"Goodbye sadness, hello jokes!". Here's a little bit of that. He brushes his teeth, eats a bowl of cereal, and begins editing his videos. See our analysis of the end of the special, and why Burnham's analogy for depression works so well. On the other two sides of that question ("no" and "not sure") the flowchart asks if it could be "interpreted" as mean (if so, then it's "not funny") or if it "punches down.". WebBo Burnham: Inside is by far one of the riskiest and original comedy specials to come out in years. After more sung repetitions of get your fuckin hands up, Burnham says, Get up. People experiencing depression often stop doing basic self-care tasks, like showering or laundry or brushing their teeth. Back in 2010, Burnham appeared on Showtime's "The Green Room," a comics round table hosted by Paul Provenza. Released on May 30, 2021, Bo Burnham wrote, recorded, directed, and produced Inside while in lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. See our analysis of the end of the special, and why Burnham's analogy for depression works so well. Some of the things he mentions that give him "that funny feeling" include discount Etsy agitprop (aka communist-themed merchandise) and the Pepsi halftime show. Instead of a live performance, he's recorded himself in isolation over the course of a year. "If greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate, then when the clock runs out, the average global temperature will be irreversibly on its way to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels.". But we weren't. Mid-song, a spotlight turns on Burnham and shows him completely naked as a voice sings: "Well, well, look who's inside again. Well, well, buddy you found it, now come out with your hands up we've got you surrounded.". Apathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime. Is he content with its content? HOLMES: Thank you. At just 20 years old, Burnham was a guest alongside Judd Apatow, Marc Maron, Ray Romano, and Garry Shandling. Bo Burnham Don't overthink this, look in my eye don't be scared don't be shy come on in the water's fine."). The song brings with it an existential dread, but Burnham's depression-voice tells us not to worry and sink into nihilism. In recent years, he has begun directing other comics specials, staging stand-up sets by Chris Rock and Jerrod Carmichael with his signature extreme close-ups. "The world needs direction from a white guy like [you] who is healing the world with comedy. Burnham uses vocal tuning often throughout all of his specials. Is he content with its content? NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. But he's largely been given a pass by his fans, who praise his self-awareness and new approach. "Any Day Now" The ending credits. "You say the whole world's ending, honey it already did, you're not gonna slow it, heaven knows you tried. WebA grieving woman magically travels through time to 1998, where she meets a man with an uncanny resemblance to her late love. He's self-evaluating his own visual creation in the same way people will often go back to look at their Instagram stories or posts to see how it looks after they've shared it. He points it at himself as he sways, singing again: Get your fuckin hands up / Get on out of your seat / All eyes on me, all eyes on me.. When that future-Burnham appears, it's almost like a precursor to what he'll have shown us by the end of the special: That both he, and his audience, could never have known just how brutal the next year was about to be. I've been singing that song for about a week NOW. Bo Burnham Not only is this whiteboard a play on the classic comedy rule that "tragedy plus time equals comedy," but it's a callback to Burnham's older work. Bo Burnham He's showing us how terrifying it can be to present something you've made to the world, or to hear laughter from an audience when what you were hoping for was a genuine connection. Bo Burnham This sketch, like the "White Woman Instagram" song, shows one of Burnham's writing techniques of bringing a common Internet culture into a fictionalized bit. Bo Burnham And then the funniest thing happened.". The incentives of the web, those that reward outrage, excess and sentiment, are the villains of this show. It's like the mental despair of the last year has turned into a comfort. Good. Bo Burnham's 'Inside And I think that, 'Oh if I'm self-aware about being a douchebag it'll somehow make me less of a douchebag.' Bo Burnham Today We'll Talk About That Day Next in his special, Burnham performs a sketch song about being an unpaid intern, and then says he's going to do a "reaction" video to the song in classic YouTube format. The song made such a splash in its insight that it earned its own episode in Shannon Struccis seminal Fake Friends documentary series, which broke down what parasocial relationships are and how they work. WebOn a budget. He slaps his leg in frustration, and eventually gives a mirthless laugh before he starts slamming objects around him. Burnham had