In Which I Declare War On Beloved Entertainer Bo Burnham

'Inside' has aged in a very strange way

First off: if you haven’t seen the award-winning 2021 Bo Burnham Netflix special Inside, you absolutely should watch that instead of reading this or whatever other bullshit I put out this month. It is a hilarious yet deeply personal piece of musical comedy that will stay with you for months after, mainly because you’ll still have several of its songs stuck in your head. The 87-minute special is universally considered to be a defining work of the era and I wholeheartedly agree. Just, not in a good way.

Before we continue: if you don’t have the new book I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, they’re doing a 50% off sale on the hardcover as of this writing.

1. Before things turn negative, please know that Bo Burnham is a treasure

If you’re unfamiliar with Robert “Bo” Burnham, he’s a comedian/actor/singer/songwriter/musician/producer/director/poet who is beloved by the public and critics alike. He is better than I am at absolutely every possible thing. If an asteroid was heading for earth and there were only two seats left in the Entertainers section of the evacuation ship, they would leave me behind and give Bo the extra seat in case he wanted to stretch out.

Burnham catapulted to fame at age 16 as one of the very first viral YouTubers in 2006. He immediately got a record deal and appeared in a Comedy Central special before he was even a legal adult. By 18, he was performing his one-man show all over the world and signed a deal to write and star in a musical produced by Judd Apatow (that didn’t wind up getting made). By 20, he’d released an hour-long standup/music special on cable and an album of its songs topped the charts. His success continued uninterrupted until, at age 25, he released his third critically acclaimed special/album and, while touring in support of it, began having panic attacks on stage.

He decided to stop performing live and, needing something to fill the time, went ahead and wrote, produced and directed a critically-acclaimed film (Eighth Grade, which premiered at Sundance, won multiple awards, and is at 99% on RT) then decided to try his hand at serious acting and co-starred in Promising Young Woman, which would then be nominated for Best Fucking Picture at the Academy Awards. At one point, he was cast to play Larry Bird in an HBO series about the 1980s NBA, but had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts (that is not a joke). Having completed those minor side quests, Burnham decided to lock in and create an era-defining masterpiece.

When the Covid lockdowns hit in early 2020, Burnham began filming the new special entirely in a single cramped room, without a crew or audience or anyone else—a true one-man show. Over the next year, it would chronicle his struggles with anxiety, depression and the specific kind of brain-poisoning that results from living a life online, cultivating a galaxy of parasocial relationships on one screen while compulsively monitoring the collapse of civilization on another.

Once finished, he sold Inside to Netflix for $3.9 million. Critics were awed; the special won a Grammy, three Emmys and a Peabody award. The accompanying album charted in a dozen countries, the performance of the song Welcome to the Internet was uploaded to YouTube where, as of this writing, it has been streamed 150 million times.

Inside perfectly captured a moment in the culture in a way that few pieces of media ever have or could. I don’t know that there’s another performer in the world capable of pulling this off with the same level of craftsmanship. Only a real piece of shit would have a problem with it.

2. Here’s why I have a problem with it

I’m being a bit coy here. There was a bit of a backlash to the special, largely from people who were kind of being dicks about it. The issue is that a good chunk of Inside is about the making of Inside, chronicling the year Burnham spent isolated in a tiny, sparsely-furnished room…

…his mental health deteriorating as the work descended into a tortuous slog (time is marked by his hair and beard growing unchecked until he looks like a newly-rescued castaway).

There is an interlude in which he talks about how the special has become an excuse to remain in seclusion long after all lockdowns had been lifted, and another about the existential crisis of turning 30, alone, in this depressing space full of cables and recording equipment. There’s a song about how his comedy does nothing to help the world and that, ultimately, this is all being done for selfish reasons, to feed the narcissism cultivated by a life lived for engagement. He jokes that he’s forced to resort to sexting for intimacy but is terrible at it, then imagines himself as a video game protagonist that does nothing but sleep and cry alone in his bedroom.

