On Bo Burnham’s “Inside” — A Purely Original Spectacle of Comedy
I had heard that Bo Burnham’s Inside was funny and sad because – as the title alludes – it was a comedy special filmed mostly within the confines of a single room about the circumstances that led to that sort of production, namely the COVID-19 pandemic. I didn’t follow Bo Burnham on YouTube and mainly remember him from last year’s Promising Young Woman (though he also directed Chris Rock’s last standup special and I did see Funny People and Hall Pass). What I was not prepared for was the level of technical skill that went into making this piece of art.
Inside is not just a comedy special. I don’t just mean this in the send-up way where we talk about how it is an artifact of this period, a primary source for historians, a time capsule that will allow us to peer back into this moment if we’re ever so lucky or stupid to forget it. It is all that, but I mean that on the level of practical execution and artistic vision, it bends and expends genre and media while exploring the relationship between performer and audience.
Of course, Bo Burnham would not be the first comedian to release an album – before home video, that’s one of the main ways comedy was distributed for home consumption. He’s not the first comedian to make comedic music, or to make a documentary. But Bo Burnham’s Inside is a comedy special that also serves as a documentary about its own making, and about the time in which it was made. It has the feeling of a film about a man struggling with his own fraying sanity while living through an apocalypse.
It is for that reason touching. Bo Burnham went through the same thing I was going through last summer, and longer, because he didn’t have the same reasons to be forcibly shaken out of his agoraphobia. He worked on the special for over a year, and he is willing to show his audience the physical, mental, and emotional toll that had on him. Inside is an incredibly vulnerable piece of art whose rawness could be undercut by its remarkable production values except that every few perfect moments are intercut with real footage of a man going through the stages of a long-term breakdown, or of someone using the same skill demonstrated to tell a joke in order to then deconstruct its context.
A lot of art tells you what its influences are by its content, but seldom so frankly and literally as Inside. We know how Bo Burnham spent his time because he names songs “Sexting” or because he films a reaction video to one of his songs right after the song, and it unfolds into another and another and another in one of the most delirious examples of layered internal commentary and comedy I’ve seen. He lampoons Twitch streams and “White Women’s Instagrams.” He has spoken bits about the ways in which none of us can keep anything to ourselves, the way we’ve allowed tech billionaires to profit off of our children publicizing their mistakes, the way we are the producers and the product and see none of the profit. It’s clear that the comedy comes from a deep and often dark and sad place because it isn’t rote or flat or just a wink and a nod; his commentary is as incisive as it is amusing, and in the latter half it is more thoughtful than funny.
The performance makes this real life variety show feel like a piece of narrative fiction, or like a sci-fi film which uses captain’s logs or lab reports similar to the confession booths that mockumentary comedies like The Office and Modern Family took from The Real World and Big Brother. I’m saying it was so earnest it almost didn’t feel real. The courage that it took to release this, to say nothing of the incredible skill displayed, is tremendous. It made me worry about him; not as a creator, but as a human being. I don’t always watch comedy and afterward want to hug the performer and tell them “I don’t know if it’ll be alright, but we’re in this together.”
As much as Inside has a message – and I would argue it has several – “we’re in this together,” might be a distillation. We’re all in this capitalist hell together, even separated by space, and whether or not there’s anything we can do to fix it. It’s intriguing to watch, for me, as we’re seeing the government pour more and more money into arming police, while crime statistics are manipulated to manufacture consent; we continue to spend billions of dollars testing bombs in open waters while the water in Flint, Michigan still isn’t clean; we’re experiencing what feels like the hottest summer on record and will likely be the coolest summer of the future, infrastructure is crumbling, and states which usually use prison labor to put out fires are sad they’ll have to pay market value for the labor to deal with the problem. We’re living in collapse and catastrophe. And we’re all seeing it reflected to our eyeballs from our myriad screens.
Even if every word was meant sarcastically, even if the moments that seemed the truest were just ‘an act,’ Inside would still be worth watching. It’s a truly beautiful piece of art. But I don’t think it’s just ‘an act,’ even as Bo Burnham begins with sketch comedy and stand-up, and moves toward music videos inspired heavily 80s synth sounds, Inside has the courage and gall to make its audience uncomfortable with its subject matter and with the tone of voice, the timbre of music, the use of light and sound which is truly masterful. It’s a technical marvel and an emotional display, full of humility, self-deprecation, and social commentary. And it didn’t feel pretentious to me, though if I were to knock a single song it would be “Problematic.” Anyhow, if we live to see another award season, Inside is going to win some awards. I hope, after a half-decade away from standup and a year-and-change writing, directing, editing and filming this special, Bo Burnham is ready for that.
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