no idea that his song would be seen more than 10 million times,nor that it would kick start his career in a niche brand of self-aware musical comedy. I'm sitting down, writing jokes, singing silly songs, I'm sorry I was gone. Thought modern humans have been around for much longer than 20,000 years, that's around how long ago people first migrated to North America. Bo Burnham: INSIDE | Trailer - YouTube 0:00 / 2:09 The following content may contain suicide or self-harm topics. For all the ways Burnham had been desperate to leave the confines of his studio, now that he's able to go back out into the world (and onto a real stage), he's terrified. With menacing horror movie sound effects and hectic, dreamy camerawork, what becomes clear is Burnhams title has a double meaning: referring to being inside not just a room, but also his head. Inside is the work of a comic with artistic tools most of his peers ignore or overlook. All rights reserved. Doona! In a giddy homage to Cabaret, Burnham, in sunglasses, plays the M.C. Bo Burnham But Burnham doesn't put the bottle down right, and it falls off the stool. Bo Burnham The song, written in 2006, is about how his whole family thinks he's gay, and the various conversations they're having trying to figure it out. Let's take a closer look at just a few of those bubbles, shall we? Instead of working his muscles at open mics or in improv, Burnham uploaded joke songs to the platform in 2006. While he's laying in bed, eyes about the close, the screen shows a flash of an open door. The label of parasocial relationship is meant to be neutral, being as natural and normal and, frankly, inescapable as familial or platonic relationships. A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall. HOLMES: Well, logically enough, let's go out on the closing song. MARTIN: Well, that being said, Lynda, like, what song do you want to go out on? At the second level of the reaction video, Burnham says: "I'm being a little pretentious. BURNHAM: (Singing) The live-action "Lion King," the Pepsi halftime show, 20,000 years of this, seven more to go. And you can roughly think about this, I think, as a series of short videos that are mostly of him singing songs and that are sewn together with a little bit of other material, whether it's shots of him lying in bed or setting up the cameras. BURNHAM: (Singing) Could I interest you in everything all of the time, a little bit of everything all of the time? So let's dive into "Inside" and take a closer look at nearly every song and sketch in Burnham's special. He says his goal had been to complete filming before his 30th birthday. HOLMES: Yeah. Copyright 2021 NPR. Burnham says he had quit live comedy several years ago because of panic attacks and returned in January 2020 before, as he puts it in typical perverse irony, the funniest thing happened.. I hope to see you inside at some point. Its a lyrically dense song with camerawork that speeds up with its rhythm. Burnham was just 16 years old when he wrote a parody song ("My Whole Family") and filmed himself performing it in his bedroom. He's freely admitting that self-awareness isn't enough while also clearly unable to move away from that self-aware comedic space he so brilliantly holds. That's what it is. The second emotional jump scare comes when Burnham monologues about how he stopped performing live because he started having panic attacks on stage, which is not a great place to have them. The monologue increases that sense of intimacy; Burnham is letting the audience in on the state of his mental health even before the global pandemic. Bo Burnham For those who are unaware, Bos real name is Robert Burnham. He takes a break in the song to talk about how he was having panic attacks on stage while touring the "Make Happy" special, and so he decided to stop doing live shows. On May 30, 2022, Burnham uploaded the video Inside: The Outtakes, to his YouTube channel, marking a rare original upload, similar to how he used his YouTube channel when he was a teenager. The comedy special perfectly encapsulated the world's collective confusion, frustration, and exhaustion amid ongoing pandemic lockdowns, bringing a quirky spin to the ongoing existential terror that was the year 2020. As someone who has devoted time, energy, and years of research into parasocial relationships, I felt almost like this song was made for me, that Burnham and I do have so much in common. Yes, Amazon has a pre-order set up for the album on Vinyl. HOLMES: I liked a bunch of the songs in this, and a lot of them are silly songs about the things that his comedy has already been concerned with for a long time, right? Then, the video keeps going past the runtime of the song and into that reaction itself. You can stream "Inside" on Netflix now, and see our ranking of all 20 original songs from the special here. It's a quiet, banal scene that many people coming out of a depressive episode might recognize. I don't know exactly how it tracks his experience, Bo Burnham, the person, right? Linda