Bo Burnham: Inside
Bo Burnham: Inside is a 2021 musical special written, directed, filmed, edited, and performed by American comedian Bo Burnham.[1] Created in the guest house of Burnham's Los Angeles home during the COVID-19 pandemic without a crew or audience, it was released on Netflix on May 30, 2021. Featuring a variety of songs and sketches about his day-to-day life indoors, it depicts Burnham's deteriorating mental health, explores themes of performativity and his relationship to the internet and the audience it helped him reach, and addresses topics such as climate change and social movements. Other segments discuss online activities such as FaceTiming one's mother, posting on Instagram, sexting, and livestreaming video games.
Bo Burnham: Inside
Bo Burnham
Josh Senior
Bo Burnham
Bo Burnham
Bo Burnham
Bo Burnham
- May 30, 2021
87 minutes
United States
English
Inside follows Burnham's previous stand-up comedy special Make Happy (2016), which led him to quit performing as he began to experience panic attacks onstage during that special's tour. An album of songs from the special, Inside (The Songs), was released digitally on June 10, 2021. The special received universal acclaim, with reviewers praising its music, direction, cinematography, editing, and presentation of life during the COVID-19 pandemic.[2] Critics found that the special incorporates a variety of art forms including music, stand-up comedy bits, and meta-commentary, describing it as some combination of comedy, drama, documentary, and theater. For Inside, Burnham received a Peabody Award, Emmy Awards for Outstanding Directing for a Variety Special, Outstanding Music Direction, and Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special, and the Grammy Award for Best Song Written for Visual Media for "All Eyes on Me".
On the first anniversary of the special's release, Burnham uploaded The Inside Outtakes, an hour-long YouTube video of outtakes, unused songs, behind-the-scenes footage, and alternate takes from the special. A deluxe album including these outtakes, Inside (Deluxe), was released on June 3, 2022.
Background[edit]
Bo Burnham is an American musical comedian who rose to fame by posting videos on YouTube from 2006 onwards.[3] After these songs were adapted into his debut self-titled album (2009),[4] he performed three stand-up tours, the first two of which were released as albums and the last two as recorded performances: Words Words Words (2010),[5] what. (2013),[6] and Make Happy (2016).[7] During the tour for Make Happy, Burnham began to have panic attacks onstage. In the intervening years, he wrote and directed Eighth Grade (2018) and starred in Promising Young Woman (2020).[8]
Synopsis[edit]
Unable to leave his home, Burnham performs in a single room. He gives periodic updates about time passing as he works on the special, with his hair and beard growing throughout. After singing "Content" and satirizing white male comedians in "Comedy", he finds the motivation to begin making the special. He performs "FaceTime with My Mom (Tonight)", a song about the frustrations of FaceTiming his mother. He sings "How the World Works" to teach children about nature, but a sock puppet character begins to sing about historical genocide and worker exploitation, before criticizing Burnham for only attempting to help for his own glorification.
In a parody of a product brand consultant, Burnham talks about companies performing moral virtues, then sings "White Woman's Instagram" about Instagram tropes. In a stand-up format, he questions the necessity of every individual voicing their opinions. Burnham records a reaction video to "Unpaid Intern", his brief song about the disposability of unpaid internships, but begins reacting to a nested loop of his commentary. He then sings "Bezos I", which disingenuously praises Jeff Bezos.
Burnham sings about sexting in a song of the same name before parodying a YouTuber's "thank you" video while holding a knife. He performs "Look Who's Inside Again" and "Problematic", the latter addressing behavior from his past that he regrets. He speaks to the viewer minutes before his 30th birthday, revealing that he had hoped to finish the special before this date; he then sings "30", lamenting his aging. The song ends with him stating that he will commit suicide when he is 40, but he then urges viewers not to kill themselves despite confessing that he would like to die temporarily. This anti-suicide talk is projected onto his T-shirt as he rewatches it later.
