Bo Burnham: Inside

This special will probably go down as the piece of media that best captured the quarantine era but together with "Eighth Grade" it also shows how Burnham is perhaps the first "big time" creator who can make truly "online" art. He captures life on the Internet like no one else. The technical skill and creative filmmaking at display here makes me giddy at the thought of seeing what this man can do moving forward. If 2020s don't become the decade of Burnham, I will be very disappointed.

OK I have to admit that I turned it off after twenty minutes, but I wasn't laughing and the sock puppet was the final straw, really: too much icky "self-aware" irony for me. It's incredible to me how people feel the need to make a display of the fact that they know how much of a "problem" it is that they are a "white man". Comedians making such a display is even more disconcerting. I'd never seen anything by this performer before (and in fact had never heard of him). Maybe it got better later.

Consider this more of a movie than previous outings. It has the usual stuff that Bo is known for, but the intimacy and directorial efforts of this one man show is impressive. It feels cinematic, it feels like an exploration of depression and solitude in a COVID world, presented as a mixture of video essay, comedy special and movie. Lots of lil details. Some of the jokes don't work, but generally it's entertaining with some great songs and potent moments (such as the ending). Drags sometimes.

Early in his career, it was easy to hate Bo, only because it was annoying to see someone young already so talented and funny. Okay, maybe that was a me thing. But I have really come around to him, and this is a masterpiece. This captures the past year so perfectly.

I never felt more understood by a piece of art.

It's not especially funny, at least not in a laugh-out-loud sort of way, but it's super thought-provoking and cinematic. Upsetting in some ways too. A unique pandemic-inspired experience.

You WILL have all of these songs simultaneously stuck in your head the following day.

Hit me personally. Stylistically random at first but a theme begins to emerge: if the digital tools we use to communicate are the means of production, then we're a free labor force, and we're getting fucking tired. Millennials are always getting called out for being sensitive, but we're also the first generation Always On, where what's inside is always exposed, and what is identity when you're simultaneously voyeur and seen and product and production and Jeffrey Bezos and

It's always special when you see an artist create their magnum opus. I'd hate to say that Bo can't make something greater than this through the rest of his career, but when you watch an artist fully commit themselves to an idea, and show us everything they have, it's hard not to feel like this is it. This will be the one he chases his whole career. If I met Bo in real life I would thank him for making this feature.

It doesn’t make any sense that this works so well. It wouldn’t work at all in any other year. It’s such a mess. But as a document of 2020, the weirdest, loneliest, and most raw year, it’s near-perfect. Has Bo’s funniest songs to date, and the depressing/introspective material, which I always felt were low points of the previous specials, are genuinely affecting and powerful. Kind of a masterpiece.