Inside, Bo Burnham’s New Special, Captures Just How Badly 2020 Sucked
Comedian, actor, screenwriter, and director Bo Burnham's last standup special, 2016's Make Happy, kicks off with camera trickery: After finishing his routine, Burnham walks off the stage at the Capitol Theater for a standing ovation. Is, and, through a hidden cut, appears to emerge inside a small guest house in Los Angeles. (It's unclear why until Burnham turns to the camera and says, "Oh, well, it's just us." The location hasn't changed until the crowd noise abruptly stops.) Following the performance of the last song, the comedian opens the door to the guest house and emerges in his own sunny backyard, where he is welcomed by his longtime companion, Hustlers director Lorraine Scafaria, and her dog Bruce. The shot is designed to show a contrast between the harsh demands of creative work and the vibrant life going on outside:
The main thing you need to know about Bo Burnham's brilliant new special, Inside, hit Netflix on Sunday, it was filmed almost entirely inside that guest house. Burnham wrote, directed, shot, and edited himself during quarantine during the pandemic, and it was simultaneously a comedy special, a coronavirus diary, an attempt to channel Vegas-era Howard Hughes, and a smart and moving discovery of depression serves as. Apocalypse, self-loathing, and of course, Internet culture. It seems like one hell of a thing to keep viewers, and Burnham is more uncomfortable than ever about the transaction, wildly amidst the need for attention and the utmost contempt for anyone who gives it. Oscillates. The opening song of the show sets the tone with the song, "I'm sorry I was gone, but look, I gave you some material / Daddy made you my favorite, open wide!" Later, however, Burnham accepted his audience as a soulful tribute to the way comedy brought people together:
He distributes those lines through an extremely immaculate quarantine beard, at the sound of birds, sitting in his underwear on a stool in his empty guest house. This is similar to John Hodgman's comment about September 11, which has been updated to a modern level of profanity and despair. There are traditional comedy bits, and they are good: In one sketch, Burnham plays the role of a corporate consultant on social issues, who advises, "The question is no longer, 'Do you want to buy wheat thin?' For example- Now the question is, 'Will you support Wheat Thins in the fight against Lyme disease?' But the main verb is in relation to Burnham's own work, and the irrelevance of that work in the face of global collapse.
When the premise of your show is tap dancing on the abyss, you have to be a great tap dancer, and luckily, Burnham is. One of his signature moves in the former special was creating ugly things in flashy pop music, and he's still doing it, but making a special without an audience gave him too much room to play with the structure, and The results are extraordinary. The highlight is a worthy successor to Mr. Show's famous "pre-tapped call-in show", in which Burnham performs a brief "sixteen-ton" -type song about unpaid interns, then reaction videos, in a recurring series of response videos Cuts the response video, and so on:
The Mr. Show version of this joke is purely about its recursive structure, but Burnham turned it against him in his reaction video to React:
It's not exactly revolutionary for the comic to draw on its own insecurities, but the number of ways Burnham criticizes his work in Inside is notable, whether by imagining an angelic choir, which he calls " Urging the world to heal with the "indescribable power of your comedy". "Re-watching his quarantine existence as a terrible video game, he's live-streaming, or bringing a sock puppet to shout at him like" You rich fucking blondes make every single political concept their own Ke insists on looking through the myopic lens — the reality? "At one point, he projects himself into a highly unrelated anti-suicide pep talk (" Just no, okay? ") On his own T-shirt. Does, as I've ever seen, as I've seen:
This is an awkward position to work on, but despite Burnham's relentless downsizing to his work, the inside is not an exercise entirely in self-pity or parochialism. Instead, Burnham's habit of assessing himself based on the same rigorous standards that he applies to the rest of the world gives him room to grow larger than he otherwise could. One of the most elaborate songs of the special is the criticism of the Internet as a whole, which is very easy to take from someone who is not claiming to be above it. Burnham repeatedly insists that he, like all of us, is part of the problem, which is the only way to keep pace with the luminous civilization we have created. Despite its many levels of jokes and meta-jokes, Inside is one of the most honest artistic responses of the 21st century so far: a beautiful, intricate chamber-like nautilus shell filled with hatred.