Bo Burnham's Inside: Out Now

      

                            (Content warning: discussions of suicide, which is doubly true for Inside itself)

    An interesting thing happened when Hannah Gadsby blew everyone away with Nanette, which is that I cried a lot. But in a wider context, a bunch of newly minted comedy scientists lurched out of their hovels with joke-ometers in hand to insist that Nanette was bad because it didn’t have enough jokes in it. I can already foresee the same obtuse criticism being levied against Bo Burnham’s new special, Inside, so I’m here telling you to please ignore those people until they dissolve back into slime. Inside was shot and edited by Burnham entirely within his house during the pandemic, so I promise that A) it is a piece of media about the pandemic that is actually good and B) most people (understandably) wouldn’t expect a laugh-a-minute gutbuster from that setup anyway.
    Inside is both an elevation of Burnham’s previous work and a return to form, in a way. Living in your studio for an arduous year of production is arguably the apotheosis of the one-man show, but filming himself in his bedroom singing songs is what made Burnham famous as a teenager. Inside is in dialogue with this idea as Burnham draws a throughline connecting his origins on YouTube, his leave of absence from live performing, and the forced isolation of quarantine. This time he keeps the introspection lively with rapidfire surreal segments parodying the earnestness of YouTube or sarcastically cheering on Jeff Bezos with techno. Many of these hold just a little too long and cut when the camera feels it cannot bear looking at Burnham anymore.
    Everything in this and all media is performed. From shots of Burnham waking up and brushing his teeth, to flubbed takes of songs left in, to interstitial plotless scenes of him making a horrified face set to a laugh track, it's calculated. There are, amazingly, still silly songs amid all this, but they are carefully metered with reminders that this is a show being controlled. Every song is bookended by bits making fun of Burnham’s attempts at sincerity or even possibly mocking the song he just did. A frame or two of Burnham viewing his own show like a twitch streamer is left in the early minutes of the show, foreshadowing a bit that doesn’t happen for another hour. Burnham has grappled with the paradoxical problem of “performing authentically” before in his work, but now it feels like he wants to shoot the moon on it. If I feel something while watching even when all I’m thinking about is how his shows are all affectation, does that mean it’s for real?
    Because of this sentiment, no matter how much it’s framed as in spite of it, Inside is funny as hell. It’s rhythm is captivating. I revisited one song to find a header image for this post and I ended up watching the whole thing again. It’s also some of Burnham’s best musical work, incorporating all his disconnected silly songs lyrically and musically to push towards a climax that’s quite stunning. Burnham is scoring a film in addition to writing comedy songs and he’s taken to it very well. His song lampooning the highly manicured lives people present on social media can’t help but betray a desperate envy. Even his most navel-gazing, worst-of-Father-John-Misty impression fits in because there’s nothing more performatively authentic and gently pleasing to the ear than a dude with an acoustic guitar talking about these fucked up times, man. He can’t go a song without asking, “But what does it all mean, anyway?” Then he turns around and says, “God, the artist asking what it all means sure is for suckers, huh?”
    Much of the show consists of Burnham watching the footage he’s recorded to make the show. This is obviously reflective of his reality making Inside, but also means he had to set up a camera and record and watch the footage of him watching the footage and so on, always reminding the viewer of his experience putting on the show about himself. It’s surely been a trying one. There’s an excellent article by Filmcrithulk about The King of Staten Island that I couldn’t get out of my head while watching. Burnham is certainly ready to talk about suicidal tendencies without having to “redeem” or “heal” them, like in The King of Staten Island. In one bit Burnham silently watches himself projected on his own chest giving an embarrassingly terrible argument for why viewers with suicidal thoughts shouldn’t kill themselves. He didn’t even need to include glassy black screens that reflect my face close to the monitor for me to see myself in this show. Isolation is fundamentally in tune with self-centeredness, so Burnham’s documentation of the plague year will always remind me of my own. Suicide is a God-awful product of misery and it hurts lots of people and I feel better than I probably ever have but it still hasn’t entirely vacated my mind. It may very well live in my mental basement forever like the Babadook and I’ll just have to poke it with a stick every now and again when it gets rowdy. During quarantine it’s been pretty well tamped down but I know that I’m lucky in that respect. I know, too, that there’s a fresh new anxiety boiling in my stomach whenever I see a crowd of people that wasn’t there two years ago. I’ve also been self conscious about which measures against the pandemic I’ve taken that are more performative than practical with the assumption that others will hold them under a microscope to make comparisons. It’s cliché, but the assurance that I’m not alone in poorly navigating this complicated cocktail of feelings I’ve been forced to live with is what’s strangely therapeutic about the bleakness of Inside.
    The final shot ends with Burnham watching his own “ending” for the show in his claustrophobic home theater setup and smiling at his own joke. One laugh out of the guy isn’t a balm for 90 minutes of intense self-loathing, but damned if it isn’t something. If you can see one thing you did while surviving the pandemic, and like that thing, that’s fucking cool. Bo Burnham continues to push himself as an artist and the form he’s working with to new heights and that’s fucking cool, too.