In an intermission, Burnham cleans the camera. He rhetorically asks the audience what they think of the special in "Don't Wanna Know". Parodying a video game streamer, he provides commentary on a game that consists of himself crying in his room. This is followed by the ironically upbeat "Shit", about a depressive episode, and description of his mental health in "All Time Low". In "Welcome to the Internet", he acts as a malign tour guide of the internet, offering to the viewer diverse types of content, ranging from upbeat to morbid, to engage with endlessly.
After declaring that he will never finish the special because he will have nothing to distract him, Burnham satirizes Bezos again in "Bezos II" and then performs "That Funny Feeling", which describes incongruous images and impending societal collapse. He attempts to talk to the viewer but gets overwhelmed and strikes his equipment before breaking down in tears.
In "All Eyes On Me", Burnham sings for a pre-recorded track of an audience: he reveals that he stepped away from live comedy five years prior because he was suffering panic attacks onstage; his mental health had improved enough by January 2020 for him to consider returning before "the funniest thing happened". The song instructs the audience to get up; hold their hands up; and pray for him. Angry with the viewer, he picks up the camera and dances with it before dropping it on the ground.
After going about normal morning activities and watching footage of the preceding scene on his laptop, Burnham says he is "done". A flashback introduces the song "Goodbye", wherein a younger and older Burnham both resign to their isolation, incorporating melodies and motifs from throughout the special. A montage shows Burnham setting up the room for each song from the special, before cutting to himself caught in a spotlight naked. After the song, he finally leaves the room in a white outfit, only to be locked out as an unseen audience applauds and then laughs at him for attempting to get back inside. Back in the room, he watches footage of this on his projector and begins to smile. The final song "Any Day Now" plays over the end credits, consisting of a stripped-down melody and the repeated lyrics "it'll stop any day now".
Production[edit]
Inside was filmed in the guest house of the Los Angeles home Burnham shared with his long-time girlfriend, filmmaker Lorene Scafaria, before they moved to a different property a few months after the release of the special; the guest house was also used for filming the end of Make Happy.[9] A Zillow listing later revealed that the property is the same one that was used to film A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).[10] Burnham said that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he worked on the show alone without a crew or audience.[11][12] The outtakes for the special say that footage was captured between March 2020 and May 2021.[13] A Netflix executive—Robbie Praw—said that Burnham contacted him "fairly early in the pandemic" about Inside, and sent him 20 minutes of footage towards the end of 2020.[14]
According to a leak supplied to Bloomberg News in October 2021, Netflix paid $3.9 million for Inside, and assigned it an internal "efficiency" value of 2.8, against a baseline score of 1 for content that breaks even;[15] the Netflix spokesperson who provided the statistics for Inside and several other programs on the streaming service was later fired for releasing confidential and "commercially sensitive information".[16]
Release[edit]
Burnham announced Inside on April 28, 2021, along with a small trailer that showed a clean-cut Burnham during the ending of Make Happy, which transitioned into a scene from Inside that featured his long-haired and bearded look.[11] He also posted on both Twitter and Instagram.[17][18] On May 21, he announced that Inside was to be released on May 30.[19] The special was released without a press kit or a collection of stills.[20] It was shown in select theaters in the United States between July 22 and July 25, 2021, with certain theaters adding showings after the initial weekend had passed.[21]
Analysis[edit]
Tone and format[edit]
