Bo Burnham: Inside

Bo Burnham: Inside
Everything by: Bo Burnham
Network: Netflix

Let me begin by saying I went into this completely blind. I know nothing about Bo Burnham. I did not read up about Bo lore on Bokipedia. I did not watch 90-minute YouTube explainer videos on what everybody gets wrong about Bo. I am entirely unversed in the Bo Cinematic Universe. I mentioned that I had watched this to someone on Discord and they immediately accused me of being a TikTok girl and have no idea what that is, or what connection it has to any Netflix comedy special, be it wholly Boed or unBoed or any intermediate degree of Boification in between. Never heard of the kid.

I like him. I mean, his youth and talent and success irritate the piss out of me, but I like him.

Should I even explain what Bo Burnham: Inside is? Nah. Not much point. Bo makes a joke during this one-man audience-less show about the possibility that he’s just talking to himself, so let me quickly reassure you Bo, in many ways the total lack of audience is a relief. You can skip all the boring explanation bits of the review, for example, and just skip straight to trash-talking it. Go ahead. Do it. Not like anybody is going to fucking care.

There’s something fitting about talking to myself online about a musical-black comedy special consisting mainly of a man talking to himself online about being online all the time. Anyway, from what I can tell Bo is a comedy songwriter in the Al Franken, Weird Al or Eric Idle vein and I have just revealed the incredible paucity of my knowledge and unfamiliarity with this field. Funny songs, in other words, written, performed and shot by Bo in his home during the pandemic.

At some point online humor seems to have shifted from ‘silliness’ to ‘relatability’ and most of the jokes in this special aren’t jokes but things that exist in Bo’s life. Facetiming his mom, sexting, Jeff Bezos.

People don’t seem to tell jokes that much anymore, everybody agrees satire is dead now that people openly say and do the most moronic things imaginable, nobody understands sarcasm, and so what’s left is things that make people clap because they are able to identify them. Like a performer saying “San Francisco!” to their audience and receiving rapturous applause. Yes, that is a place, a place I am from! Woo! Yay! What I get out of Bo is a whole lot of relatability that I don’t much relate to, interspersed with some genuine comedy.

I think it’s unrelatable because the experience of a successful 30-year-old single entertainer living in the United States of Deliberately Fucking Up Their Covid Response at Every Imaginable Stage in Every Imaginable Way of America has been pretty different from a failed 47-year-old married-with-kids writer in Japan. Turning 30 is a distant, half-forgotten image in my rearview mirror. Aside from a three-week period in April 2020, I have been going to the office every day. We have been going shopping, eating in restaurants, getting haircuts, seeing our friends about as much as we did before, i.e. never. Like I have friends. Covid has changed many things, but the degree to which I am or am not online has not been one of them. So songs and jokes about how awful it is to be isolated and online all of the time, however well crafted and expertly shot, tend not to land for me. I wonder if they land for most people outside of a small clutch of social media addicts.

One of the non-song actual stand-up bits involves Bo wondering aloud if it is possible, in this day and age, times being what they are, and so on, is it at all possible for everyone to just shut the fuck up about anything. But you know what? I think most people do shut the fuck up. I think the vast majority of humanity shuts the fuck up on a pretty consistent basis. Maybe if you have a somewhat larger online presence than a Twitter account with three followers and a blog with even fewer than that, then online discussions might feel a bit more heated, but for most of us I suspect the Internet is about as participatory as a rock concert or one of America’s larger wars—in a very abstract way it couldn’t exist without us but nobody is seriously asking us what we think of it. Replying to famous Twitter accounts is like talking back to the TV. Anyway, it’s not like nobody had opinions prior to 2006.

The bit ends with Bo rhetorically asking himself why he doesn’t shut up, then quickly cuts away.

There is, of course, something ironic about a man with a self-written and directed comedy special in which he is the sole performer and often the sole subject complaining about people talking about themselves online. He is the very problem he is describing, a living example of the man who jams a stick in his own bicycle wheel and complains when he falls off. He does exhibit awareness of this, but he himself admits that self-awareness doesn’t absolve anybody of anything. So. There.

I did laugh though, at least in the first half. The facetiming and sexting songs are chuckle worthy, the dark humor of songs about how useless it is to worry about the world ending hits pretty hard, and much of the camera work and setup has an almost childlike and gleeful sense of inventiveness. There’s a brilliant bit about brands attempting to exhibit a social conscience, “The question is not whether you will buy Wheat Thins, but whether you will stand with Wheat Thins in the fight against Lyme Disease.” Spoofs of recursive reaction videos to reaction videos to reaction videos and twitch streamers trying to play the life of a depressed 30-year-old shut-in are also kind of funny. The song “White Woman’s Instagram” manages to be more than just relatable, by subtly lampooning the cheapening of real feeling and empathy by giving equal emotional weight to inspirational Lord of the Rings quotes misattributed to Martin Luther King, silly photos of dogs and heartfelt open letters to one’s dead mother.

The second half I liked a lot less, as it is mostly Bo chronicling his declining mental state in his isolated, always-online existence.

For one thing, I don’t buy it. There is something awfully contrived about filming yourself having a mental breakdown while staying in shot, in focus, and zooming artistically away at the appropriate moment.

I don’t buy it.

Maybe it’s Gen X suspicion of any public display of emotion, but I don’t buy it. I don’t believe Bo’s house is that messy, I don’t believe he set up a camera to catch himself waking up, I don’t believe he really cried on camera. I realize as I type this that the performative nature of public grief is part of Bo’s whole beef with the Internet, so this too is probably deliberate, but still off-putting and kind of alienating.

I don’t buy it.

For another, the whole pandemic has been far easier to cope with if one is not one of these quantum Schrödinger humans who disappears if they are ever unobserved. Bo’s theatrical moping about his expensive Los Angeles house is just barely more tolerable than Gal Gadot singing to us from her mansion and one suspects comes from the same root, the same need to be the center of attention at all times. I feel slightly greater sympathy to those suffering to the pandemic without the padding provided by being a YouTube celebrity with a number of comedy specials.

But you know. It was sporadically funny, sometimes gut-bustingly so, visually interesting, something a little different. It was fun. I enjoyed it. I just don’t think I’ll ever want to watch it ever again.

P.S. Listening to the songs from the special on Spotify is a whole other experience. Stripped of the burden of sitting through 45 minutes of material and allowed to command your full attention, I really appreciate that these aren’t just silly little quips, but actually pretty good tunes in their own right. They are bops, my friends, they are each a mood, whole and entire.