Bo Burnham’s “Inside”
One of the leading auteurs of the mediated mind—a brain broken into shards by a steady stream of social media, open tabs, and reality television—the comedian Bo Burnham captures, with frenzied and dexterous clarity, the unmoored, wired, euphoric, listless feeling of being very online during the pandemic. The ninety-minute Netflix special, which Burnham wrote and directed, is not a traditional comedy special but, rather, a virtuosic one-man musical extravaganza, and also an experimental film about cracking up via Wi-Fi while trying to make said extravaganza. Burnham never explicitly mentions the pandemic, a purposeful omission that allows the show’s title to take on multiple meanings. He leaps among visual and musical references with swaggering fluency, and, as the special goes on, it gets sadder and stranger. During filming, he…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 28, 2021