Age: 35
male
Robert Pickering "Bo" Burnham (born August 21, 1990) is an American comedian, musician, actor, film director, screenwriter, and poet. He began his career on YouTube in March 2006, with his videos gaining more than 300 million views as of March 2021. Burnham signed a four-year record deal with Comedy Central Records and released his debut EP, Bo fo Sho, in 2008. His first full-length album, Bo Burnham, was released the following year. At the age of 18, he became the youngest person to record a half-hour comedy special with Comedy Central. In 2010, his second album, Words Words Words, was released along with his first live comedy special of the same name on Comedy Central. His third album and second comedy special, what., was released in 2013 on his YouTube channel and Netflix. He finished in first place at the 2011 Comedy Central Stand-up Showdown. His third stand-up comedy special, Make Happy, was released exclusively on Netflix in 2016. His fourth comedy special, Bo Burnham: Inside, premiered on Netflix in 2021. In 2013, Burnham co-created and starred in the MTV television series Zach Stone Is Gonna Be Famous and released a book of poetry called Egghead: Or, You Can't Survive on Ideas Alone. His first feature film as a writer and director, Eighth Grade, was released in 2018 to widespread critical acclaim; among other accolades, it received the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – First-Time Feature Film. In 2020, Burnham starred as Ryan Cooper in the film Promising Young Woman.
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
