Burrito Jokes

I like Bo Burnham an awful lot. I discovered him in the summer before freshmen year, and I haven’t been able to let go of him since. He’s the perfect mixture between funny ha ha! and deep haha? and sarcastic ha. And so I went on a spiral, of course, scouring the internet for every last inch of him. Watched as he awkwardly endured Katy Perry flirting with him, sang along with him as he played for Pitbull’s show, listened to him talk about watching YouTube videos of eighth graders. And I listened to podcasts.

Lots. Of Them.

One of my favorite songs by him is the ending of his Netflix special Make Happy: a Kanye West-inspired song called Can’t Handle This. If I were a more dramatic person, I would write that I got shivers just from thinking of that song.

Okay. I am that dramatic. I got shivers just thinking about that song.

I mean, it’s a goddamn masterpiece; I used to watch tons of video essays analyzing that song and loving every second of it like a fucking nerd. I really liked the idea of the burrito joke being a metaphor for all the pressures and anxiety Bo felt piling up due to his comedy career. I thought it was witty and funny and incredibly endearing.

So imagine my surprise when I listen to a podcast guest-starring Bo and hearing him say that the burrito joke was just. a. burrito joke.

Segways are weird! You know what else is weird? Art. What makes good art, what makes bad art. I used to think that art was good if it had meaning behind it, but now I’m not so sure, because you can literally ascribe meaning to anything, no matter how meaningless it is. Case in point: burrito joke.

I have always struggled with understanding the line between artist intention and consumer interpretation. I am sitting here writing this and still don’t know if the two should be the same. Is it okay if I interpret a piece of work differently than what the artist wanted? All English teachers would respond, “Yes! Of course it’s okay! Literary theory! Death of the author! Blah blah blah!”

But… is it really? I just feel so dumb for making something out of nothing.

Let’s take a detour from Burnham and talk about Shakespeare for a second.

Advanced English, freshmen year, we were covering the famous Shakespearean play; So You Think You Can Dance?

Whoops. Sorry. Not that one.

(I make really bad jokes.)

Okay, okay, it was Romeo and Juliet. Romeo, oh Romeo, where art thou, Romeo! Juliet, you idiot, he’s only into you because you have big tits.

To be fair, I was also into you because you had big tits, but it’s different because I’m a girl. Girls are innocent and perfect and can do no wrong and can never ever ever be sexist.

(btw juliet was a fucking whore just saying…)

Jesus, how did I get so off track. So for the class, we had to analyze the themes of Romeo and Juliet. For that, our English teacher really emphasized just how stupid the characters in the play were being, how reckless Romeo and Juliet were, all in the name of love. It was pretty easy to tell what she wanted us to write down for the “theme” section.

Everyone else read between the lines. I didn’t because I’m an idiot and I let the artists’ intention cloud my interpretation. My line of thought was: Okay, no way in hell did Shakespeare purposely write these characters to be dumb as fuck. He probably thought he was writing an epic saga about two (very much intelligent, very much reasonable) people falling in love. And so I strayed away from the Love makes you do reckless things theme and more towards the Love and violence are inherently intertwined route.

I felt stupid when everyone else did the former and I did the latter. I felt like I had the “wrong” answer, even though in literature you can never really be wrong. I was just so hellbent on considering Shakespeare’s original intent when creating the play, even though maybe his original intent wasn’t even anything worth analyzing. He literally could’ve just been bored and conjured up a plot for funsies.

This is just another example of the burrito joke, just like how people thought King Kong was an allegory for slavery, just like how people read Maggie Stiefvater’s werewolf trilogy and unearthed a metaphor for grief and Alzheimer’s.

Here is what Maggie had to say about it all: I remember when I wrote the Shiver trilogy, I thought I was writing it just for me—this quiet little werewolf novel. And then it sold in all of these countries, and I would get all of these emails from all around the world telling me that people had cried at this one chapter. I didn’t understand how this was possible until they started explaining to me what they thought the book was about. They would talk about how they thought that the werewolves were a metaphor for loss—a metaphor that reminded them of grief, or reminded them of losing a parent to Alzheimer’s. Once you take a true thing and you translate it into myth, then people translate it back into another true thing and it becomes universal again. I think as long as I’m being as true as I can when I translate that magic, people are going to keep on translating it back into a real thing. So, it feels like magic and reality at the same time.

I guess that that makes sense. I would love to think about it like that. It eliminates all possibility of Julie, you’re an idiot and it gives art meaning, which I love.

But even though I like the idea of it, I’m not quite sure if it’s true. It still is impossibly easy to make something out of nothing. To make a truth out of an untrue thing.

I don’t know. Art is like, the most important thing to me and so these types of conversations are always floating around in my mind. I wish I could have an answer. Yes or no. No maybes allowed.

But life isn’t programmed to work that way, is it?