“I can’t really, uh, play the guitar very well, um, or sing,” Bo Burnham says at the beginning of the video for his song “That Funny Feeling,” illuminated by a flickering light in a dark room. “So you know, apologies.”
First released on his 2021 surprise comedy special Inside, “That Funny Feeling” was presented alongside an hour of songs and bits exploring the comedian’s thoughts about turning 30, labor, and experiencing the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic. Burnham, who first launched his career on YouTube at 18, is best known for his absurdist and often nihilistic use of musical comedy to critique pop culture and current events. He also wrote and directed the 2018 film Eighth Grade, a scathing yet heartwarming look at adolescence in the digital age, which won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Inside takes Burnham’s defining wit and compresses it, forcing the audience to watch a version of Burnham perform ditties about the world’s darkest and funniest corners. There’s screams about hand-drawn internet porn, Jeff Bezos ruling the world, and even a sock puppet named Socko negged into backing down on his hot takes on socio-political conflict. But throughout the special, there is truth woven into each of Burnham’s jokes. There are things to laugh about, but when the chuckling stops, viewers are immediately reminded that life for Burnham — and the audience — is a hyper-realized mess of contradictions. And nothing sums up this frustration and acknowledgement better than “That Funny Feeling.”
When the song, along with its special, was released in 2021, fans of Burnham began a well-known trend on TikTok, using the basic structure of “That Funny Feeling” — naming a litany of overwhelming things, from Logan Paul to “a gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall,” that make his stomach drop — rewriting the song with their own frustrations. Later that year, Phoebe Bridgers released her own cover of the song, splitting all of the proceeds between 10 Texas abortion funds.
There are over 11,000 videos on TikTok alone referencing the track, which doesn’t include the hundreds more that have flooded the app since Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. presidential election. So Rolling Stone caught up with some of these re-writers to discuss why the song has had such a lasting impact on the digital generation — and why they think it won’t be going away anytime soon.
@bella.the.rat this might be stupid lol #fypage #fyp #songwriter #thatfunnyfeeling
Alani Browning, an 18-year-old from California, can’t really remember a Presidential election where Donald Trump was not a contender. So when Trump claimed victory last week, in the first election she was ever able to vote in, she tells Rolling Stone it reminded her of “That Funny Feeling” immediately.
“[The election] was definitely really scary for me. It felt the most amount of anxiety I’ve felt in a long time about it,” she says. “I listened to the song the day after the election, and I saw online that a lot of other people were saying that they did. It’s cathartic. It’s a really great song to recognize the fact that you’re in a shitty or a rough situation.”
@hiiialani shell shocked and unbelievably heartbroken #singersongwriter #kamala
Browning’s rewrite mentions AI plagiarism, the climate crisis, and Trump’s election win, but she says she also wanted to mention influencers and the lack of abortion access in the U.S. “The whole song is really about contradictory ideas. So many young girls and women aren’t going to have access to reproductive care, and could be punished for trying to seek it, and the result of that is going to be a lot of young mothers without true autonomy. And at the same time, there’s been a rise in tradwife culture,” she says. “So I think including the fact that women are dying because of lack of reproductive care and we’re going back to worshiping these very stereotypical feminine ideals was really important for me to include.”
For Jensen McRae, a singer-songwriter known for her folk-alternative-pop sound, “That Funny Feeling” has felt important ever since she heard the first note of the song. She tells Rolling Stone she can remember watching Inside with a friend, and the room growing quiet as Burnham began to sing. “There’s this sense of preemptive nostalgia,” she says. “There’s something about this that’s comforting, even though it’s devastating. And there’s somebody that feels familiar, even though I’ve never heard it before.”
McRae has been releasing annual rewrites of the song since 2021, each with updated lyrics containing world events. In fact, she’s already working on releasing her next version. But she also points to a specific Gen-Z nihilist streak that thrives on the internet as a reason why the song has maintained its status.
“I think that Bo Burnham, even though he’s a millennial, he really tapped into that [Gen-Z nihilism],” she says. “This is the anthem that we want. It’s not sugar coating it, and not telling us that it’s going to be okay. It’s saying it’s actually going to be worse. Are you going to find a way to live through that anyway?”
@jensenmcrae that funny feeling, again #thatfunnyfeeling #boburnham #foryou #fyp
A 25-year-old from Massachusetts, Simon French says that he rewrites “That Funny Feeling” often, even if he doesn’t intend to post it.
“To me, this song represents the pit you get in your stomach when things reach a new darkest hour. It represents the, ‘I knew this would happen and it did, and now I wish I wasn’t right’” feeling,” he tells Rolling Stone. “It has such a lasting impact because it’s so raw and so real. We all experience that ‘funny’ feeling at one point or another, and this song is perpetually growing and changing through us when we rewrite its verses and relate it to current events. With every single thing that happens, I get that ‘funny’ feeling and I think about this song.”
@simonrobertfrench 🍉 here’s a rewrite of that funny feeling by bo burnham 🍉 #fyp #boburnham #thatfunnyfeeling #cover #rewrite #musician #singersongwriter #indiefolk #passthehat #operationolivebranch #oob #pth
Rewrites of “That Funny Feeling” have flooded the app since Trump’s election, a trend that will probably continue as his administration begins in earnest next year. But while the song and its remakes often take a lamenting bent, the song doesn’t end with more bad news. Rather, Burnham begins a small bridge, one that seems to continue even after the camera stops filming. “Hey, what can you say? We were overdue/But it’ll be over soon, you wait,” he sings in a loop, increasing his pace. There’s no answer to any of the problems Burnham poses, but the refrain seems to point at both the cyclical nature of events and the possibility that something else could change.
“I feel like the song is so stirring because it takes our actions and lines them up next to each other. The “ordinary” seems to elevate the “extreme”, and creates a blinding realization of human fault, contradiction, and ignorance,” Brenna Patzer, a 23-year-old songwriter tells Rolling Stone. “It simply acts as a reminder of what has been and what is, in hopes of getting us to take a moment to consider what will be. It falls somewhere between a catchy musical reminder and a desperate call to action – it’s up to the listener to decide what to do once the song ends. ”
And for Browning, that ending is a key aspect of the song — and one she believes people shouldn’t ignore.
“Music has always been the way people engage politically. The anti-war movement and the Civil Rights movement were driven by music,” she says. “That line is a way to acknowledge that there is a path to move forward, even if you’re not in that space right now. These negative things that we experience, they’re always bound to happen. Embracing that aspect of community is just such an important thing, And so if the way we do that is through ‘That Funny Feeling’ or original songs, I think it’s important to keep that up.”
From Rolling Stone US