Though often described as a comedy special, Inside tackles controversial and serious subject matter, with mental health and its deterioration being the most prevalent theme.[43][44] Brian Logan of The Guardian called it a "comedy Gesamtkunstwerk"—a piece of art combining many forms.[45] Tom Power of TechRadar wrote that it was a "comedy-drama" and its alternation between stand-up material, music and "fly-on-the-wall" scenes makes it feel like the combination of "a documentary and stage act".[46] Similarly, in Vulture, Kathryn VanArendonk said that it "longs to be a concert" in some places and in others approaches "confessional" or "journalistic" styles.[47] In contrast, NPR reviewer Linda Holmes saw it as "not a documentary but an exceptionally well-written piece of theater".[48] Some parts of the special lack humor, while many jokes are met with silence.[45] Both Holmes and The New Yorker's Rachel Syme analyzed that, of the limited traditional comedy in the special, the punchlines feel out of place: Syme stated that they "feel deliberately hackneyed and out-of-date" and Holmes explained that Burnham felt "it makes no sense without an audience to laugh at it".[48][49] There is meta-humor and footage of Burnham editing the special and viewing one of his previous videos.[9][43] Eric Kohn of IndieWire identified "weird tonal shifts and abrupt transitions" between different sections of the special,[50] and VanArendonk described Burnham as displaying "performance energy across a wide spectrum of affects and moods".[47]
Power suggested that the setting of a single room is representative of Burnham's mind, explaining that "scattered instruments, clothes and recording equipment signify the cluttered, messy and overwhelming thoughts he has to deal with on a daily basis".[46] On a related note, Jason Zinoman said in The New York Times that the title has a double meaning, referring to Burnham being inside a single room, and "also his head".[51] Karl Quinn of The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that Inside employs the limited setting "as a canvas for creativity", but the overall feeling is "claustrophobia and cloying ennui", and even "full-blown depression".[20] Power stated that Burnham "struggles with his solitary confinement" and "gradually loses his grip on reality"; VanArendonk pointed out that Burnham's growing beard and hair reflect this trajectory.[46][47] Writing in The Independent, Isobel Lewis saw that "the more he opens up, the more heightened the artifice" he employs, and concluded that this is a method of coping with despair.[52]
Reviewers drew parallels to various other works. A stand-up comedy routine by Maria Bamford, "The Special Special Special" (2012), was filmed in her house with her parents as the audience, similar to Burnham's filming constraints of one room and no audience.[50] Staged (2020), a British television comedy set during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, stars Michael Sheen and David Tennant as fictionalized versions of themselves attempting to rehearse a stage play solely via video calls during lockdown; The A.V. Club's Allison Shoemaker found that both Inside and Staged presented pandemic life as having a surreal quality.[53] Isobel Lewis of The Independent said that Inside is "largely about comedy itself" and explores Burnham's "complex relationship with his audience", similar to Hannah Gadsby in their stand-up set Nanette (2017).[52] Den of Geek's Bojalad drew tonal connections to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), a Dave Eggers memoir that portrays "the confusing, oft exhilarating human experience" through Eggers' experience of having to raise his younger brother after their parents died of cancer.[44] The song "Unpaid Intern" and subsequent reaction video is similar to the sketch "Pre-Taped Call-In Show" from the Bob Odenkirk and David Cross sketch show Mr. Show with Bob and David (1995–1998), but Burnham further uses the recursive format as a way to portray his insecurities.[9] IndieWire's Eric Kohn said that like Burnham's film Eighth Grade, the focus is on "the dangerous allure of shutting the world out in an era of on-demand distractions"; Lewis stated that it was like some of Burnham's older material, such as the music video to "Words, Words, Words" (2010), in the "effort put into every rapidly changing shot".[52] Several other publications drew comparisons of Burnham's lyrical content and appearance to those of musician Father John Misty.[54][55][56]
Themes[edit]
NPR's Linda Holmes said that there are blurred lines between "truth and fiction" in the special.[48] In The Daily Beast, Kevin Fallon asked, "What is performance and what is voyeuristic when the pain we're watching is almost uncomfortably real?" He also suggested that not being able to distinguish may be intentional.[57] Matthew Dessem of Slate saw the main subject as "Burnham's relationship to his own work, and that work's irrelevance in the face of global collapse".[9] On this topic, Kohn described that Burnham's "maniacal, passive-aggressive screen presence suggests he's grown cynical about creating art in a world that reduces it to pure capitalist product".[50] Some reviewers noticed recurring imagery of Burnham as Jesus, with long unkempt hair and a growing beard.[45][50][58] Bojalad analyzed the special as "one entertainer beating his own ego to death"; in contrast, TechRadar's Tom Power said that though Burnham is "leading us through" the "deeply personal" work, "it's hard not to see yourself in Burnham's place".[44][46] Holmes stated that it would be familiar to many people who lived through the pandemic that there is a "balance" between "two impulses": one to "stay in bed ... alone", and the other to "create, stay busy, and make jokes".[48]
