Gross asked Burnham if people "misinterpreted" the song and thought it was homophobic. Under stand up, Burnham wrote "Middle-aged men protecting free speech by humping stools and telling stories about edibles" and "podcasts. Don't overthink this, look in my eye don't be scared don't be shy come on in the water's fine."). Still, its difficult not to be lulled back into, again, this absolute banger. Burnham's career as a young, white, male comedian has often felt distinct from his peers because of the amount of public self-reflection and acknowledgment of his own privileges that he does on stage and off screen. 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. Perform everything to each other, all the time for no reason. "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. Is he content with its content? Let's take a closer look at just a few of those bubbles, shall we? This special spoke to me closer and clearer than Ive ever felt with another person. It's not. HOLMES: Yeah. Also, Burnham's air conditioner is set to precisely 69 degrees throughout this whole faux music video. In the song "That Funny Feeling," Burnham mentions these two year spans without further explanation, but it seems like he's referencing the "critical window for action to prevent the effects of global warming from becoming irreversible. Then he moves into a new layer of reaction, where he responds to that previous comment. ", "I do not think my intention was homophobic, but what is the implicit comedy of that song if you chase it all the way down? While he's laying in bed, eyes about the close, the screen shows a flash of an open door. Likewise. HOLMES: That was NPR's Linda Holmes reviewing Bo Burnham's new Netflix special "Inside." The comedy special perfectly encapsulated the world's collective confusion, frustration, and exhaustion amid ongoing pandemic lockdowns, bringing a quirky spin to the ongoing existential terror that was the year 2020. And its easier to relax when the video focuses on a separate take of Burnham singing from farther away, the frame now showing the entire room. Burnham's creative background began with being a theater then he transitioned to musical-comedy. At the forefront of this shift has been Bo Burnham, one of YouTubes earliest stars, who went on to make his own innovative specials with satirical songs backed by theatrical lighting and disembodied voices. "Oh Jesus, sorry," Burnham says, hurrying over to pick it up. Known as "Art is a Lie, Nothing is Real," there's a bit Burnham did at the start of his 2013 special "what." 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. When that future-Burnham appears, it's almost like a precursor to what he'll have shown us by the end of the special: That both he, and his audience, could never have known just how brutal the next year was about to be. He's freely admitting that self-awareness isn't enough while also clearly unable to move away from that self-aware comedic space he so brilliantly holds. Burnham has said in interviews that his inspiration for the character came from real YouTube videos he had watched, most with just a handful of views, and saw the way young women expressed themselves online. ", When asked about the inspiration for the song, like if people he knew thought he was gay, Burnham said, "A lot of my close friends were gay, and, you know, I wasn't certain I wasn't at that point.". My heart hurts with and for him. The vocal key used in "All Eyes On Me" could be meant to represent depression, an outside force that is rather adept at convincing our minds to simply stay in bed, to not care, and to not try anymore. Just wanted to make sure everybody knew about Bo's comedy special transcripts on Scraps. [1] Created in the guest house of Burnham's Los Angeles home during the COVID-19 pandemic without a crew or audience, it was released on Netflix on May 30, 2021. The whole video is filmed like one big thirst trap as he sweats and works out. Netflix It moves kind of all over the place. WebStuck in a passionless marriage, a journalist must choose between her distant but loving husband and a younger ex-boyfriend who has reentered her life. Burnham reacts to his reaction of the song, this time saying, Im being a little pretentious. A harsh skepticism of digital life (a life the pandemic has only magnified) is the dominant subject of the special. According to the special, Bo decided he was ready to begin doing stand-up again in January 2020, after dealing with panic attacks onstage during his previous tour, the Make Happy Tour of 2015-2016. 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. WebA biotech genius tries to bounce back from the depths of grief with help from his son, who works to escape his dads shadow and save the family business. I actually felt true mutual empathy with someone for the first time, and with someone Ive never even met, its kinda funny.. Bo Burnham: Inside review this is a claustrophobic masterpiece. I did! Then comes the third emotional jump scare. Poioumenon (from the Greek word for "product") is a term created by author Alastair Fowler and usually used to refer to a kind of metafiction. 