Holmes, welcome. But before that can register, Burnham's eyes have closed and the special transitions to the uncannily catchy song "S---," bopping about how he hasn't showered in nine days or done any laundry. I was not, you know, having these particular experiences. The fun thing about this is he started writing it and recording it early on, so you get to see clips of him singing it both, you know, with the short hair and with the long hair - when he had just started this special and when he was finishing it. "Inside" feels like the creative culmination of Bo Burnham's career over the last 15 years, starting with his first viral YouTube video in 2006. Theres always been a tension in his comedy between an ironic, smarty-pants cleverness and an often melodramatic point of view. Burnhams eyes are sharply in focus; the rest of him faded out subtly, a detail you might not even notice with how striking his eyes are. this breakdown of 31 details you might have missed in "Inside,". WebBo Burnham is more than a comedian he's a writer-director-actor who first went viral in 2006. Each of the songs from the first half of the special are in line with Burnham's earlier Netflix specials and comedy albums. Finally doing basic care tasks for yourself like eating breakfast and starting work in the morning. So he has, for example, a song in which he adopts the persona of a kind of horror movie carnival barker, you might call it, who is trying to sell people the internet. Relieved to be done? And then, of course, he had previous standup comedy specials. Tapping on a synthesizer, he sings about the challenges of isolation as he sits on a cluttered floor, two striking squares of sunlight streaming in through the windows of a dark room. Bo Burnham: Inside It's prison. But the lyrics Burnham sings seem to imply that he wants to be held accountable for thoughtless and offensive jokes of his past: "Father please forgive me for I did not realize what I did, or that I'd live to regret it, times are changing and I'm getting old, are you gonna hold me accountable?". "You say the ocean's rising, like I give a s---, you say the whole world's ending, honey it already did, you're not gonna slow it, heaven knows you tried," he sings. Throughout "Inside," there's a huge variety of light and background set-ups used, so it seems unlikely that this particular cloud-scape was just randomly chosen twice. Now, hes come a long way since his previous specials titled What. and Make Happy, where his large audiences roared with laughter Burnham skewers himself as a virtue-signaling ally with a white-savior complex, a bully and an egoist who draws a Venn diagram and locates himself in the overlap between Weird Al and Malcolm X. I got better. And maybe the rest of us are ready, too. Likewise, the finale of Burnhams next special, Make Happy (2016) closes in a song called Handle This (Kanye Rant). The song starts as him venting his hyperbolically small problems, until the tone shifts, and he starts directly addressing the audience, singing: The truth is, my biggest problem is you / [. MARTIN: And it's deep, too. Parasocial relationships are neutral, and how we interact with them is usually a mixed bag. Now, the term is applied to how viewers devote time, energy, and emotion to celebrities and content creators like YouTubers, podcasters, and Twitch streamers people who do not know they exist. It's a hint at the promised future; the possibility of once again being able to go outside and feel sunlight again. Burnham says he had quit live comedy several years ago because of panic attacks and returned in January 2020 before, as he puts it in typical perverse irony, the funniest thing happened. But Burnham is of course the writer, director, editor, and star of this show. Self-awareness does not absolve anyone of anything, he says. Bo Burnham The song is like having a religious experience with your own mental disorder. Some of this comes through in how scenes are shot and framed: its common for the special to be filmed, projected onto Burnhams wall (or, literally, himself), and then filmed again for the audience. Burnham may also be trying to parody the hollow, PR-scripted apologies that celebrities will trot out before they've possibly had the time to self-reflect and really understand what people are trying to hold them accountable for. How does one know if the joke punches down? Most of the comments talk about how visceral it is to hear Burnhams real voice singing the upsetting lyrics. "I didn't perform for five years," he says. WebBo Burnham's "Inside" special on Netflix is an incredibly detailed musical-comedy artwork. Known as "Art is a Lie, Nothing is Real," there's a bit Burnham did at the start of his 2013 special "what." It has extended versions of songs, cut songs, and alternate versions of songs that were eventually deleted; but is mainly comprised of outtakes. Gross asked Burnham if people "misinterpreted" the song and thought it was homophobic. After about 35 minutes of candy-colored, slickly