Bo Burnham

Content note: This post contains discussions of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.

I think some of my friends think I’ve lost my mind a little bit. I keep talking about Bo Burnham lately, and I think many of the people in my life are like, “Wait. What? Isn’t that the kid from YouTube who wrote shitty songs making fun of every marginalized group under the sun? You’re into HIM now?”

Well, to be fair, I’ve unironically (though sometimes surreptitiously) loved Bo for over a decade, in part because it’s clear that a lot of his past missteps were just pointed leftist irony that viewers didn’t interpret as such, being (reasonably) hesitant to assume a cis straight white guy has good intentions. (“If you were offended by that, it was ironic,” Bo explains after performing a song called Straight White Male in his special Make Happy. “Isn’t that fun? I meant the whole opposite of it!” The tone is jokey, but like… he’s right. That is what he, and other irony-based crooners, do.) It’s fine if you don’t forgive him; you don’t have to. BUT ALSO, he has come a long way since those YouTube days. Like, a loooooooong way.

Bo’s latest Netflix special, Inside, touched me in a way that no piece of art has in a very long time. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette came close, as did the movie Ex Machina and the Andy Shauf album The Neon Skyline. All of these works of art accessed deep wells of emotion in me through razor-sharp relatability and big themes. But I really think Inside might be my favorite piece of art I’ve consumed – in any medium – for at least the last five years. I’m not fucking kidding, y’all.

If you haven’t seen it, first of all, SEE IT, and secondly, here’s what it’s about: Bo, like many of us, found himself cooped up inside during the pandemic, socially isolated and inundated with terrible news on the internet every day. But unlike many of us, he had the technical skills and creative vision to sequester himself in a single room with a camera, a lighting setup, and a bunch of audio equipment, and create a 90-minute musical comedy special that somehow expresses a giant range of quarantine emotions and 2020 Big Moods.

Toward the beginning of Inside, Bo’s hair is beginning to get long, a beard is forming on his face, and he seems merely perplexed and thrown by the pandemic, like we all were. As the special progresses, however, his hair grows longer, his beard expands, and his mental health starts to slip. But he keeps making the special anyway. We learn, through his occasional tiny disclosures of big truths, that working on the special has become his tether to the world, the one thing keeping him semi-afloat as his mental health reaches “an ATL (all-time low).” As a creative who has, myself, used writing or music or podcasting to give me a sense of purpose and belonging when I was unable to find one any other way, this resonated so hard that I often found myself yelling “WOW” or “YIKES” or “DRAG ME, BO” at the screen.

Bo’s songwriting has levelled up IMMENSELY since his last special, Make Happy. As a music nerd, that’s one of the main things I noticed on my initial watch of Inside. He was always a highly skilled lyricist and pianist, but his songs until now have mostly stayed within a pretty small range of chord progressions and styles. In this special, he reaches almost Sondheimian levels of intricacy and beauty with his songwriting, and explores styles like hiphop, folk, and cabaret. It feels like his ability to execute a project has finally caught up with his creativity and vision, such that every song in this special functions wonderfully as an actual song, rather than just being a framing device for Bo’s clever jokes and witty observations.

I can’t possibly tell you about all my favorite parts of this special because there are frankly too many. But here are a few:

• An early song, “Healing the World with Comedy,” gets us all on the same page, in Bo’s signature half-joking-but-kinda-serious style. He establishes right off the bat that he knows comedy is simultaneously pretty useless in the face of worldwide strife and also potentially a platform through which he can effect change. As an artist who also sometimes struggles with the question of “Why the fuck am I doing this when so much awful shit is going on?” I found this one screamingly hilarious and also useful as a reminder to use my platform for good. “If you wake up in a house that’s full of smoke, don’t panic – call me and I’ll tell you a joke,” Bo offers; “If you see white men dressed in white cloaks, don’t panic – call me and I’ll tell you a joke.” It’s a chilling reminder that art can only do so much.

• There are two sort of silly-sexy jams in this special, called, respectively, “FaceTime with My Mom” and “Sexting,” which are about… exactly what they sound like they’re about. In a very classic Bo Burnham way, these songs crack you up for most of their duration and then hit you with an unexpected emotional punch – like when Bo’s mom puts his dad on the phone and they have a stilted, emotionally disconnected conversation (#relatable) or like the one frame in “Sexting” where you can read Bo’s paragraph-long textual meditation on the line between playfully begging to see someone’s nudes and pressuring them in a way that feels uncomfortable. Also, these songs are both absolute bops.

