Inside

If you’d have told me a year ago

that I’d be locked inside of my home

I would have told you a year ago,

“interesting now leave me alone”

Sorry that I look like a mess

I booked a haircut but it got rescheduled

Robert’s been a little depressed

And so today I’m gonna try just

getting up, sitting down, going back to work

Might not help but still it couldn’t hurt

sitting down, writing jokes, singing silly songs

I’m sorry I was gone

but look I made you some content

Daddy made you some content now open wide

Here is the content

It’s a beautiful way to stay inside

You might be surprised to hear that I’ve seen every single Bo Burnham special that has ever been made. Am I proud of this? Or am I more embarrassed by the fact that my gateway was through someone I briefly dated in college who emphatically noted, “He’s my hall pass.” Yes, Bo is a genuinely, conventionally attractive, skinny, white dude who has been in the stand-up business since he was 19 years old (right around the time he turned down the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU). His career has spanned over a decade of five comedy specials that are not all too dissimilar from each other: they all discuss touchy subjects like racism, sexuality, mental health issues, and every annoying thing that white people have ever done and will ever do.

Inside is more introspective than any of his previous works. I mean…naturally, he has had nothing but time to think… alone… in this one room he records all of the material in this special. This room is small, and especially for Burnham, who needs to duck to get under most doorways. He shows us the room, his camera equipment, and tells us that he’s going to work on this special for… however long it takes. To think how simultaneously tortuous and magical this must have been for him: to be locked inside of a room with nothing to do but work on your art for the foreseeable future. This was the idea at the beginning of this whole mess. We all finally have so much time. What do we do with it? Well, Bo Burnham struggles with that too.

Is comedy over?

Should I leave you alone

‘cause really who’s gonna go for

joking at a time like this?

Should I be joking at a time like this?

I wanna help to leave this world

better than I found it

But I fear that comedy won’t help

and the fear is not unfounded

Should I stop trying to be funny?

Should I give away my money? No!

What do I do?

Then the comedic twist:

The world needs healing

from a white guy like me (bingo!)

who is healing the world with comedy

And his commentary on the great reckoning that followed our national lockdown, the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery? GOLD:

I’m a special kind of white guy

I self-reflected and I wanna be an agent of change

So I’m gonna use my privilege for the good (Very cool! Way to go!)

American white guys

have had the floor for at least three hundred years

so maybe I should just shut the fuck up?

I’m bored.

I don’t wanna do that

A lot to unpack here. Burnham consistently does an amazing job at holding the mirror up to nature through comedic song. I think this might be a genre that hasn’t existed before him? At least, not as successfully. Here, he highlights the frustration experienced among white and POC Americans (though I am thinking especially about Black Americans). Do I speak up, or do I shut up? Do I use my position to create change, or do I make space for others to create the changes they want and need? Do I stay inside, or do I venture outside? Do I follow the routine, or do I change it?

What is so ingenious about this song? A white guy talking about stepping out of the spotlight…at the beginning of his (solo) standup special. And it works, because it’s all in the spirit of irony. In most of Burnham’s specials, I’m not particularly sure how he feels about the issues he sings about because he is ALWAYS ironic. Here, though, and especially in the second half, his position starts to make sense.

He doesn’t have one.

A lot of twenty-somethings absolutely hate that. I kind of love it. It’s incredibly honest and humiliating and vulnerable— almost too much at times. In the second half of Inside, everything gets darker as the pandemic rages on.

Bo later holds his head in his hands and sobs violently. It’s uncomfortable. I’ve wondered if he was okay before, but now I’m wondering more than ever.

Watch this before moving on…

. . .

I’ve seen every single Bo Burnham special that has ever been made, but I would have never guessed that Bo quit performing for five years. Most of you reading probably have no clue that I haven’t actually acted in two years… by choice. This song makes me feel less alone. It gives me hope. It helps me to heal and to get better. It allows me to be gracious to people who wonder, when are you going to act again? Are you ever going to act again? It also clarifies, to me, that perhaps a lot of twenty-somethings are “trapped inside” and struggling to figure out how to balance the world’s expectations with their own, newfound desires. Bo turned 30 this year. Something tells me he’s still working on it. But until he does figure it out, his process is pretty damn beautiful.

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