Blue eyes, blonde hair, pale face, Bo Burnham wrote, shot, directed, and edited his comedy special Inside in a room — two windows to the left, a kitchenette behind, a door in front shorter than Burnham’s 6’5’’, and a pit of snake-like wires on the floor for the various lights, the flashes, the keyboard, the mic, etc.
The camera is often gazing at these various objects, and sometimes, through a mirror, at itself. It stares at him tinkering with the lights, editing footage, creating footage, eating cereal, dumping clothes. The whole circuitous, atomic process of creation is laid bare inside out.
At one point, while singing, Burnham takes his right hand away from the keyboard to his laptop lingering nearby and plays the recorded laughter track to round out his pithy lyric, “What the fuck is going on?”. The next time we hear the laughter track, towards the end, we are primed to note its synthetic, pre-recorded nature. The lighting keeps changing, three different lights from three different directions leaving shadows on the back wall, and each time Burnham manipulates the lighting, we see it. There isn’t a pretense of invincibility or magic here. The chaotic but inspired process of creation is broken down into its smallest unit that is capable of appreciation. One can only marvel at his virtuosic abilities. Inside is a technical marvel.
Burnham takes the isolation involved in creating, the isolation created by participating in the internet culture morphing oneself into filtered, interesting digital dust, and makes it indistinguishable from the isolation one feels during the pandemic. There is a claustrophobic quality to the comedy special, even as he creates the illusion of space by projecting skies, the moon, and tall woods on the back-wall. However, this cabin fever of staying with Burnham and Burnham’s process for 90 minutes becomes a dense, hot mess that cannot be saved by the brilliance of form, which is — in no uncertain terms — brilliant.
He has the sort of anything-goes punk sensibility which from his YouTube days has gotten edgier but also more responsible. Mental health figures, suicide figure — to which he advises, “just don’t”. Burnham had his first panic attack at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2013, during the opening night of his show what. He decided to give up stand-up comedy to get his bearings back. In the interim, he directed a movie and played the pivotal role of the initially well-intentioned, ultimately incorrigible asshole in the Oscar-nominated Promising Young Woman. In January 2020 he decided he was ready for the stage. But the city shut shop, and so Burnham took his ideas indoors to create this patchwork parody. And it is patchwork. In a previous comedy special, Make Happy, he noted how his performance is constructed from “discrete bits”. It’s not different here. The running theme is him.
He takes various cliches, the “Deadpool self-awareness”, the self-effacement, puppetry, reaction videos, PewdiePie’s narrations, fireside singing in a wooded forest, the faux-edgy takes and runs with it. He has songs which are essentially lists that rhyme — of what white women do on Instagram (photogenic shots of waking up, which later in the special he does himself), of the dizzying array that the internet provides. The list itself has elements that are unrelated, exaggerated, rhyming zoomer with tumor, holding Pornhub terms of service and traffic laws in the same breath, lurking on that border between the generic and the genius.
Then there are songs that stretch quirky anecdotes into little more than quirky anecdotes — of facetiming his mom, of the comedian’s illusion of invincibility, of sexting. But there is such a dryness to the content, a deadpan attitude that one usually expects to accompany the absolutely bizarre, and a running commentary on the making of the special, deconstructing its format, its length, its intermission, its morals or lack thereof. This boredom weighs heavy on the inventive form. I wondered why should I find Burnham drily noting he is a white man, centering himself, funny? Doing it, and making fun of doing it, and making fun of making fun of doing it has a logical excessiveness that sure, is eye-catching, but has a very thin comedic pay-off. It’s the kind of structural wonder that is content with being a structure, unable to inhabit it with anything fleshier, or flashier.
There are some moving moments, like waiting for that one minute before the clock turns from 11:59 to 12:00, before he turns from 29 to 30-years-old. The tragedy of ageing is here — where Burnham is less entertained by those older than confused by those younger. The special itself is more emotionally naked when Burnham hovers around himself. The pauses between each word have a tensile quality — like you don’t know where he is taking this sentence. Often it isn’t anywhere totally unexpected. But the thrill is in the wait. The same can be said of the special. I waited for it to go someplace interesting — beyond the cliches of the self-aware, broken, bored comedian, beyond the platitudes of modern-day isolation. He doesn’t say anything new, wrapping the known in inventive phrasing — he calls the internet, “everything all of the time”, conjuring a chaos that is made accessible the second we split open our laptop or switch on our phones. The rest is, in Burnham’s own words “Fucking boring. But that’s the point, I think?”
Bo Burnham’s Inside streams on Netflix.
Rating: **1/2
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/inside-review-bo-burnhams-netflix-comedy-special-is-fiercely-inventive-but-has-little-to-elevate-its-dryness-9678491.html
