#8: That Funny Feeling
Mr. Burnham still has me in his grips, I fear. Plus, we are finally getting the 10-minute version of All Too Well.
Much like Bo Burnham solemnly admits halfway through his latest comedy special “Inside,” this latest newsletter has taken much longer than I anticipated.
Last week, I found myself awake at 2:45 a.m., wired, refusing to concede to another week starting, and watching Bo Burnham’s “Inside” for a second time. After I first watched his latest special, I became obsessed with any piece of content (comedy or otherwise) Burnham had made. I watched his past Netflix specials, his early YouTube videos, interviews with him and Elsie Fisher talking about his fantastic movie “Eighth Grade,” “Promising Young Woman” and looped my way right back to “Inside.”
For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about or have never seen Bo Burnham’s comedy before, he’s a musical comedian, which means he performs all of his jokes as songs. His instrument of choice is the piano, but he also plays guitar, raps and autotunes his way through meticulously-timed shows with downright impressive special effects. He got his start making videos on YouTube that propelled him to viral fame when he was a teenager. By the time he was 25, he was headlining his own tours and had three studio albums under his belt. He had taken a hiatus from live comedy the past five years, but recently made his long-awaited return with his latest special, “Inside” that released on Netflix on May 30. And while technically marketed as stand-up comedy, the reality is closer to a dark, introspective satire of the internet and Bo’s own struggle with mental illness.
After two watches and many a YouTube hole, I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s brilliant. The best piece of performance art I’ve ever seen.
Bo wrote, shot, edited and produced the entire special over the course of last year in one room. But as much as “inside” may seem to be about a year stuck indoors for a select privileged class that could afford to, it also leans heavily on being “inside” one’s own head, a head that for Bo, is filled with depressive thoughts, anxiety, cynicism and an intense drive to perform. It’s jam-packed with social commentary on the psychological effects of social media and pointed comments about audience perceptions of artists.
There are already so many thoughtful, insightful critical reviews to stimulate your thinking around “inside,” if that’s what you’re after (this one by Rachel Syme of the New Yorker still holds as my favorite.) But today I want to use this space to talk about something a little different.
one of my favorite lines of the special comes from cartoon villain-esque “Welcome to the Internet” - apathy’s a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.
As ingenious and hilarious as this special is, (shoutout to the two interludes on Jeff Bezos that give me “Actual Cannibal Shia LeBeouf” vibes) it also left me confused, hollow and sad. It gave me that “funny feeling,” something that Burnham dedicates an entire song to in the latter half of the show.
It’s a personal favorite of mine (and not just cause it’s the only acoustic one), but because Burnham is able to so cleverly capture crippling self-awareness and existential dread all in a simultaneous moment. It’s Phoebe Bridgers’ “I Know the End” meets Father John Misty’s “Holy Shit.”
Against a silhouette of the woods flickering in the background, Bo takes center stage like a guy about to play “Wonderwall” at a campfire, but, instead, launches into a perfectly succinct list of 21st-century people, places and events that leave you feeling something that’s hard to articulate.
The surgeon generals' pop-up shop, Robert Iger's face
Discount Etsy agitprop, Bugles' take on race
Female Colonel Sanders, easy answers, civil war
The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door
On their own, these two lines are quite literally, meaningless. Pop culture and internet jargon mixed with news headlines. Strung together, it somehow makes sense. Relatable even.
Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul
A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall
There it is again
That funny feeling
It’s a feeling we’ve all experienced. Quietly comprehending the dark reality we are living in, yet soldiering on, pretending as if everything were fine. It extends to so much of what we were grieving for last year. Climate change, crumbling democracy, raging capitalism, coronavirus.
The pandemic is never once mentioned throughout the special, yet the loneliness of such a devastating, taxing and isolated year indoors shines through in nearly every song. As the show, and Bo, unravels, it’s clear that the inside of his mind can be just as devastating, taxing and isolating, and creating this “content” is his best chance at describing that. It’s why “That Funny Feeling” is to me, the most relatable song of them all. It successfully connects soulfully with everyone who went through the pain of 2020 and will live with the astonishment of normalizing this “funny feeling” for the rest of their lives.
I know that being meta has always been Bo’s niche. Satire about the relationship between artist and audience, how he thinks he’s viewed vs. how he views himself is not new material for him. But in “inside,” the stakes suddenly seemed higher. The burgeoning presence of social media is a huge motif. Controlled narratives are another. Parts of it were polished, carefully crafted and packaged to appease a generic audience that Netflix lured into watching the special (see “White Woman’s Instagram”) and in other parts, the line between performance and reality was blurred.
A few times, Bo talks directly to the camera, as we see reflected in the mirror, documenting his progress for us. In one scene, he lashes out after admitting on camera that the special has now taken over a year to produce and knocks over equipment out of rage. At another point, he breaks down in sobs.
In these moments, we are yanked out of the whimsical props and melodies of the previous songs and are witnessing what feels like something we shouldn’t be seeing. These scenes peel back the layers of all the fancy lights, equipment and cables that accumulate on the floor around him as time goes on. It’s wrenching, relatable and really hard to watch. Yet it’s also a calculated part of the performance. A conscious choice to add in. How many countless hours did he spend watching over those clips and confirming they belonged? It all seemed orchestrated, which I think was the point. Nothing is really what it seems. Question everything. art is dead.
Ok so the point of why this is worth your time. Yes, music comedy is Bo’s niche and he’s been a mainstream name for this corner of the performing world, but it just makes me think about how the boundaries of music and social commentary could be pushed more. Of course, musical theater has been experimenting with comedy for much longer than Netflix has been around. And there have been great American comedians such as Tom Lehrer and Steve Martin to influence the Bo Burnham generation with political analysis and shrewd commentary. But as a vehicle for satire, music and comedy is such a powerful tool for expression, and standup, concerts, studio albums are all just waiting to be revamped and re-explored. There is clearly an appetite for it as long as it’s as well-executed as we’ve seen in “inside,” and I’m curious to see how this inspires the next generation to take it, and run with it.
Rec Corner
bits and bops from the archive or around the internet
its official. Red (Taylor’s Version) is the next re-recorded studio album we are getting and this time she’s back with THIRTY (that’s three-oh) songs, including the mythical 10-minute explicit version of All Too Well.
The Lorde hath risen and she has officially declared hot girl summer
other stuff in rotation:
that’s it for this week! thanks for coming along. as always, feel free to reply to this email if you have any burning thoughts on this week’s topic or just wanna say hi! if you stumbled upon this week’s newsletter and want to stick around, you can sign up below.