Bo Burnham: Inside
Bo Burnham: Inside is a 2021 musical special written, directed, filmed, edited, and performed by American comedian Bo Burnham. Created alone by Burnham in the guest house of his Los Angeles home during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was released on Netflix on May 30, 2021. Featuring a variety of songs and sketches about his day-to-day life indoors, it depicts Burnham's deteriorating mental health, explores themes of performativity and his relationship to the Internet and the audience it helped him reach, and addresses topics such as climate change and social movements. Other segments discuss online activities such as FaceTiming one's mother, posting on Instagram, sexting, and livestreaming video games.
Inside follows Burnham's previous stand-up comedy special Make Happy, which led him to quit performing as he began to experience panic attacks onstage during that special's tour. An album of songs from the special, Inside , was released digitally on June 10, 2021. On the first anniversary of the special's release, Burnham uploaded The Inside Outtakes, an hour-long YouTube video of outtakes, unused songs, behind-the-scenes footage, and alternate takes from the special. A deluxe album including these outtakes, Inside , was released on June 3, 2022.
The special was widely praised, particularly for its music, direction, cinematography, editing, and presentation of life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Critics found that the special incorporates a variety of art forms including music, stand-up comedy bits, and meta-commentary, describing it as some combination of comedy, drama, documentary, and theater. For Inside, Burnham received a Peabody Award, Emmy Awards for Outstanding Directing for a Variety Special, Outstanding Music Direction, and Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special, and the Grammy Award for Best Song Written for Visual Media for "All Eyes On Me".
Background
is an American musical comedian who rose to fame by posting videos on YouTube from 2006 onwards. After these songs were adapted into his debut self-titled album, he performed three stand-up tours, the first two of which were released as albums and the last two as recorded performances: Words Words Words, what., and Make Happy. During the tour for Make Happy, Burnham began to have panic attacks onstage. In the intervening years, he wrote and directed Eighth Grade and starred in Promising Young Woman.Synopsis
Burnham enters the small, spare room he left at the end of his last special, Make Happy. All subsequent events are depicted in the single room, with his hair and beard growing throughout. In the song "Content", he apologises for his hiatus and clarifies that he is unable to leave his home. This is followed by "Comedy", where an ethereal voice commands Burham that the dire state of the world can only be saved by a white male comedian. Addressing the viewer, he apologises for the incongruent and fast-paced nature of the special, and expresses the intent to keep himself busy while making the viewer happy.After "FaceTime with My Mom ", he addresses the "kids" watching in a song about nature, but a sock puppet character begins singing about historical genocide and worker exploitation—this makes up "How the World Works". A parody of a brand consultant is succeeded by "White Woman's Instagram", mocking Instagram tropes. The brief song "Unpaid Intern" is immediately followed by a mock reaction video, but the film continues playing in the superimposed video, making Burnham react to a loop of his own commentary. This is followed by "Bezos I", disingenuously praising Jeff Bezos, "Sexting", and a parody of a YouTuber's "thank you" video while holding a knife. The song "Look Who's Inside Again", in the third-person, mocks an individual who was looking for an excuse to isolate themselves and got what they wanted. He apologises for problematic behavior from the past that he regrets in "Problematic".
He speaks to the viewer minutes before his 30th birthday, revealing that he had hoped to finish the special before this date. This is followed by "30", ending with an abrupt admission that he will commit suicide when he is 40. In the immediate next scene, he urges the viewer not to kill themselves. Halfway through this anti-suicide talk, the scene cuts to this footage being projected onto a future Burnham, who watches disinterestedly. Burnham in the talk then begins to admit he would die temporarily if he could.
In an intermission, Burnham cleans the camera. He rhetorically asks the viewer what they think of the special in "Don't Wanna Know". Parodying a video game streamer, he provides commentary on a game that consists of himself crying in his room. This is followed by descriptions of his mental health in the ironically upbeat "Shit" and "All Time Low". In "Welcome to the Internet", he acts as a malign tour guide of the Internet, offering to the viewer diverse types of content, ranging from upbeat to morbid, to engage with endlessly. After "Bezos II", incongruous images of modern society are listed in "That Funny Feeling". He attempts to tell the viewer that he has been working on the special for a year, but gets overwhelmed and strikes his equipment before breaking down in tears. In "All Eyes On Me", Burnham sings for a pre-recorded track of an audience: he reveals that he stepped away from live comedy five years prior because he was suffering panic attacks onstage; his mental health had improved enough by January 2020 for him to consider returning before "the funniest thing happened". The song instructs the audience to get up; hold their hands up; and pray for him. Angry with the viewer, he picks up the camera and dances with it before dropping it on the ground.
