Bo Burnham: Inside is probably one of the most distressing comedy specials anyone will ever watch. What else could one expect from the comedian whose last special, 2016’s Make Happy, was practically an on-stage existential crisis? Bo could never have predicted how pertinent the abrupt shift in tone and setting for the ending of that special would be regarding where he, and the world, would end up 5 years down the road. It makes Inside a natural progression for a man whose mental health struggles have become a regular cornerstone from where he draws his material, as he finds himself seemingly trapped in a single room with a camera, piles of wires, lights, and equipment, and a burgeoning, begrudging desire to create.
Bo Burnham hates fame. He hates the concept of it, everything that comes with it, and he hates being famous – which is an unfortunate situation for someone who has such an ardent passion for creating and performing (and for someone who happens to be pretty damn good at it). He seems to always return to the spotlight, in this case after a 5-year hiatus because of recurring on-stage panic attacks. In the interim he honed his creative pursuits elsewhere: stepping out of the spotlight for his directorial debut Eighth Grade in 2018, and serving as a prominent co-star of last year’s Oscar-nominated Promising Young Woman. In the context of Burnham’s troubled relationship with his own fame, both excursions felt like him testing the waters to see how other show biz pursuits aside from stand-up affected his mental well being when it comes to his art. You can feel this push and pull within him in sections of all of his comedy specials going back to 2010’s Words, Words, Words. His comedy and songs over the years have slowly become more and more defined by the contradictions he’s burdened with: the desire to entertain, and the acute awareness of the inherent arrogance and vanity that comes with a career that’s built on people poorer and doing shittier jobs than you paying to watch you. How do you reconcile that? Bo’s never really figured it out.
All this, on top of the COVID-19 pandemic, has culminated in this new special: an hour-and-a-half of isolation within a single room as Bo experiments with what kind of comedy he can mine within the confines of four walls and without an audience reacting to his jokes; almost an ironic return-to-form for a comedian who started out performing for a camera and uploading to YouTube. The result is one that makes this experience only for die-hard Burnham fans or the unusually curious, as he doubles down on his anguished depressive episodes, meta self-criticism, and social commentary in ways not feasible when being performed for people. Now left to his own devices, Bo’s created what’s as much an experimental one-man comedy show as it is a journalistic, year-long period of self-introspection and investigation. The runtime is made up of songs, of course, but also brief one-off vignettes and skits that see Bo pushing the envelope as for what he can get away with in ways not possible on stage. One minute he’s singing a minute-long jazz-style tune about exploitative unpaid internships in black and white, before abruptly cutting to himself doing a reaction-style video to the song, which then loops around to him reacting to that reaction, which continues several times over. Between this haphazard nature of what he’s created and the stark, bitterly depressing ethos of the project, this is both a personal documentation of a declining state of mental health and an acute depiction of life under pandemic lockdown. Anyone coming across this on a whim looking for a comedy special will turn it off after the first 10 minutes.
Those who already know all this about Burnham will find moments of dark hilarity as well as a palpable discomfort in watching a man truly begin to spiral as he does the thing he loves: perform. Burnham opts to mostly not mention the pandemic aside from a couple of stray remarks, instead allowing to let it linger in the background as just another problem he feels powerless in the face of, and stupid for trying to make people laugh during. His conflicting emotions about making the special are at the forefront as the opening musical number sees him asking himself if he “should be joking at a time like this?” before a voice from beyond reminds him that only the healing power of his comedy can salvage the remains of this world.
Burnham has always been good at walking a line between bitter self-deprecation and tongue-in-cheek narcissism and Inside is no exception. The difference here is the lonesomeness. The lack of an audience lends the project a unique, uncomfortable tension. There’s a disquieting sense of dread whenever Bo lets the silence linger after one of his upbeat, sardonic pop tunes about his depression or about life under a hellish capitalist empire. You can feel him sinking into himself as time goes on, his hair and beard grow long and unkempt, and he becomes more and more tormented by his own creation.
Other song topics see Bo coming to terms with turning 30, sexting, and FaceTiming with his mom. On one notable track, he contends with the problematic material he wrote in his youth, particularly as a teenager, but perhaps even realizing that some of the dicier material in his other specials may not fly if he did them now. Not that Bo has ever had any purely hateful or bigoted jokes, but let’s admit that a song like “Repeat Stuff,” from his 2013 special what., has some bits that would easily be taken out of context and shared on social media today (and probably already have been). Insert the obligatory explanation that depiction doesn’t equal endorsement here, but between the lyric about how Bo doesn’t care about little girls without arms because they can’t use iTunes and the Nazi salute he does as he gets the crowd to chant the hook of the song, it’s no mystery why now Bo is wondering if “anyone is gonna hold [him] accountable.” Let’s not even get started on the song “Kill Yourself” from Make Happy. You can feel Burnham going through something of a self-reckoning here as he gets older. He’s not the kid he once was.
One of the most important and probing lyrics of Burnham’s entire career is found in the middle of the song “ART IS DEAD”, a song he wrote at 19. In it, he sings, “Self-centered artist/Self-obsessed artist/I am an artist, I am an artist/But I’m just a kid/And maybe I’ll grow out of it.” Burnham is grown up now, but he still hasn’t grown out of performing, no matter how much he wrestles with it.
One of the most surprising gut-punch lyrics from Inside comes from the emotional closing ballad, where Bo sings, “Hey, here’s a fun idea/How about I sit on the couch and watch you next time?” His tumultuous relationship with his own passion is still raging within him just as much as it ever has. And just when the ending suggests there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, that maybe Bo has found a way out from the inside of his own head, it circles back around to a reflection of his everlasting cynicism and despondency. He becomes the audience for his own misery, watching and laughing – a piece of poetic justice after all he’s put on display for his audience.
