, tells some funny and ironic haikus, (Japanese poems) and reenacts a made up, but based on true poems, Sonnet 155 while calling out Shakespeare for not being a real artist.

Credits
Producer
Recorded At
Carolines on Broadway
Released on
October 19, 2010
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