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. But he's largely been given a pass by his fans, who praise his self-awareness and new approach. Burnham brings back all the motifs from the earlier songs into his finale, revisiting all the stages of emotion he took us through for the last 90 minutes. If the answer is yes, then it's not funny. On May 30, 2022, Burnham uploaded the video Inside: The Outtakes, to his YouTube channel, marking a rare original upload, similar to how he used his YouTube channel when he was a teenager. It's a quiet, banal scene that many people coming out of a depressive episode might recognize. Burnham's hair is shorter in those initial behind-the-scenes moments, but his future-self has a longer, unkempt beard and messy hair. "Truly, it's like, for a 16-year-old kid in 2006, it's not bad. He is not talking about it very much. 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. He also costarred in the Oscar-winning movie "Promising Young Woman," filmed in 2019. "If greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate, then when the clock runs out, the average global temperature will be irreversibly on its way to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels.". I got so much better, in fact, that in January of 2020, I thought 'you know what I should start performing again. Like most of Burnhams specials, it includes comedic songs and creative lighting effects. ", And last but not least, for social media he put "sexually pranking unsuspecting women at public beaches" and "psychologically abusive parents making rube goldberg machines" alongside "white people using GIFs of Black people widening their eyes.". Bo Burnham: INSIDE | Trailer - YouTube 0:00 / 2:09 The following content may contain suicide or self-harm topics. Burnham's earlier Netflix specials and comedy albums. Mirroring the earlier scene where Burnham went to sleep, now Burnham is shown "waking up.". The aesthetic telegraphs authenticity and vulnerability, but the specials stunning final shots reveal the misdirection at work, encouraging skepticism of the performativity of such realism. jonnyewers 30 May 2021. I have a lot of material from back then that I'm not proud of and I think is offensive and I think is not helpful. I was not, you know, having these particular experiences. Long before the phrase parasocial relationship had entered the mainstream zeitgeist, Burnhams work discussed the phenomenon. And it has a real feel of restlessness to it, almost like stream of consciousness. Burnham is an extraordinary actor, and "Inside" often feels like we're watching the intimate, real interior life of an artist. MARTIN: And it's deep, too. WebOn a budget. Might not help, but still, it couldn't hurt.". Inside doesnt give clear answers like parasocial relationships good or parasocial relationships bad, because those answers do not, and cannot, exist. Parasocial relationships are neutral, and how we interact with them is usually a mixed bag. It's a hint at the promised future; the possibility of once again being able to go outside and feel sunlight again. How does one know if the joke punches down? The title card appears in white, then changes to red, signaling that a camera is recording. . In the same way that earlier vocal distortion represented God, the effect on his voice in "All Eyes on Me" seems to signal some omniscient force outside of Burnham. Its a feat, the work of a gifted experimentalist whose craft has caught up to his talent. And you know what? To save you the time freeze-framing, here's the complete message: "No pressure by the way at any point we can stop i just want to make sure ur comfortable all this and please dont feel obligated to send anything you dont want to just cuz i want things doesnt mean i should get them and its sometimes confusing because i think you enjoy it when i beg and express how much i want you but i dont ever want that to turn into you feeling pressured into doing something you don't want or feeling like youre disappointing me this is just meant to be fun and if at any point its not fun for you we can stop and im sorry if me saying this is killing the mood i just like ". Burnham was just 16 years old when he wrote a parody song ("My Whole Family") and filmed himself performing it in his bedroom. A series of eerie events thrusts an unlikely trio (John Boyega, Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris) onto the trail of a nefarious government conspiracy. Hes bedraggled, increasingly unshaven, growing a Rasputin-like beard. 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. In recent years, he has begun directing other comics specials, staging stand-up sets by Chris Rock and Jerrod Carmichael with his signature extreme close-ups. