Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bo Burnham: Inside’ On Netflix, Self-Reflecting In Quarantine For All Of Our Sakes, But Most Hopefully His Own

After taking five years off from performing comedy, Bo Burnham re-emerged with this painstakingly brutal meditation on isolation, both his and ours, working in solitude throughout the pandemic to produce this breathtaking work of art. It’s got songs to make you laugh, jingles to make you think, everything you’ve already come to know and love from Burnham. And yet so much more.

BO BURNHAM: INSIDE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Burnham seemed to say goodbye to live comedy when he released his third special, Make Happy, for Netflix five years ago this week. In fact, he did. Or thought he had.
As he tells near the close of the 87-minute Inside, Burnham reveals he had to stop performing for live audiences after he began experiencing panic attacks in the middle of his shows. “I spent that time trying to improve myself mentally,” he tells us now. “I got so much better!” So much that, in January 2020, he decided himself ready to write new material and get back out there. Only for the pandemic to sequester him. So he did the next best thing? He spent the past year and change making Inside, all by himself, in the same room where he closed out Make Happy.
Burnham’s not only older and wiser (having turned 30 in the middle of making Inside, and he shows us that moment, too), but he’s also become more assured behind the camera as he has in front of it, having spent the intervening pre-pandemic years directing comedy specials for Chris Rock and Jerrod Carmichael, writing and directing an insightful ode to Gen Z adolescence with Eighth Grade, and turning heads with a surprising role in Promising Young Woman. Now what?
That’s a good question for all of us, and for Burnham, too.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: In terms of comedy, the only thing that’s even remotely close was Netflix’s 2020 pandemic comedy special, Vir Das: Outside In, although that was something completely different, with Das interacting with fans over Zoom. Burnham’s Inside feels closer in spirit to both Beyoncé’s Lemonade and the feature film, The Lighthouse. Visually stunning, thematically arresting like the former; and like the latter, it goes off the rails bonkers as the isolation continues past a certain point, while somehow still making complete sense.
Burnham’s closing song also reminds me a lot of another sentimental piano guy who can bring pathos to parody: Tim Minchin. (Their paths crossed many moons ago, and I have a funny sad story about that that has no place here, so remind me to tell you it some other day)
Memorable Jokes: Burnham jokingly refers to himself in one image as the Venn diagram between Malcolm X and Weird Al. Burnham’s comedy may be somewhat revolutionary in terms of poking holes at comedy conventions while also ruthlessly maintaining his own rigorous self-awareness within each shot across the bow of the art form, his songs themselves aren’t straight-up parodies like Yankovic’s, but rather, synth-pop bangers which show off his sensibilities for what the kids of all ages might want to listen to.
His sharpest social commentary comes after social media and Internet living. Already, his fans are plucking the musical numbers to share in very viral ways, whether’s it’s about sexting, or his mockery of white women Instagram trends, his meta YouTube reaction video, his Twitch gamer wondering what was the point of his onscreen avatar, his brand consultant reminding us how corporations glom onto political movements when they think they can make more money off of it, or most pointedly, segueing from talk about hitting an all-time-low in his mental health into a circus-like ditty about chaos of the Internet, where it wasn’t always this dangerous, but most certainly is now that it offers “everything, all of the time.”
He’s even more subversive when it comes to capitalism, what with two quick jingles for Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, a jazzy number about unpaid interns, and most effectively, a duet with “Socko” (his sock hand puppet) about how we’ve been indoctrinated into believing all sorts of things that are unmistakably bad for us.
For my money, though, the most memorable parts come when Burnham references his own beginnings inside, alone in his room, as a teenager 15 years ago. One song finds him apologizing for the offensiveness of his earlier lyrics, another asks slyly and rhetorically, “Can one be funny when stuck in a room?” then answers: “I was a kid who was stuck in his room. There isn’t much more to say about it. When you’re a kid and you’re stuck in your room. You’ll do any old shit to get out of it.”
Then we see 30-year-old Burnham watching his younger self, who had no idea what was in store for him once he uploaded that video to YouTube.

Of course, there’s one lesson Burnham hopes you don’t take away from his songs, especially the lyric in which he suggests he might kill himself when he turns 40. Because he immediately follows that with a pointed PSA, saying please don’t consider suicide. And at the end credits, Burnham includes a link to a site called wannatalkaboutit.com, which clicks to this page hosted by Netflix.

Our Take: So yeah, you’re not going to find many comedy specials with public service announcements at the end of them (the only other one I remember in recent memory was Daniel Sloss: X for HBO in 2018, because of talk about rape victims).
I’ve always admired and respected Burnham for he marries his great prowess for musical comedy with great responsibility and awareness, evidenced by his own admiration and respect for the craft and the audience receiving it. His closing song not only asks, “Am I right back where I started 14 years ago?” but also manages to become a medley of lyrical callbacks to moments and themes he’s dropped throughout the special.
For someone who became a star thanks to social media to have the good sense to call b.s. on all of it, and how “giant digital media corporations exploiting our kids emotions and psyche for profit might have been a bad call by us,” that takes a lot of chutzpah.
When he walked out that door five years ago at the end of Make Happy, Burnham imagined a happy ending for himself. What he does at the end of Inside, circling back upon that idea, only to find himself back inside, a sullen spectator, but not for long…it gives me hope. This 30-year-old is still going places, and I’ll gladly go along for the ride.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Easily the best comedy special of the pandemic, if not the best “content” of any kind from the pandemic that you’ll see, putting everything we’ve felt over the past year and a half, and still feel, as each of us figure out what comes next.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Bo Burnham: Inside on Netflix