If you haven’t heard of him, you probably live in a cave. He’s only YouTube’s most hilarious up-and-coming teenage comedian musician.

Just kidding. I don’t live in a cave, but I’d never heard of Bo Burnham either until I found myself in line for his show at ASU with some friends last Wednesday.

The situation looked something like this: I was standing on the sidewalk, shifting my weight endlessly from leg to leg, sending random texts as the sun slowly disappeared, and I found myself wondering, “Why are so many people here? (Well it is a free show). What’s made ASU students line up for more than an hour, threatening to stampede right into Murdock 101? What caused kids to choose to sit scrunched up on the steps of the lecture hall or cram into standing room in the back?”

Well, it turned out to be well worth the crunch because Bo Burnham is brilliant. He may look like your average skinny 18-year-old with wavy hair and boxers poking out of his jeans, but he kept a jam-packed lecture hall full of college kids entertained for hours.

Bo’s one-kid-show is a mix of songs, accompanied by his own piano or guitar tunes, off-color jokes, haikus, outrageous statistics and random, often obscene outbursts. He’s clearly talented. His hands fly over guitar strings as strings of witty lyrics and curse words fly out of his mouth. As Bo himself describes in one of his signature songs, “I’m offensive and creative like handicapped porn.”

I found myself laughing really hard at his completely politically incorrect jokes and feeling really, really bad for it. This kid was making black jokes, Jewish jokes, disabilities jokes, you name it, right in audience members’ faces. In fact, I should feel particularly bad, because I’m Jewish, so I know a little bit about stereotypes and discrimination, right? I should feel offended for the minorities of this world and anyone who has ever been put down for his or her identity.

But as the show progresses, I realized Bo was not making fun of minorities; he was making fun of people who make fun of minorities. It’s meta-bigotry. His songs make the most ridiculous claims about all types of people, and he cleverly sets you up to realize how crazy and dumb generalizations really are.

Bo’s delightful because he simultaneously makes explicit and defies the stereotypes. He’s the dorky, too-tall, scrawny high school kid who’s supposed to be really awkward. So he sings shamelessly about all the tense, awkward subjects, such as sexual orientation, religion and race.

And maybe we are looking for that unity that you just can’t achieve when you’re tiptoeing around taboo cultural sensitivities. We need to be careful to respect what makes each of us unique, and yet, are we really that different in the first place? Maybe we’ve realized that laughter is an effective way to bridge the artificial cultural divides we’ve created among ourselves.

So maybe Bo’s show is exactly what we needed — something to throw our stereotypes and frustrations on the table, so we can laugh at them and realize that people are people. His show reminds us that what we call black, white, Hispanic, Jewish, Christian, liberal, conservative, gay and straight are often just superficial labels and personas that we draw up to fit our expectations.

In the end, his vulgar and over-the-top comedy routine is quite refreshing because it gives us a different way to think about how we approach stereotypes. I give it two thumbs up.

Reach Hannah at hannah.wasserman@asu.edu.