But by using this meta-narrative throughout the whole special, Burnham messes with our ability to know when we're seeing a genuine struggle with artistic expression versus a meticulously staged fictional breakdown. His career evolved through YouTube, MTV, Vine, his movie "Eighth Grade," and now Netflix's "Inside." I think you're getting from him, you know, the entertainment element. MARTIN: This special is titled, appropriately enough, "Inside," and it is streaming on Netflix now. 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. The song brings with it an existential dread, but Burnham's depression-voice tells us not to worry and sink into nihilism. By keeping that reveal until the end of the special, Burnham is dropping a hammer on the actual at-home audience, letting us know why his mental health has hit an ATL, as he calls it ("all time low"). But look, I made you some content. He uploaded it to YouTube, a then barely-known website that offered an easy way for people to share videos, so he could send it to his brother. It's a quiet, banal scene that many people coming out of a depressive episode might recognize. But during the bridge of the song, he imagines a post from a woman dedicated to her dead mother, and the aspect ratio on the video widens. "Problematic" is a roller coaster of self-awareness, masochism, and parody. 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." 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. "I didn't perform for five years," he says. Burnham's creative background began with being a theater then he transitioned to musical-comedy. He's the writer, director, editor, and star of this show. .] "Robert's been a little depressed," he sings (referring to himself by his birthname). The voices of the characters eventually blend together to tell the live Burnham on stage, We think we know you.. And they're biting, but he's also very talented at these little catchy pop hooks. In Inside, Burnham confronts parasocial relationships in his most direct way yet. Burnham achieved a similar uncanny sense of realism in his movie "Eighth Grade," the protagonist of which is a 13-year-old girl with extreme social anxiety who makes self-help YouTube videos. But, like so many other plans and hopes people had in the early months of the pandemic, that goal proved unattainable. This line comes full circle by the end of the special, so keep it in mind. begins with the question "Is it mean?" Netflix did, however, post Facetime with My Mom (Tonight) on YouTube. He also costarred in the Oscar-winning movie "Promising Young Woman," filmed in 2019. It's a reprieve of the lyrics Burnham sang earlier in the special when he was reminiscing about being a kid stuck in his room. In his new Netflix special, Inside, Bo Burnham sings about trying to be funny while stuck in a room. Get the fuck up! Burnham walks towards the camera and grabs it like hes grabbing the viewer by the throat. 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. Or DM a girl and groom her, do a Zoomer, find a tumor in her HOLMES: And this is what the chorus of that song sounds like. When he appeared on NPR's radio show "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross in 2018, the host played a clip of "My Whole Family" and Burnham took his headphones off so he didn't have to relisten to the song. this breakdown of 31 details you might have missed in "Inside,". Inside is the work of a comic with artistic tools most of his peers ignore or overlook. 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. Under stand up, Burnham wrote "Middle-aged men protecting free speech by humping stools and telling stories about edibles" and "podcasts. It's full circle from the start of the special, when Burnham sang about how he's been depressed and decided to try just getting up, sitting down, and going back to work. "I was in a full body sweat, so I didn't hear most of that," Burnham said after the clip played. The clearest inspiration is Merle Traviss 16 Tons, a song about the unethical working conditions of coal miners also used in weird Tom Hanks film Joe vs. He puts himself on a cross using his projector, and the whole video is him exercising, like he's training for when he's inevitably "canceled.". Instead, thanks to his ultra-self-aware style, he seems to always get ahead of criticism by holding himself accountable first. Burnham watching the end of his special on a projector also brings the poioumenon full circle the artist has finished their work and is showing you the end of the process it took to create it. Similarly, Burnham often speaks to the audience by filming himself speaking to himself in a mirror. 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. "That's a good start. For those who are unaware, Bos real name is Robert Burnham. 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. Netflix. So let's dive into "Inside" and take a closer look at nearly every song and sketch in Burnham's special. WebBo Burnham: Inside is by far one of the riskiest and original comedy specials to come out in years. 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.. An older Burnham sits at a stool in front of a clock, and he says into a microphone that he's been working on the special for six months now. It's so good to hear your voice. MARTIN: Well, that being said, Lynda, like, what song do you want to go out on? In a giddy homage to Cabaret, Burnham, in sunglasses, plays the M.C. Likewise. And if you go back and you look at a film like "Eighth Grade," he's always been really consumed by sort of the positive and the negative of social media and the internet and the life of of young kids. He is now back to where he was, making jokes alone in his room, an effort to escape his reality. "The poioumenon is calculated to offer opportunities to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality the limits of narrative truth," Fowler wrote in his book "A History of English Literature.". ", He then pulls the same joke again, letting the song play after the audience's applause