There it is Again: TikTok’s Take on Bo Burnham’s "That Funny Feeling"

CW: Mentions of Mental Illness, Suicide, Climate Doom, and Gun Violence

Original artwork by Briaanna Chiu

Lit by a glowing studio light, an exhausted man with a scraggly beard and acoustic guitar sits before a blurred projection of a forest and sings “the whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door… there it is again, that funny feeling.” It’s the beloved Bo Burnham, comeback kid of musical comedy. After a years-long anxiety-induced hiatus from performing live comedy, Burnham created a special for Netflix that documents and expresses his emotional state and ruminations during the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020. The entire special was written, directed, staged, and performed by Burnham and Burnham alone. 

Receiving 5 Primetime Emmy award nominations, Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021) is more performance art and philosophical musings than it is stand-up comedy. Inside touches on the massive global civil rights movement of 2020, the worsening climate crisis, capitalism, social media, the internet, and the problems posed by both performance and by comedy itself. Burnham communicates his material almost entirely through songs, many of which became quite popular on Tik Tok following Inside’s release in late May. “Welcome to the Internet” and “All Eyes on Me,” were the most notable hits, the former beloved by ADHDers who resonated with the line “could I interest you in everything all of the time?” and the latter known for its painful assertion that the whole world has ended: “You say ‘the whole world’s ending,’ honey, it already did.”

All Eyes On Me

Welcome to the Internet

Despite being the work of a 30-year-old, Burnham’s music in Inside quite literally struck a chord with Gen Zers, with "That funny feeling" being among the most impactful songs of the show. Clocking in at the one-hour mark of the special, "That Funny Feeling" is a simple guitar song with rambling but vivid lyrics likened to those of Gen Z’s beloved indie sad girl singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, who later expressed her love for the song on her Instagram story.

The funny feeling Burnham is singing about is that created by the absurd, ironic, and generally unsettling aspects of hypermediated life under modern capitalism and the ongoing climate crisis it has created. It is about the unease of never-ending catastrophes being normalized and the numbness many of us experience as a result. It is about the cognitive dissonance that occurs when terrible things become mundane. 

For example, the line “a book on getting better hand-delivered by a drone” is an allusion to the monopolizing e-commerce nightmare that is Amazon, whose billionaire founder has two short songs explicitly dedicated to him in the special. The uncomfortable incongruity here is that Burnham’s attempt at improving his mental health depends on the notoriously egregious exploitation of Amazon workers, who commonly suffer from severe mental health issues and have even died by suicide at Amazon factories.

Other poignant lines from Burnham’s version include: “In honor of the revolution, it’s half off at the GAP,” which speaks to the co-option and commercialization of social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter by brands who perform wokeness for financial gain. “A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall” is a blunt reminder of the rampant gun violence carried out by white supremacists in the United States. Last but not least, what are perhaps the most mood-ruining lines of the song “twenty-thousand years of this, seven more to go” and “the quiet comprehending of the ending of it all” don’t need much of an explanation. All of these couplets are followed by gentle singing of the chorus “there it is again, that funny feeling, that funny feeling.” 

Plenty of Tik Tok creators used the original chorus to talk about their experiences with mental illness and trauma. Other listeners took the meme as far as writing their own verses. The lyrical structure is simple: 4 couplets of things that give Burnham that funny feeling followed by the repeating lines “there it is again, that funny feeling.” This format makes for a great meme due to its easy remixing. “That Funny Feeling” practically invites listeners to write personalized lines to the song. 

The verses written by 18-year-old @muditmathur_ reveal the difficulties of life moving online in lockdown. He shares that he cried to a school counselor via video chat after learning of a classmate's death from a Google Classroom notification.

@realboypluto sings “playing devil’s advocate to someone else’s truth, waiting till you’re 30 to romanticize your youth,” describing the cruelty of debating someone’s painful lived experiences and the melancholy possessed by a chronically online generation that feels it is never doing enough.

In one of her renditions of the song, Cammi aka @swiftbridgers sings “customer service pointing you to self-checkout, when it’s not a terrorist declaring a recount, amazon bookstores, chest of drawers empty for months, listening to Phoebe [Bridgers] though I’m feeling good for once…”

These are just snippets from some of the countless rewrites of "That Funny Feeling." On TikTok, the tag #thatfunnyfeeling has nearly 20 million views. Burnham’s original song inspired thousands of users to share what gives them that funny feeling. There are a few recurring themes in these rewrites worth noting: mental illness, hyper awareness of the climate crisis, and disdain for capitalism.

These themes reflect what researchers know about Gen Z so far. According to research carried out by the American Psychological Association in 2019,  Gen Z is the least likely generation to report very good or excellent mental health. The most commonly reported stressors include mass shootings (75% report as a source of stress), rising suicide rates (62%), and climate change (58%). All of these percentages are higher than those of adults overall. A Gallup poll found that 51% of Americans aged 18 to 29 view socialism more favorably than capitalism, with support for capitalism dropping from 68% to 49% in just the past two years. Our collective beliefs and ways of living are changing rapidly. Gen Z is deep in the throes of this upheaval. 

Get on the right side of Tik Tok, and it is clear that a good part of Gen Z connects all too well with the funny feeling outlined by Bo Burnham. This entire generation consists of digital natives whose milieu is marked by chaos: the 2008 recession and subsequent internal failings of capitalism, gun and white supremacist violence, the proliferation of social media and personal smartphones, and a keen awareness of the escalating effects of climate change. Burnham captures their shared sense of quiet unease and gives a name to it. "That Funny Feeling" gives Gen Zers the perfect meme format to express their own experiences and connect with others. Now don’t cringe, but I have to ask, what gives you that funny feeling?