Using cinematic tools other comics overlook, the star (who is also the director, editor and cameraman) trains a glaring spotlight on internet life mid-pandemic.
One of the most encouraging developments in comedy over the past decade has been the growing directorial ambition of stand-up specials. It’s folly to duplicate the feel of a live set, so why not fully adjust to the screen and try to make something as visually ambitious as a feature? At the forefront of this shift has been Bo Burnham, one of YouTube’s earliest stars, who went on to make his own innovative specials with satirical songs backed by theatrical lighting and disembodied voices. In recent years, he has begun directing other comics’ specials, staging stand-up sets by Chris Rock and Jerrod Carmichael with his signature extreme close-ups. His virtuosic new special, “Inside” (on Netflix), pushes this trend further, so far that it feels as if he has created something entirely new and unlikely, both sweepingly cinematic and claustrophobically intimate, a Zeitgeist-chasing musical comedy made alone to an audience of no one. It’s a feat, the work of a gifted experimentalist whose craft has caught up to his talent. And while it’s an ominous portrait of the isolation of the pandemic, there’s hope in its existence: Written, designed and shot by Burnham over the last year inside a single room, it illustrates that there’s no greater inspiration than limitations. On the simplest level, “Inside” is the story of a comic struggling to make a funny show during quarantine and gradually losing his mind. Burnham says he had quit live comedy several years ago because of panic attacks and returned in January 2020 before, as he puts it in typical perverse irony, “the funniest thing happened.” The reason he started making this special, he explains in the show, is to distract himself from shooting himself in the head, the first of several mentions of suicide (including one in which he tells viewers to “just don’t”). With menacing horror movie sound effects and hectic, dreamy camerawork, what becomes clear is Burnham’s title has a double meaning: referring to being inside not just a room, but also his head. There’s always been a tension in his comedy between an ironic, smarty-pants cleverness and an often melodramatic point of view. Underneath the Steve Martin-like formal trickery has always beaten the heaving heart of a flamboyantly dramatic theater kid.