Performativity and Burnham's relationship to his audience are key to the special. This follows on from Make Happy (2016), in which the closing stage song "Can't Handle This (Kanye Rant)" reflected his ambivalent relationship with his audience.[44] After the stage section of Make Happy ends, Burnham performs "Are You Happy?" in the same guest house used in Inside and then leaves to join his girlfriend Lorene Scafaria and their dog in the garden. Dessem commented that the filming style creates "contrast between the austere demands of creative work and the vibrant life going on outside".[9] Power wrote that Inside is a "continuation" and "extension" of these themes from Make Happy.[46] VanArendonk identified "endless loops of performance and consumption, worrying about performativity and authenticity and productivity".[47] Through the final scene, in which Burnham watches a recording of himself locked outside while still in the room, Zinoman saw Inside as "encouraging skepticism of the performativity" of "realism".[51]
The internet is a major topic in the special, which explicitly depicts media such as Instagram grids and Twitch livestreams.[47] Zinoman believed it was the "dominant subject", as the pandemic increased the importance of "digital life", and that Burnham demonstrated a "harsh skepticism" towards it: according to Zinoman, "the incentives of the web, those that reward outrage, excess and sentiment" are cast as "the villains".[51] Bojalad contextualized Burnham as having a "fraught relationship with technology and social media" since his career began with a series of YouTube videos posted before social media "became something far more corporate and sinister".[44] Rebecca Reid of The Daily Telegraph saw Burnham as not "demonising" or "evangelising" about the internet, and instead "capturing the silliness, the horrors, the brilliance and the total futility".[59]
Individual songs[edit]
Bojalad and Reid analyzed a verse in "White Woman's Instagram" about the character's emotions over the past death of her mother. The majority of the song is "a satirical tune about all the shallow and clout-chasing images that pop up on basic white women's Instagram accounts", according to Bojalad. It uses a narrow frame to mimic a cell phone screen—as did the earlier song "FaceTime With My Mom (Tonight)"—but as the character talks about her mother's death, the frame expands to full size.[44][59] Reid saw this as a reflection of a young person's life on social media: "Vapid, inane rubbish ... interspersed with occasional moments of boundary-breaking honesty and observation."[59] Bojalad commented that Instagram can be performative, and as with Burnham's own performativity, "sometimes real sneaks itself through".[44]
Gabrielle Sanchez of The A.V. Club reviewed "Problematic". She compared Inside with Burnham's earliest YouTube videos and found many similarities in performance style; however, he made "blatantly unfunny, homophobic, and misogynistic jokes" in his early career. Sanchez said that "Problematic" serves a dual purpose of apologizing for this content and satirizing "the current cycle of celebrity call-outs and apologies". Burnham initially uses his young age as an excuse, but then apologizes for doing so in the next verse: Sanchez argued that the message is that "the first step to being a better person is acknowledging mistakes".[60]
Reception[edit]
Critical response[edit]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 95% of 55 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 9.2/10. The website's consensus reads: "A claustrophobic masterclass in comedy and introspection, Inside is a beautifully bleak, hilariously hopeful special from Bo Burnham."[61] On Metacritic, the special has a weighted average score of 98 out of 100 based on nine critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[62] It received five out of five stars from The Guardian, The Times, and The Sydney Morning Herald.[20][45][63] IndieWire gave it an A− rating.[50] The A.V. Club included the program in its 2023 list of the 30 best stand-up specials in history.[64] Adrian Horton of The Guardian named "All Eyes On Me" one of his favorite songs of 2021.[65]