Bo Burnham’s ‘Inside’ is the year’s best album, and a must-watch pandemic musical comedy
I can’t stop thinking about “Inside,” and I don’t want to. Which is a good thing, considering many songs from Bo Burnham’s incredible, unique, so-much-better-than-any-other-special-he’s-done-it’s-insane Netflix special are so entrenched in my brain that they start playing unconsciously, only to be discovered later, as if they always existed there and just had to be found.
It would be wrong to say that the 87-minute piece, which is a personal essay and a time capsule and a musical and a comedic cry for help, can’t be summarized or described. It can, to the extent that saying that Burnham wrote, shot, edited and directed the entire thing encapsulates what a singular accomplishment it is to absorb, or the extent to which saying most of the songs are catchier than almost anything on the radio in the last several years captures what they actually sound like. Or the way that Burnham comments on himself commenting on himself not just figuratively but literally in a sequence that turns its own progressively deteriorating mental health into an exercise of funny/infuriating tail-chasing.
I want to quote favorite lines, and I don’t. I want to talk about how Burnham’s early work is obnoxious and basic and how now, at just 30, he has leveled up in a way that it’s fair to wonder if it would’ve happened, at least like this, if not for the pandemic and being forced to consider what to do and how to do it when trapped alone, even if he wasn’t really that alone. (He reportedly lives with “Hustlers” writer/director Lorene Scafaria and made “Inside” in their guest house.) I want to marvel at how Burnham, who also wrote and directed the terrific 2018 film “Eighth Grade,” distills the bizarre contradictions of the internet and the abyss of performing comedy to no one and the futility of self-fulfillment in a world drowning in capital-letter problems. I want to sing and dance to the songs and laugh at the jokes and feel very sad about a lot of the material.
“A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall.” I can’t get that lyric, from the extraordinary “That Funny Feeling,” out of my head. I keep wondering if “Problematic,” about apologizing for saying offensive things in the past, is meant to sidestep its own sincerity or comment on those who do that. “Inside” constantly folds over onto itself until Burnham is blending the start of the project and the end, wondering what has changed, who we are now. I don’t know if the confessionals are performances or authentic; it’s odd to question them when sprinkled in between actual performances that aren’t being questioned.
But this is a creative experiment in celebration of creativity’s ability to give purpose, the cliche of the journey upended by the fear of having nowhere else to go, or to have to find out what it looks like when you get there and need something else to do. Throughout is a tension between individual and society, existing in it, existing outside of it, things that we can control, things we can’t. I love “Inside” for its multifaceted, weird, joyous, despairing achievements, for the things that don’t quite work (deliberately mediocre stand-up needlessly hits the same note several times), for the idea that I want to listen to the album on repeat but think everyone should watch the special first, for the simultaneous feeling of wanting to talk to everyone about it and just live and sit with it in a room somewhere, with nothing but time, the biggest problem being what to think about and what to do next.
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