Haikus/Sonnet/Shakespeare - Bo Burnham
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 is being pulled towards The underworld (Ding) Do unto others As you would have them do to you Said the rapist (Ding) My aunt used to say Slow and steady wins the race She died in a fire (Ding) Even if he is Your friend, never, ever call An Asian person (Ding) And finally Bono, if you want To help poor people, sell your Tinted shades, you cunt (Ding) Thank you, this next piece is called "Sonnet 155", or "If Shakespeare Had Written a Porn", and it goes like this: I saw the morning dew betwixt thine thighs As I removed my source of Grecian power As if King Midas dared to touch the skies Upon thy body fell a golden shower Thy body's temples, two church bells had rung Upon thy chest, a row of pearls bestowed The sun had set, thy set with wary hung I thought, "How black a night and blue a lode" 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-a riding on an ass Thank you very much William Shakespeare, uh William Shakespeare was a verbal cun-tortionist He could bend his words in the way a contortionist bends his frame well I'd hope 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 have 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've 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 'twere 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 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 "To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die, To sleep No moreand by a sleep to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause." Pft, like what?
Artist: Bo Burnham
Title: Haikus/Sonnet/Shakespeare