He's almost claustrophobically surrounded by equipment. That's a really clever, fun little rhyme in this, you know, kind of heavy song. Self-awareness does not absolve anyone of anything, he says. Its an origin story of sorts. Just as often, Burnhams shot sequencing plays against the meaning of a song, like when he breaks out a glamorous split screen to complement a comic song about FaceTiming with his mom. begins with the question "Is it mean?" And he's done virtually no press about it. He tries to talk into the microphone, giving his audience a one-year update. "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.". Finally doing basic care tasks for yourself like eating breakfast and starting work in the morning. Apathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime. He's the writer, director, editor, and star of this show. Something went wrong. We see Burnham moving around in the daylight, a welcome contrast to the dark setting of "All Eyes on Me." and concludes that if it's mean, it's not funny. Bo Burnhams 2021 special, Inside. And part of it is sometimes he's just in despair. Its called INSIDE, and it will undoubtedly strike your hearts forevermore. "I don't know that it's not," he said. On the simplest level, Inside is the story of a comic struggling to make a funny show during quarantine and gradually losing his mind. BURNHAM: (Singing) Start a rumor, buy a broom or send a death threat to a Boomer. Hes been addressing us the entire time. In the same way that earlier vocal distortion represented God, the effect on his voice in "All Eyes on Me" seems to signal some omniscient force outside of Burnham. See our analysis of the end of the special, and why Burnham's analogy for depression works so well. 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. There's also another little joke baked into this bit, because the game is made by a company called SSRI interactive the most common form of antidepressant drugs are called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, aka SSRIs. Bo Burnham also uploaded Welcome to the Internet and White Womans Instagram on his YouTube channel. The first comes when Burnham looks directly into the camera as he addresses the audience, singing, Are you feeling nervous? Most sources discuss fictional characters, news anchors, childrens show hosts, or celebrity culture as a whole. One of the most encouraging developments in comedy over the past decade has been the growing directorial ambition of stand-up specials. "A part of me loves you, part of me hates you," he sang to the crowd. While he's laying in bed, eyes about the close, the screen shows a flash of an open door. But now Burnham is showing us the clutter of the room where "Inside" was filmed. 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. At the start of the special, Burnham sings "Content," setting the stage for his musical-comedy. The aesthetic telegraphs authenticity and vulnerability, but the specials stunning final shots reveal the misdirection at work, encouraging skepticism of the performativity of such realism. "I didn't perform for five years," he says. Im talking to you. Toward the end, he appears completely naked behind his keyboard. I've been hiding from the world and I need to reenter.' MARTIN: So as you can hear in that bit, he sounds something like other comedic songwriters who do these kind of parody or comedy songs, whether it's Tom Lehrer, Weird Al or whoever. It's prison. 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. Burnham was just 16 years old when he wrote a parody song ("My Whole Family") and filmed himself performing it in his bedroom. At the forefront of this shift has been Bo Burnham, one of YouTubes earliest stars, who went on to make his own innovative specials with satirical songs backed by theatrical lighting and disembodied voices. I think you're getting from him, you know, the entertainment element. It's an emergence from the darkness. WebOn a budget. Theres always been a tension in his comedy between an ironic, smarty-pants cleverness and an often melodramatic point of view. 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. An ethereal voice (which is really just Burnham's own voice with effects over it) responds to Burnham's question while a bright light suddenly shines on his face, as if he's receiving a message from God. our ranking of all 20 original songs from the special here. But then the video keeps playing, and so he winds up reacting to his own reaction, and then reacting yet again to that reaction. 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. The song's melody is oddly soothing, and the lyrics are a sly manifestation of the way depression convinces you to stay in its abyss ("It's almost over, it's just begun. 1 on Billboards comedy albums chart and eventually climbed to No. Burnham slaps his leg in frustration and eventually gives a mirthless laugh before he starts slamming objects around him. Audiences who might not read a 1956 essay by researchers about news anchors still see much of the same discussion in Inside. Entertainment correspondent Kim Renfro ranked them in ascending order of greatness. Now get inside.". The songs from the special were released on streaming platforms on June 10, 2021. The special is hitting an emotional climax as Burnham shows us both intense anger and then immediately after, a deep and dark sadness. Burnham's hair is shorter in those initial behind-the-scenes moments, but his future-self has a longer, unkempt beard and messy hair. It's a quiet, banal scene that many people coming out of a depressive episode might recognize. But usually there is one particular voice that acts as a disembodied narrator character, some omniscient force that needles Burnham in the middle of his stand up (like the voice in "Make Happy" that interrupts Burnham's set to call him the f-slur). That's when the younger Burnham, the one from the beginning of his special-filming days, appears. Or was it an elaborate callback to his earlier work, planted for fans seeking evidence that art is lie? Gross asked Burnham if people "misinterpreted" the song and thought it was homophobic. The penultimate song "All Eyes on Me" makes for a particularly powerful moment. Bo Burnham: Inside, was written, edited, and directed by the talent himself and the entire show is shot in one room. Similarly, Burnham often speaks to the audience by filming himself speaking to himself in a mirror. Burnham reacts to his reaction to his reaction: Im so afraid that this criticism will be levied against me that I levy it against myself before anyone else can. The video keeps going. His virtuosic new special, Inside (on Netflix), pushes this trend further, so far that it feels as if he has created something entirely new and unlikely, both sweepingly cinematic and claustrophobically intimate, a Zeitgeist-chasing musical comedy made alone to an audience of no one. The video is an hour-long edit of footage that was deleted from the making of Inside. Even when confronted with works that criticize parasocial attachment, its difficult for fans not to feel emotionally connected to performers they admire. The special was nominated for six Emmy Awards in 2021, of which it won three: Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special, Outstanding Directing for a Variety Special, and Outstanding Music Direction. But Burnham doesn't put the bottle down right, and it falls off the stool. So this is how it ends. Burnham has said in interviews that his inspiration for the character came from real YouTube videos he had watched, most with just a handful of views, and saw the way young women expressed themselves online. While sifting through fan reactions to Inside, the YouTube algorithm suggested I watch a fan-made video that pitch corrects All Eyes on Me to Burnhams actual voice. That YouTube commenter might be understood by Burnham if they were to meet him. You can tell that he's watched a ton of livestream gamers, and picked up on their intros, the way the talk with people in the chat, the cadence of their commentary on the game, everything. Then he moves into a new layer of reaction, where he responds to that previous comment. I actually felt true mutual empathy with someone for the first time, and with someone Ive never even met, its kinda funny.. 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. In a giddy homage to Cabaret, Burnham, in sunglasses, plays the M.C. Many of his songs begin seriously, then shift into the joke, but this one doesnt. While platforms like Patreon mean creators can make their own works independently without studio influence, they also mean that the creator is directly beholden to their audience. And notably, Burnhams work focuses on parasocial relationships not from the perspective of the audience, but the perspective of the performer.Inside depicts how being a creator can feel: you are a cult leader, you are holding your audience hostage, your audience is holding you hostage, you are your audience, your audience can never be you, you need your audience, and you need to escape your audience. Self-awareness does not absolve anybody of anything.". He decided to stop doing live performances, and instead set out to write and direct his first feature film, the critically-acclaimed 2018 movie "Eighth Grade." A part of me loves you, part of me hates you / Part of me needs you, part of me fears you / [. But unlike many of us, Burnham was also hard at work on a one-man show directed, written and performed all by himself.