The complaint from the (few) naysayers was that, well, none of this was real and it was clear some fans were taking it at face value. The dismal, cluttered space in which Burnham filmed the special was actually the guest house in the backyard of his $3 million home in an upscale LA neighborhood . . . where he was living with his long-term girlfriend at the time. He could have included scenes with her, or his dog, or of the bedroom where he actually slept each night, or of him leaving his house to do press events with fellow celebrities, but pointedly chose not to. The isolation was a performance, the runaway hair and beard a costume choice to fit the aesthetic (half way through production of Inside, he was appearing clean-shaven in public to do promo for Promising Young Woman and presumably had to wait for the whiskers to grow back to continue filming).

In my view, this is all totally fine—that’s his job, he’s a performer, and achieving the desired effect required blurring the line with reality. You’ve surely seen singers on stage get choked up trying to get through a song, as if it the lyrics are just too raw for them—do you really think they’re still that affected by the 5,000th performance of a tune about a breakup that happened ten years and twelve relationships ago? Moments when performers “break” are almost always part of the act, a mask under a mask.

But this does imply that when Burnham filmed himself having an emotional meltdown near the end of Inside, throwing gear around the room until he breaks down into sobs, that there’s a real good chance it required multiple takes. Here’s the final shot of that section:

As a director who knows what he’s doing, Burnham was acutely aware of exactly how that shot was framed, how the shadows fall dramatically across his face, how his shaggy bangs dangle in just the right way while he fights back tears of frustration and despair. I personally believe that he sketched out the special in advance and decided that “slowly deteriorating in isolation” was going to be the framing device. But it’s not a lie or a fraud—it’s a performer giving us exactly what we demand from him.

And what we demand, is misery.

That, kids, is what we’re here to talk about today.

3. The champion of a fierce competition to see who can feel the most and worst

If we pull back a bit, we’ll see that Inside is what the kids in my day would call a “flex.” Burnham didn’t have to film an entire feature-length special entirely on his own—he chose to. He wrote all the songs and jokes, did all the singing (live), played all the instruments, created all the costumes and sets and props, set up the cameras and mics and lights and laboriously spent endless hours hunched over a laptop mixing and editing. This solo effort won awards over productions with nine-figure budgets and armies of professional staff.

The man was, unquestionably, showing off, demonstrating that he could compose and play music in pretty much any genre, from bouncy show tunes to folk ballads to 80s synth pop. The punchlines are hilarious and thought-provoking, every emotion either heartfelt or performed with Oscar-worthy sincerity. A lot of messages get delivered across Inside’s 1.5-hour runtime but the first and most urgent message of this (or any) performance is, look at what I can do, motherfuckers.

I don’t think I’m being uncharitable in framing it this way, because it in no way undermines the point Inside is trying to make. If anything, it enhances it; Burnham is living proof that mental illness doesn’t necessarily care about your material circumstances.

I think Burnham would readily agree that he is one of the most privileged humans in the history of the species. Others may have inherited wealth, but Burnham was born with extraordinary talent, in a supportive environment, in the exact right time and place in history to take advantage (his abilities developed just at the moment YouTube opened a pathway for anyone to get famous from their bedroom). He did all of this in what is objectively the wealthiest, safest and most comfortable civilization that has ever existed.

Inside was the work of a man with millions of dollars and total creative freedom and flexibility over his own schedule and universal critical acclaim and respect from peers and a beautiful, talented girlfriend and a beautiful home in a beautiful neighborhood with beautiful weather year-round and he is conventionally handsome and 6’5”. This man’s reality far exceeds the wildest dreams of 8 billion other humans and he is still so miserable that he sometimes can barely get out of bed.

That is the point; his anguish is not due to his circumstances but in how he’s wired, tortured by a void that seemingly no amount of achievement or public adoration can fill. The track that broke out as a streaming hit, the arena singalong ballad All Eyes on Me, conveys it wonderfully. Burnham pumps in fake crowd noise under lyrics that are just a series of nonsense commands to the audience (alternating between “all eyes on me” and “heads down now”) until he finally flies into a rage at their inability to follow instructions.

Here is the deranged struggle of someone who keeps getting exactly what he wants and still feels nothing. And Inside makes it clear Burnham believes this disease is an epidemic, that easy access to an audience creates that same gnawing, insatiable hunger in tens of millions of kids who won’t have his charmed life.

But there is that other layer that Burnham never acknowledges and may not even be aware of, which is that publicly detailing the contours of his illness is, paradoxically, one of the symptoms of that illness. And that, in my opinion, is the real epidemic of the modern age.

