All Eyes on Him
Ella Kemp writes on Bo Burnham’s miraculous, existential return to form with Inside. Now streaming on Netflix and Spotify.
For the last 14 years of his life, Bo Burnham has been at war with himself and has not been able to stop telling the whole world about it. He’s fine, really, and would be mortified to have your pity. There is nothing wrong, yet everything feels terrible. He doesn’t know if he deserves to be funny, he doesn’t trust that anyone is really laughing for the right reasons. He’s a stand-up comedian who stopped doing stand-up when he started getting panic attacks on stage. He’s a filmmaker who made his debut as a writer-director in 2018 with Eighth Grade, a film about a 13-year-old girl having the most mundane teenage experience and framing it, as this girl deserves, like the most horrifying time of anyone’s life.
After Eighth Grade, Burnham starred in Promising Young Woman as the film’s romantic-yet-really-not-reliable lead, and it seemed like he was done with comedy. And why would he need to go back? He started making YouTube videos in 2006 when he was 16 years old, at the very moment that YouTube videos started to become a thing. The world knew he was funny and has continued to tell him so as YouTube made way for Twitter, which made way for TikTok ,which made way for the maelstrom of hyperreal virtual realities we’re trapped in now. His last comedy special Make Happy, released on Netflix in 2016, ended with him telling us that he couldn’t “handle this right now”. One second he was explaining the problem with Pringle cans, the next he confessed: “Part of me loves you. Part of me hates you. Part of me needs you, part of me fears you.” He bowed, said he hoped we were happy, and left.
But then the last 15 months happened, and promises dissolved to dust and time’s elastic band snapped and Bo Burnham found himself inside again, trying to be funny when stuck in a room. Against all odds, just like that, he released another comedy special because it was all he could do. And, though he probably wouldn’t believe it if you told him, it might be the best thing he’s ever done.
It is, ostensibly, a 90-minute time capsule of the year during which Burnham, like the rest of the world, was forced to stay at home during the COVID-19 outbreak. But if it was just that – a document of an unprecedented but really quite unexciting and deeply unenjoyable time – it would regurgitate the same lethargic feelings, at first corrosive and unpredictable, now irritating and tired catchalls that plague every conversation without much purpose. Inside is repetitive and insistent, but in the same way that Burnham’s fears always have been. It is a portrait of a man stuck only with himself, which just so happened to be forced into a state of very entertaining confrontation during a raging global pandemic.
Inside is much more about Bo Burnham than it is about the pandemic. It is the most sophisticated realisation of the qualities and flaws that have kept him around for so long, growing up alongside us on the internet. Two words mirror one of Burnham’s best songs from his first special, 2013’s what. and bring us into the present: That’s it. On ‘sad’, Burnham once sang of the guilt of “all the sad stuff I see in the world” before realising that everyone is still laughing. “How do y’all do it? I’ve been telling you sad things this whole song and you’ve been laughing. That’s it, laughter, it’s the key to everything. The world isn’t sad, the world is funny, I get it – I’m a sociopath!” And today, on ‘Comedy’ we go again: “That’s it. The world is so fucked up. There’s only one thing I can do about it. While being paid and being the centre of attention. Healing the world with comedy, making a literal difference metaphorically.”
The message is the same, but it sounds so much better. He’s going around in circles but, at least, he has better means than ever – more confidence, greater self-awareness, and, to be blunt, better tech support – to fully lean into it and excavate what terrifies him. The same methods, neurotic but ultimately considerate, return on ‘Don’t Wanna Know’ when he asks us how we’re doing. “Are you finding it boring? Too fast? Too slow? I’m asking but don’t answer because I don’t want to know.” On ‘Problematic’, he anticipates what the internet is already writing about him (another full-circle moment from the aftermath of ‘Kill Yourself’ from Make Happy, in which Burnham stepped out of character for a beat, to tell audiences to, actually, not kill themselves and that he apologised immediately if anyone did indeed think he seriously encouraged them to kill themselves). “Times are changing and I’m getting old / Are you going to hold me accountable?” He sings on Inside, to a juddering beat straight out of Dua Lipa’s outrageously good album from last year, Future Nostalgia. And that, right there, is what makes Inside unlike Burnham’s other specials, unlike so many other specials. The music is so, so good.
For Eighth Grade, Burnham enlisted fearless electronic producer Anna Meredith to compose her first film score, and Inside sounds like he had been paying close attention during the process. So much of his music, and comedy, is – usually – based around very simple constructions: a portable keyboard, a few reliable chords. He’s funny in slicing, specific and verbose ways, but the music often provided a means to an end. Here, it’s as accomplished as anything breaking records and stealing hearts from your favourite boybands to your most brazen pop sensations in the charts. A 58-second interlude about Amazon “CEO Entrepreneur, born in 1964, Jeffrey, Jeffrey Bezos” called ‘Bezos I’ has no purpose other than to get the room vibrating and your heart racing – then confirmed with the thrilling 46-second sequel: ‘Bezos II’.
There are moments like those, silly and seemingly non-sensical (although you can tell that Burnham is just a little too aware of how vicious the internet is to fully expand on what he’s itching to say), fleshed out into loving satires like ‘FaceTime with my Mom (Tonight)’ which sounds like each and every one (yes, this excludes Harry Styles) of the raw post-breakup One Direction soloists, the fittingly peppy ‘White Woman’s Instagram’ and ‘Sexting’, sulphurous and stupid at once, about, well, the only thing a lot of single people could do in lockdown.
But the greatest moments of Inside, and of Burnham’s art more broadly, are the ones where you feel in your bones his turmoil and the real exhaustion of chasing his own tail. He would have felt this way even without a pandemic, eventually: it’s the torturous problem of any creative, forced to believe in yourself as a means to achieve anything but trying so hard to move as far away from yourself as possible in order to tolerate this existence. He started this to escape his boring life and now it’s all he has. “I swore I’d never be back, now I’m back on my feet,” he confesses on ‘Comedy’ and then, sat crossed-legged on the floor trying to monitor his breath, with no fanfare and no special effects (because, it must be said, the cinematography on most of Inside’s numbers is as creative and colourful as any other production this year that didn’t just involve one man stuck in a room he’s too tall for), ‘Look Who’s Inside Again’ unfolds a song both tender and wise about trying to figure out the point of any of this.
“Can one be funny when stuck in a room? Being in, trying to get something out of it,” he hums. It’s about trying to get out: of your room, your town, your body, your head. It’s frustration and self-awareness and understanding. There’s no solution and this is nothing new: but Inside is reassuring in that, even in such circumstances, you can make something so good out of it. “Does anybody want to joke when no one’s laughing in the background?” he asks on ‘Goodbye’, the final song. And I think he knows the answer: nobody thought this special would exist, or that Bo Burnham would ever be happy enough – with himself, with us – to tell another joke again.
A lot of it is constructed, of course (Did he really turn 30 on his own in that room instead of with his partner, in their house, with their dog, about three feet away? Could he really not finish a sentence about making this special after 12 months of making this special?) but the journey remains true. And what does it matter, really, how much of what this man is sharing with us connects with what he doesn’t share with us when he turns the camera off? He started doing this because he was bored and sad and did it so much that he became terrified and sad and then a pandemic happened, forcing everyone to be a little bit of everything all of the time and, well, well, look where we are again.
Bo Burnham never needs to make another comedy special again – his fans understand his fears all too well to demand anything more. But when you’re given something as self-affirming and special as Inside, it’s hard to not hold onto a tiny crumb of hope.
Inside is now available to watch on Netflix. The album of songs is now streaming on Spotify.
