Bo Burnham, are you okay?
I’m not going to lie to you: I’m not actually a fan of Bo Burnham. That’s not to say I don’t like him, though. I just can’t be a fan of someone I didn’t know existed until recently. Not all that long ago, I came across his song If You Want Love and I thought it was clever, and funny, and humor that is right up my alley, so much so that I was surprised I wasn’t already familiar with Burnham’s work.
I’m not telling you this for any other reason than to illustrate that I went into watching Inside as a totally neutral observer. I mean, I’m so unfamiliar with Burnham that I didn’t even realise that his comedy is primarily musical (you’d think the song I’d heard might have clued me in, but no). So today, anchored to my lounge with a particularly nasty case of gastroenteritis, I decided to watch his Netflix special.
I’m so glad I did.
Equal parts hilarious, surreal and claustrophobic, Burnham’s Netflix special Inside gives me the distinct impression of a very intelligent, very talented person with possibly fragile mental health and an overwhelming compulsion to create. Inside was directed, written, filmed and edited by Burnham during isolation, and while these may sound like limitations, I actually think it’s worked well for him to have complete control over this project, as it’s captured a comprehensive snapshot of his talent. As Burnham sings about topics from modern-day worker exploitation to white girls on Instagram, or shows himself reacting to himself reacting to himself reacting to himself, it occured to me that I was likely watching a person who is compelled to create simply because they are alive, in much the same way a fish is compelled to swim.
Inside starts out with an air of manic cheerfulness and satire in songs like Healing the World With Comedy and Facetime With My Mom (Tonight), but even as Burnham introduces his special by talking into a mirror with a camera, his affect is flat, his expression subdued. Look, I don’t know the man, but I’d wager a guess that this isn’t his standard approach to comedy. By the time we’ve gotten to Socko the sock puppet and the song How the World Works, the gloves are well and truly off as Burnham aims his sights on his targets with the energy of a person who has just the right combination of success and apathy under their belt to cut through the bullshit. Burnham’s actually quite sick of how the world works, it turns out: he’s sick of this shit, he’s sick of your shit, and his shit, and all of the shit, and he doesn’t give a shit if you know it. The results are strange and magical.
I mean, it’s not often you see a grown man in a ghillie suit and sunglasses singing an ironic congratulations to Jeff Bezos while jamming away on a keyboard and you think to yourself, “Yeah, this seems about right.”
There’s a melancholy underpinning the special, a melancholy I think many of us became familiar with during this past year if we weren’t already. The isolation of lockdown provided us with an inescapable time of reflection and introspection, and for many, frustration. Frustration with global politics, capitalism and social inequities, power imbalances, performative activism, and the pointless white noise predominant on social media, just to name a few.
This frustration is paralleled in Burnham’s documentation of his creative process in solitude. His recording room is his stage, but it also seems to act as a reflection of his interior world, surreal, colourful and cluttered. The projected images on the walls of the room and even on Burnham himself parallel the introspection and self-awareness present in the comedy. His interior world eventually spills outwards: in one scene, he serenely eats cereal and tinkers with lighting, which is contrasted with other scenes, one of his hysterical sobbing, another where he loses his temper on camera. His musical comedy covers topics I imagine a lot of us have ruminated on over the quiet, strange, slowed-down liminal space of lockdown, but Burnham himself acts out the emotional experiences familiar to so many during the past year or so. This isn’t just a comedy special: it’s a snapshot, a time capsule of one person’s lived experience, a little piece of 2020.
I walked away from Bo Burnham’s Inside sensing that while what I’d seen might not be typical of the comedy he is known for, I’d just witnessed the sort of rare rawness and vulnerability that makes comedy all the more funny for the connection you feel with its creator. Inside is well-made, hilarious and clever, sure, but it also gives the viewer a chance to glimpse something startlingly, wonderfully authentic in our polished influencer-heavy, sponsored, filtered, curated culture.
As Inside draws to a close, it meanders in the sense that it doesn’t really make a final point, which works because what in 2020 did actually make sense? What was concluded or ultimately resolved? Best summed up by the lyric “In a frightening, liminal space between states of being/Not quite dead, not quite alive” Burnham has encapsulated the isolating experience of lockdown that so many have faced and even continue to face. What’s more, though, the surreal and introspective comedy of Inside has highlighted the strangeness of being alive in 2021, the multitude of issues we face as a society, and the “new normal” we will continue to grapple with.
Is it safe to call me a fan yet?
Early in the special Burnham sings, “Should I be joking at a time like this?”
When these are the jokes, I’d say there’s no better time for them.