Somewhere, right now, a teenage girl just recorded herself crying for a TikTok video but, when she went to edit it, realized her mic wasn’t plugged in and so now she’s making herself cry a second time to get another take. Next door is some dude with a great job, healthy body, a loving partner and lots of friends who, after a long day of fairly easy work and an evening watching Netflix, will tweet, “Another wretched day enduring the horrors, my thoughts are with all of you who know that just surviving this absolute hellscape is an accomplishment all its own.”

They all exist within an online subculture in which earnest attempts at positive sincerity and wellness are to be mocked as vapid (as they are in Burnham’s “White Woman’s Instagram”). The practice of not just broadcasting your lowest moments, but intentionally playing up the angst for maximum engagement has to be the world’s worst possible coping mechanism, a form of self-harm with an added layer of performance anxiety (I’m not sure science even has a word for the gut-punch sensation of recording your sobs of despair, only to see the post get zero likes and a single comment from a spambot).

But they do it because that subculture says this is what a good person does, they demonstrate how they constantly feel the terrible weight of the world on their shoulders. That means the despair portrayed in Inside is also a flex, Burnham proving that his misery is bigger, deeper and more watchable than yours. And I think this leaves a giant, gaping blind spot in his worldview.

4. “The End of the World” is always a coping mechanism

The titular feeling in Burnham’s “That Funny Feeling” is a sense of impending doom, that the stream of stimulus flying across your screens is simultaneously relaying and obscuring a single narrative, that society is collapsing and “They” are just trying to distract you:

The live-action Lion King, the Pepsi Halftime Show

Twenty-thousand years of this, seven more to go

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

Likewise, in “All Eyes on Me,” Burnham says, “You say the whole world's ending, honey, it already did.” Inside presents the impending apocalypse as a given and I find it fascinating if Burnham genuinely doesn’t see what’s going on here. He clearly understands his depression and anxiety are irrational responses to a life lived almost entirely free of danger or deprivation, yet does not seem to understand that his apocalypse fixation is simply a scaled-up version of that same irrational response.

You can argue with me about the impending dangers of climate change or AI or world war, but the apocalypse Burnham references is, objectively, pure superstition. The outro of “That Funny Feeling” is the light and bouncy reassurance, “it’ll be over soon, you wait, ba-da-da, ba-da-da.”

He sees the End of the World the way religious zealots see it, as a sudden relief from all earthly suffering. They want the world replaced by a paradise, he longs for a peaceful oblivion, but it all comes from the same impulse, a selfish desperation to escape your anxieties at all costs.

Worsening climate disaster (or almost any other “collapse” scenario) would mean turmoil, shortages and upheaval in the power structures but life would continue, there will still be jobs and bills and marriages and birthdays and celebrities. Hell, Bo Burnham would probably be able to keep working as a performer, there would still be demand. Wistfully waiting for the world to “end” like it’s a bad movie is just another form of suicidal ideation, a safer version that won’t cause your friends to stage an intervention.

Bo, and millions of others like him, need the apocalypse to keep their worldview intact, because they have to resolve the contradiction between “This system has provided me with an objectively comfortable life” and “I’m miserable.” Belief in the End Times lets them turn this bug into a feature: “Considering the dire state of the world, it would actually be selfish to enjoy what I have!”

5. Its possible this is at least partially my fault

Inside is not overly political, in the sense that it contains the minimum required amount of politics for a performer like Burnham to include in a 2020-era work, which is still quite a bit. The politics come in the form of scattered references that probably sound strange or random to anyone who hasn’t spent the last several years refreshing certain apps.

I have repeatedly referenced Burnham’s “subculture” and future historians will have a name for the college-educated, extremely-online, left-leaning influencers that bubbled up on the internet starting around 2012 or so. It’s a group that held the same policy positions as about half of the country (abortion should be legal, medical emergencies shouldn’t be financially ruinous, climate change will require government intervention) but with an added a layer of off-putting, trollish quirks optimized to juice Twitter engagement.