designed sketch comedy, the tone shifts with Burnhams first completely earnest song, a lovely indie-rock tune with an ear worm of a hook about trying to be funny and stuck in a room. This is the shows hinge. It's not. 20. The global pandemic and subsequent lockdown orders of March 2020 put a stop to these plans. And you know what? A weekly roundup of the best things from Polygon, By submitting your email, you agree to our, Bo Burnhams Inside begs for our parasocial awareness, Sign up for the Throughout the song and its accompanying visuals, Burnham is highlighting the "girlboss" aesthetic of many white women's Instagram accounts. Bo Burnhams latest Netflix special, Inside, is a solo venture about the comedian and filmmakers difficult experience in quarantine thats earned enthusiastic critical acclaim. And like those specials, Inside implores fans to think about deeper themes as well as how we think about comedy as a genre. Once he's decided he's done with the special, Burnham brings back all the motifs from the earlier songs into "Goodbye," his finale of this musical movie. Comedian and filmmaker Bo Burnham used his time alone during the pandemic to create a one-man show. "Problematic" is a roller coaster of self-awareness, masochism, and parody. and concludes that if it's mean, it's not funny. Might not help but still it couldn't hurt. The penultimate song, "All Eyes On Me," is the best in the whole special, in this writer's opinion. "I don't know that it's not," he said. Bo Thank you, Michel. WebA biotech genius tries to bounce back from the depths of grief with help from his son, who works to escape his dads shadow and save the family business. And I'm just wondering, like, how would you describe that? The whole video is filmed like one big thirst trap as he sweats and works out. But when reading songs like Dont Wanna Know and All Eyes On Me between the lines, Inside can help audiences better identify that funny feeling when they start feeling like a creator is their friend. Bo Burnham The first half is dominated by sharp, silly satires of the moment, like a visually precise and hilarious song about social media vanity, White Womans Instagram, and a commercial for a woke brand consultant. That quiet simplicity doesn't feel like a relief, but it is. ", "On September 17, the clock began counting down from seven years, 103 days, 15 hours, 40 minutes and seven seconds, displayed in red," the Smithsonian reported. You know, I was not, you know, I was alone, but I was not trapped in one room. So in "Inside," when we see Burnham recording himself doing lighting set up and then accidentally pull down his camera was that a real blooper he decided to edit in? And it portends and casts doubt on a later scene when his mental health frays and Burnham cries in earnest. On the Netflix special, however, Josh Senior is credited as a producer, Cooper Wehde is an assistant producer, and a number of people are credited for post-production, editing, and logistical coordinating. It's a hint at the promised future; the possibility of once again being able to go outside and feel sunlight again. The voices of the characters eventually blend together to tell the live Burnham on stage, We think we know you.. But in both of those cases, similarity and connection would come from the way the art itself connects people, not any actual tie between Burnham and myself, Burnham and the commenter. Whatever it is, NPR's Linda Holmes, host of Pop Culture Happy Hour, has reviewed it, and she liked it. "Oh Jesus, sorry," Burnham says, hurrying over to pick it up. He also revealed an official poster, a single frame from the special, and the cover art prior to its release. With electro-pop social commentary, bleak humour and sock-puppet debates, the comics lockdown creation is astonishing. A Detailed Breakdown of How Bo Burnham As he shows in this new sketch, he's aware at a meta level that simply trying to get ahead of the criticism that could be tossed his way is itself a performance sometimes. But, of course, it tangles that right back up; this emotional post was, ultimately, still Content. Now get inside.". I feel very close and intimate with him in this version. I cant say how Burnham thinks or feels with any authority, but as text and form-driven comedy, Inside urges the audience to reflect on how they interact with creators. Not in the traditional senseno music was released prior to the special other than a backing track from Content found in the trailer. Burnham lingers on his behind-the-scenes technical tinkering handling lights, editing, practicing lines. It's wonderful to be with you. Bo Burnham: Inside Still, its difficult not to be lulled back into, again, this absolute banger. While talking to the audience during the opening section, Burnham takes a sip out of a water bottle. And that can be a really - if you're not very good at it, that kind of thing, where there's a balance between sort of the sarcastic and ironic versus the very sincere can be really exhausting.