A worn-out Burnham says that he is "done". In "Goodbye", he vows to never go outside again; footage of Burham singing with both a cropped and long beard and hair is played simultaneously. A montage shows him setting up the room for various scenes in the special, and he incorporates lyrics from previous songs. The final shot of the song shows him caught in a spotlight naked. After the song, Burnham is shown finally leaving the room, only to be locked out as an unseen audience applauds and then laughs at him for attempting to get back inside. Back in the room, he watches footage of this on his projector and begins to smile. The song "Any Day Now" plays over the end credits, consisting of a stripped-down melody and the repeated lyrics "it'll stop any day now".
Production
Inside was filmed in the guest house of the Los Angeles home Burnham shared with his long-time girlfriend, filmmaker Lorene Scafaria, before they moved to a different property a few months after the release of the special; the guest house was also used for filming the end of Make Happy. A Zillow listing later revealed that the property is the same one that was used to film A Nightmare on Elm Street. Burnham said that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he worked on the show alone without a crew or audience. The outtakes for the special say that footage was captured between March 2020 and May 2021. A Netflix executive—Robbie Praw—said that Burnham contacted him "fairly early in the pandemic" about Inside, and sent him 20 minutes of footage towards the end of 2020.According to a leak supplied to Bloomberg News in October 2021, Netflix paid $3.9million for Inside, and assigned it an internal "efficiency" value of 2.8, against a baseline score of 1 for content that breaks even; the Netflix spokesperson who provided the statistics for Inside and several other programs on the streaming service was later fired for releasing confidential and "commercially sensitive information".
Release
Burnham announced Inside on April 28, 2021, along with a small trailer that showed a clean-cut Burnham during the ending of Make Happy, which transitioned into a scene from Inside that featured his long-haired and bearded look. He also posted on both Twitter and Instagram. On May 21, he announced that Inside was to be released on May 30. The special was released without a press kit or a collection of stills. It was shown in select theaters in the United States between July 22 and July 25, 2021, with certain theaters adding showings after the initial weekend had passed.''Inside (The Songs)''
As announced on June 8, 2021, music from Inside was released as Inside on June 10 on music streaming platforms through Republic Records. Inside reached the top ten in the United States, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom. It was the best-selling American comedy album of the year and was certified Gold in the United States. Additionally, a number of individual songs from the special charted. "All Eyes On Me" became the first comedy song to enter the Billboard Global 200 charts.''The Inside Outtakes''
On May 30, 2022, Burnham marked the first anniversary of the special by premiering the hour-long The Inside Outtakes via YouTube. He announced that he would be posting the video one hour beforehand. The video was edited by Burnham from April to May 2022. The outtakes were also released on Netflix on August 11, 2022.The Inside Outtakes shows behind-the-scenes takes, alternate versions of each song and scene in Inside, and insight into the production process. It features 13 new songs, including alternate versions of "All Eyes On Me" and "Look Who's Inside Again", and short songs "Bezos III"; "Bezos IV"; and "Spider". "The Future" contrasts Burnham's desires to have a daughter and effectively meditate with his unhappy reality. "Five Years" celebrates a relationship anniversary, and has been considered to be both a parody of Drake's songs and a reference to Burnham's relationship with Lorene Scafaria. "Biden" is about his reluctance to vote for Joe Biden in the 2020 United States presidential election. Auto-Tune-heavy "This Isn't a Joke" deviates to the topic of Burnham's birth scar. "The Chicken" dramatizes the scenario of the question "why did the chicken cross the road?" It also includes other unused material, such as a podcast satirizing The Joe Rogan Experience and a parody of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The video itself references YouTube's advertisement system, including a countdown to adverts, Inside-styled web banners, and fake video recommendations.
Some of the outtakes evoke songs or themes included in the final special—for instance, Mitchell Clark of The Verge compared "The Future" to "Problematic" due to the songs sharing a similar melody, with both songs sharing themes of depression and being stuck inside. Brian Logan of The Guardian reviewed that though some outtakes were only for fans of Inside, "some of the material sparkles as brightly as the best of the original", including the podcast, "Five Years" and "Chicken". The Big Issues Evie Breese, though less fond of "Chicken", praised the songs in the outtakes for their "mental claustrophobia", which continues to be relevant after the end of lockdowns.
The Daily Beast Matt Wilstein praised that the podcast scene felt "more relevant in 2022", with its satire of podcasters like Joe Rogan who talk "about censorship while broadcasting to tens of millions of listeners every day", and ironic moments like an advert for "Manstuff's Dick Spray" appearing when the podcaster calls himself a "philosopher". Similarly, The Mary Sues Vivian Kane praised that the scene showed that anti-"woke" or anti-"cancel culture" comedians use "thinly or not-at-all veiled bigotry" while "demanding reverence". Kane wrote that "the best takedown possible is just essentially repeating a bigot's own words and general ethos verbatim".
Following the special, a line of merchandise themed around the MCU parody sketch was released. The website's homepage and product descriptions are satirical, including such passages as "All you need to do is what we are calling 'BUY' this what we are calling 'WEARABLE CONTENT' with what we are calling 'YOUR MONEY.'"