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. And that can be a really - if you're not very good at it, that kind of thing, where there's a balance between sort of the sarcastic and ironic versus the very sincere can be really exhausting. The scene cuts to black and we see Burnham waking up in his small pull-out couch bed, bookending the section of the special that started when him going to sleep. that shows this exact meta style. Went out to look for a reason to hide again. Other artists have made works on the wavelength of Repeat Stuff, but few creators with a platform as large as Burnhams return to the topic over and over, touching on it in almost all of their works. 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. 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. I think this is something we've all been thinking about. I don't think it's perfectly morally defendable.". It's a dangerously tempting invitation to stop caring, coming from the villain of this musical comedy (depression). "And so today I'm gonna try just getting up, sitting down, going back to work. And I think that, 'Oh if I'm self-aware about being a douchebag it'll somehow make me less of a douchebag.' And then, of course, he had previous standup comedy specials. The result, a special titled "Inside," shows all of Burnham's brilliant instincts of parody and meta-commentary on the role of white, male entertainers in the world and of poisons found in internet culture that digital space that gave him a career and fostered a damaging anxiety disorder that led him to quit performing live comedy after 2015. And we might. Self-awareness does not absolve anyone of anything, he says. But, of course, it tangles that right back up; this emotional post was, ultimately, still Content. Now we've come 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. We're a long way from the days when he filmed "Comedy" and the contrast shows how fruitless this method of healing has been. On the simplest level, Inside is the story of a comic struggling to make a funny show during quarantine and gradually losing his mind. Viewer discretion is advised. He brushes his teeth, eats a bowl of cereal, and begins editing his videos. On the other two sides of that question ("no" and "not sure") the flowchart asks if it could be "interpreted" as mean (if so, then it's "not funny") or if it "punches down.". In this time-jumping dramedy, a workaholic who's always in a rush now wants life to slow down when he finds himself leaping ahead a year every few hours. Inside is the work of a comic with artistic tools most of his peers ignore or overlook. His virtuosic new special, Inside (on Netflix), pushes this trend further, so far that it feels as if he has created something entirely new and unlikely, both sweepingly cinematic and claustrophobically intimate, a Zeitgeist-chasing musical comedy made alone to an audience of no one. The special is set almost entirely in one cluttered room. Burnham may also be trying to parody the hollow, PR-scripted apologies that celebrities will trot out before they've possibly had the time to self-reflect and really understand what people are trying to hold them accountable for. It's prison. And notably, Burnhams work focuses on parasocial relationships not from the perspective of the audience, but the perspective of the performer.Inside depicts how being a creator can feel: you are a cult leader, you are holding your audience hostage, your audience is holding you hostage, you are your audience, your audience can never be you, you need your audience, and you need to escape your audience. Remember how Burnham's older, more-bearded self popped up at the beginning of "Inside" when we were watching footage of him setting up the cameras and lighting? "I don't know that it's not," he said. "A part of me loves you, part of me hates you," he sang to the crowd. Sitting in the meeting room, not making a sound becomes the perceived 24/7 access fans have to DM you, reply to you, ask you questions. BO BURNHAM: (Singing) 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. A weekly roundup of the best things from Polygon, By submitting your email, you agree to our, Bo Burnhams Inside begs for our parasocial awareness, Sign up for the With electro-pop social commentary, bleak humour and sock-puppet debates, the comics lockdown creation is astonishing. The battery is full, but no numbers are moving. Burnhams eyes are sharply in focus; the rest of him faded out subtly, a detail you might not even notice with how striking his eyes are. Now, you heard me struggling to describe what this is, so help me out. Most sources discuss fictional characters, news anchors, childrens show hosts, or celebrity culture as a whole. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. The video is an hour-long edit of footage that was deleted from the making of Inside. 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.