• There’s a lot of… gender… in this special?? There is, in fact, an entire song (“White Woman’s Instagram”) where Bo is essentially in drag, albeit with a beard. And, um, my gay ass can confirm that he is pulling it off. I was wondering what other people thought about this, so I typed “Bo Burnham gender” into the Twitter search bar, and there are dozens upon dozens of trans and nonbinary people tweeting that Bo gives them gender envy. Understandable, tbh.

• An extended bit in which Bo does “commentary” on one of his own songs, and then does commentary on his commentary, is a brilliant depiction of the self-criticism and self-policing that can come with depression and anxiety. He does something similar in another section where he takes on the role of a hyper-masc Twitch streamer playing a video game that is actually just Bo’s own life: sit in a room, cry, play piano, go to sleep, start the day over again. Both of these bits crystallize an overarching theme of dissociation, derealization, depersonalization, and the way that the internet encourages us to view ourselves and our lives through an externalized lens.

• One of the prettiest songs in the special laments, “Can one be funny when stuck in a room?” In reflecting on his own past tendencies to self-isolate as a protective mechanism, Bo sings, “Well, well! Look who’s inside again! Went out to look for a reason to hide again,” at which point I felt like someone had stabbed me through the heart because DAMN, @ ME NEXT TIME, BO.

• Speaking of Bo’s (numerous) past fuck-ups, there is a song toward the middle of the special where Bo fully, explicitly, and sensitively apologizes for the problematic jokes he built his fame on. “Are you gonna hold me accountable?” he dares, almost begs. In classic Bo fashion, the song is simultaneously self-reflective and hilarious. It’s filmed as an athletic scene reminiscent of a Rocky training montage, which contributes to the overall image of masochistic self-flagellation and doing penance for past mistakes. I kept screaming at the screen “I CAN’T BELIEVE HE’S DOING THIS” at this point, because it really is that rare to see someone of Bo’s demographic owning up to what they’ve done. “Bitch, I’m trying to listen; shit, I’ve been complacent,” he sings toward the end. “If I wanna catch up, first I gotta ‘fess up.” Too true.

• Bo’s really bummed about turning 30 during the making of the special because he thought he’d be done with the special, and ideally with the pandemic, by then. Again… relatable as fuck. Then he sings a song about turning 30 which is a beautiful meditation on aging, feeling “out of touch,” resenting others who are “adulting” better than you are, and just generally mourning the passage of time. He does his own light show during this song, pressing pedals and rotating a handheld light around his nearly-naked body, orchestrating his own vulnerable self-exposure. (There is also a whole lotta bisexual lighting and genderless hotness in this song, tbh.)

• The catchiest song from the whole special, in my opinion, is a Lizzo-esque hiphop/pop tune that begins thusly: “Wake up at 11:30, feeling like a bag of shit. All my clothes are dirty, so I’m smelling like a bag of shit.” It goes on to paint a perfect picture of not only depression (which many other artists have tackled) but the specific brand of dark, self-effacing humor that can emerge out of a bad depressive spell. It’s not the most thematically complex song, especially compared to some of the others in this special, but it’s the one I find myself singing the most, and laughing at so hard that my depressed body shakes. (I’m listening to it right now as I write this, and dancing in my chair.) There is also just something about seeing a person perform a slick, upbeat song with perfect lighting choreography… while wearing a white T-shirt and baggy shorts. You get me, Bo.

• Probably the objectively best song in the special is “Welcome to the Internet,” an absolutely chilling and devastating takedown of the internet and the ways it corrupts our minds. After I watched this for the first time with my spouse, they observed, “I think that’s the best thing that’s ever been written about the internet,” and I had to agree. That’s high praise, friends.

• A low-key folk song toward the end of the special grapples with existential dread, climate change anxiety, and dissociation in the internet age. It’s the prettiest Bo’s voice has ever sounded, and perhaps the most sensitive and sincere he’s ever been. “There it is again,” he croons sweetly, sadly, “that funny feeling.” He never names exactly what “that funny feeling” is, but by the end of the song, I always feel like, Yep. I know that feeling. I know it well.

Overall, I simply cannot recommend this special enough for anyone who struggles with mental health, their relationship to the internet, the weirdness of being a public figure, and/or mounting dread about the state of humanity. It’s a “comedy special,” sure. It’s also a fucking masterpiece that depicts, better than anything I’ve ever seen or heard, what it’s like to be a certain type of human in this terrifying time. It’s given me comfort, solace, and laughs – if just because it showed me that I’m not the only one feeling “that funny feeling.” Not at all.