so it seems like a mistake. And like those specials, Inside implores fans to think about deeper themes as well as how we think about comedy as a genre. From the very beginning of "Inside," Burnham makes it clear that the narrative arc of the special will be self-referential. It's like Burnham's special has swallowed you whole, bringing you fully into his mind at last. Well now the shots are reversed. He's almost claustrophobically surrounded by equipment. "I was a kid who was stuck in his room, there isn't much more to say about it. It chronicles Burnhams life during the pandemic and his journey creating the special. True, but it can deepen and clarify art. Its a feat, the work of a gifted experimentalist whose craft has caught up to his talent. "Trying to be funny and stuck in a room, there isn't much more to say about it," he starts in a new song after fumbling a first take. newsletter, On Parasocial Relationships and the Boundaries of Celebrity, Bo Burnham and the Trap of Parasocial Self-Awareness.. "The world needs direction from a white guy like [you] who is healing the world with comedy. And we might. 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. 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. Anything and everything all of the time. The album peaked at #7 on the Billboard 200 chart, #1 on the Comedy Albums chart, and #18 on the Independent Albums chart. '", "Robert's been a little depressed, no!" The tropes he says you may find on a white woman's Instagram page are peppered with cultural appropriation ("a dreamcatcher bought from Urban Outfitters") and ignorant political takes ("a random quote from 'Lord of the Rings' misattributed to Martin Luther King"). Social media; it's just the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform so the market said, here, perform. 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. Burnham's hair is shorter in those initial behind-the-scenes moments, but his future-self has a longer, unkempt beard and messy hair. He brushes his teeth, eats a bowl of cereal, and begins editing his videos. Most of the comments talk about how visceral it is to hear Burnhams real voice singing the upsetting lyrics. The penultimate song "All Eyes on Me" makes for a particularly powerful moment. "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. That's when the younger Burnham, the one from the beginning of his special-filming days, appears. Its a lyrically dense song with camerawork that speeds up with its rhythm. That's a really clever, fun little rhyme in this, you know, kind of heavy song. This is a heartbreaking chiding coming from Burnham's own distorted voice, as if he's shaming himself for sinking back into that mental state. In the song Problematic, Burnham sings about his past problematic behavior, asking the audience, Isnt anyone going to hold me accountable? The specials intermission looks like a clear view into Burnhams room, until Burnham washes a window between himself and the viewer an explicit, but invisible, boundary between creator and audience. So for our own little slice of the world, Burnham's two time spans seem to be referencing the start and end of an era in our civilization. Its an uncanny, dystopian view of Burnham as an instrument in the soulless game of social media. 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. One of those is the internet itself. In another scene, Burnham gives a retroactive disclaimer to discussions of his suicidal ideation by telling the audience, And if youre out there and youre struggling with suicidal thoughts and you want to kill yourself, I just wanna tell you Dont! Look Whos Inside Again is largely a song about being creative during quarantine, but ends with Now come out with your hands up, weve got you surrounded, a reflection on police violence but also being mobbed by his fans. And many people will probably remember his 2018 movie, "Eighth Grade." Finally doing basic care tasks for yourself like eating breakfast and starting work in the morning. Thank you so much for joining us. Using cinematic tools other comics overlook, the star (who is also the director, editor and cameraman) trains a glaring spotlight on internet life mid-pandemic. At just 20 years old, Burnham was a guest alongside Judd Apatow, Marc Maron, Ray Romano, and Garry Shandling. It's an emergence from the darkness. 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. I did! He tries to talk into the microphone, giving his audience a one-year update. Not putting a name on parasocial relationships makes the theme less didactic, more blurred while still being astutesuch sharp focus on the eyes, you dont notice the rest of the face fades into shades of blue. and concludes that if it's mean, it's not funny. While he's laying in bed, eyes about the close, the screen shows a flash of an open door. Some of the narrative of the show can be indulgently overheated, playing into clichs about the process of the brooding artist, but Burnham has anticipated this and other criticisms, and integrated them into the special, including the idea that drawing attention to potential flaws fixes them. By inserting that Twitch character in this earlier scene, Burnham was seemingly giving a peek into his daily routine. Released on May 30, 2021, Bo Burnham wrote, recorded, directed, and produced Inside while in lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. At first hearing, this is a simple set of lyrics about the way kids deal with struggles throughout adolescence, particularly things like anxiety and depression. "Oh Jesus, sorry," Burnham says, hurrying over to pick it up. A part of me loves you, part of me hates you / Part of me needs you, part of me fears you / [. Bo Burnhams 2021 special, Inside. Tell us a little bit more about that. The clean, tidy interior that first connected "Inside" with "Make Happy" is gone in its place is a mess-riddled space. A college student navigates life and school while dealing with a unique predicament he's living with a beautiful former K-pop sensation.