Bo Burnham - 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)
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 pow'r
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 weary, hung
I thought
"How black a night and blue a load" 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
"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 more, and, 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"

Pfft! Like, what?

This next song is about quantum mechanics
(Hit's random keys on the piano)

This next song
I was raised very well, like a field of corn
You know, I was also raised very Christian
Like the Children of the Corn
And Christians get angry at me 'cause I
Say things like, "Why the long nose
Pope nocchio?" they'll think I'll go to Hell
The truth is, I've been to Christian Hell
And I actually wrote a song about it:

Hitler was there
And so were all the Jews, yeah
So it got a little awkward