This included a tendency to exaggerate every single negative event or trend in the world to DEFCON-1, and to fly into a shrieking rage if anyone suggested maybe that’s not the optimal way to raise awareness. They constantly joked(?) about how they’re longing for either suicide or an apocalypse…

…and implied that every single headline, whether about a celebrity breakup or a natural disaster, was evidence the End was near. They insisted that everything was better in the past but has steadily gotten worse due to capitalism, and thus our misery won’t end until that system is violently overthrown. They always portrayed themselves as in poor mental health but said it was simply a rational response to modern life (again, due to capitalism). In general, everything about the subculture was designed to repel the normies on both side of the aisle, asserting that everything loved by Middle America (religion, cops, the military, nice cars, big houses, hamburgers) is, if you think about it, a form of literal genocide.

It sounds psychotic when I type it all out like that, but this was politics when viewed through the funhouse mirror of rage-based engagement algorithms and years of social media infighting (everything could be justified under the guise that the right-wing version of this faction was much, much worse). But one side-effect was that, for a while, every comedian who wasn’t explicitly conservative was making the same jokes.

Thus, Inside gives us the relentlessly hard-working, business-owning millionaire explaining why capitalism is cruel and unnatural. You get the references to the past being a better, more innocent place (including the bizarre assertion that 1999-era internet was just G-rated blogs and chatrooms—I guess Bo’s parents didn’t let him browse rotten.com). You get Logan Paul referenced as a harbinger of the apocalypse alongside rising sea levels. And, above all, you get that drumbeat of miserable helplessness, the implication that every bad thing in your life is due to factors beyond your control: mental illness, capitalism, or mental illness caused by capitalism.

I’m intimately familiar with this particular subculture because I spent a decade as a somewhat prominent member. Some of my angriest hate mail insists that, in my position at Cracked, I was even one of its architects, though I feel like we were mostly just along for the ride.* And this brings us to why I’m laboriously deconstructing this special four years after the fact, at a moment when headlines are 24/7 Trump/Musk outrage:

Politics is always just a backlash to a backlash and when young men surged to the right in 2024, you only needed about five minutes on social media to realize the online left’s pitch to those men had become absolute dogshit. Regardless of what any actual candidate was saying, what young men heard/perceived was:

“Come join the Left and be miserable! Listen to us talk endlessly about how awful your demographic is and how you should keep your mouth shut unless it’s to apologize! Abandon any hope for the future, as you either need to become poorer to protect the environment, or endure the horrors of climate disaster! Relentlessly police your own language according to rules that change hourly and be prepared to be totally ejected from your personal and professional network the second anyone even accuses you of stepping out of line! If you criticize any aspect of the above, that means you’re a literal Nazi! And don’t worry about the crushing malaise, that’s just a sign that you’re a Good Person Who Cares!”

This subculture’s influence hit its apex in 2020 and entered its death throes with the 2024 election and the slow degradation of the platform previously known as Twitter. I think Inside, in ways both intentional and unintentional, perfectly demonstrated why.

“Here I am,” says the charismatic, empathetic male on the screen, “someone who has achieved everything our side says is good in life. I have all the correct opinions and praise from all the right people. I have acquired my wealth ethically. I have demonstrated empathic awareness of others’ suffering and an unflinching perception of my own shortcomings and culpability in the world’s injustices. And it fucking sucks so much that I literally am rooting for the world to end just to make it stop.”

I’m obviously not implying that this special put Trump back in office, I’m saying that Inside lives on as a beautifully-crafted expression of how not to build a popular, durable Resistance. The lesson should be that any movement devoid of hope will quickly be devoid of members. Humans do not want to feel helpless or worthless or weak. They want role models who are strong and capable and enjoy being who they are. They don’t just want endless validation and valorization of their poor mental health, they want to be fucking cured.

In other words, they want at least a fighting chance at personal happiness and if your movement can’t offer it to them, then your movement will die and no one will miss it.

The new novel that touches on all these subjects is called I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, it’s available right here in all formats.

*Side note: I’ve been asked repeatedly if Inside influenced that book but the parallel lies in the fact that these are both projects born from similar turmoil. Oddly enough, Burnham and I both made huge career decisions in January of 2020 (he decided to return to public performance, I left the job at Cracked to become a full-time novelist). Burnham’s track “That Funny Feeling” references “derealization”, the sense of detachment from the physical world that comes from viewing it through a screen. In my book, a character calls the resulting nihilistic isolation the “Black Box of Doom.”