Comedy movies tend to get a bad rap compared to other genres. You don’t see comedies scooping up Best Picture Oscars very often, don’t see their lead actors and actresses getting nominated. Comedies are subjective. What one person finds funny, the next might find stupid (even though laughter is the most universal form of communication), and the popularity of comedies – the ability to craft a film or perform within one to bring an abundance of joy to people – tends to be held against them in that snobbish it’s-just-appealing-to-the-lowest-common-denominator kinda way.

All of which I say to now say this: Bo Burnham’s Inside needs to go straight into the Criterion collection. Not only is it a comedy but it’s billed as a hybrid stand-up special which makes that idea even wilder but, mate, make no mistake about it. Inside is genuinely astounding in its creative vision, gorgeous in its homemade light-show cinematography, as well as being absolutely hilarious and insanely catchy, and it deserves to stand alongside any prestige new release drama you might happen upon this year. Bo’s not playing around here. This thing is the real deal.

Inside exists on three levels. On the first level, it’s a collection of clever and funny song performances about the internet and the internet age. There’s one about facetiming with mum. There’s one about sexting. There’s one about bland Instagram influencers. There are a couple about social justice, keeping a pretty self-aware tone. There’s one about the overwhelming ‘content’ arms race that is the world wide web at the dawn of the 2020s. There’s even a bloodthirsty Jeffrey Bezos ode. That’s the surface level here as we effectively have a collection of music videos strung together into a movie length.

Then on the second level we have a meta-textual descent into hell as Burnham writes, performs, produces, films, and edits the entire special together by himself during lockdown and slowly loses his mind along the way. The special becomes his white whale. It’s a quest of frantic determination but one which eventually becomes more trouble than it’s worth as the one-man-band abandons all hope. This is Burnham’s return to comedy after retiring from stand-up a few years back due to anxiety and depression which are grievous angels that come to seek their revenge during Inside. There are scenes where Burnham speaks candidly to the camera about his struggles. There are scenes where he simply balls his eyes out in pain. Songs become increasingly cynical and defeatist. The heaviness comes down hard.

Which brings us to the third level because a lot of viewers seem to have gotten off the elevator at level two without continuing onwards. Level Three goes beyond the on-screen imagery. Level Three is a profound creative endeavour where we stop and take notice of exactly how much work goes into something like this. Burnham is credited in every category in the credits. This is the ultimate version of the dude who takes over the group project.

And it’s hard to even express how much work that takes, nothing that you see on the screen comes from anywhere other than the mind of Bo Burnham. Editing all this would have taken months, let alone the process of writing and filming. It’s entirely deliberate... and mistaking the on-screen suicidal ideations of a tortured artist for the man (metaphorically) behind the camera’s real life feelings is kinda silly. Nothing that you see is there by accident, everything has been chosen. If he was truly as depressed as he expresses in the film then there’s just no way he’d have had the energy to keep making this thing. Come on now.

Still, it’s a powerful and realistic depiction of a fertile mind in turmoil. It’s a relatable vision of the toll that isolation can take on a person. It’s a profound examination of the way that an artist can make themselves suffer for their art. The creative pursuit. A battle between mind and soul. Hermann Hesse would absolutely dig it... as long as somebody left him alone with a macbook for a few weeks to accustomise himself with the internet before his screening.

Because, mate, this thing is all about the internet. Remember that Bo Burnham is a bloke who came up as a teenage musical comic in the early days of YouTube. An accidental trail blazer who has lived in real time the evolution of the world wide web as this exciting digital space where people could find communities of like-minded friends without the hassle of physical geography... to a breeding place for late-stage capitalist extravagance, full of violence and distraction and broken promises about privacy. Welcome To The Internet is a genius bit of frantic songcraft giving a vaudeville, carnivalesque theme to overwhelming, all-consuming beast that is The Internet Circa Now.

A little bit of everything, all of the time. Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime.

It’s the attention economy, this parasitic scrap for society’s focus at the expense of society itself. Clickbait and misinformation. The idealistic yarns of those earlier days still exist but the good stuff is so drowned out by this obnoxious shouting match for the focus of as many people as possible all at once in a million directions, the vastness of cyberspace quickly becoming claustrophobic. The rule goes that if you can thing of it then there’s a porno for it. That rule applies to everything online:

See a man beheaded/Get offended, see a shrink/Show us pictures of your children/Tell us every thought you think/Start a rumour, buy a broom/Or send a death threat to a boomer/Or DM a girl and groom her/Do a Zoom or find a tumour/And here's a healthy breakfast option/You should kill your mom/Here's why women never fuck you/Here's how you can build a bomb/Which Power Ranger are you?/Take this quirky quiz/Obama sent the immigrants to vaccinate your kids

You know, just like for example.

And how does a person react to all that? One extreme or the other of course. Either fiery intensity or a dose of that tragic apathy, which is where That Funny Feeling comes in. By this point in the show ol’ mate Bo is in tatters but he pulls himself together for a rare acoustic guitar jam (pretty much everything else is keyboard based – though there’s an impressive range of musical styles on offer) which honestly might be the finest few minutes of the entire film. A gentle ditty in which he basically just lists stuff without a response or reaction up until the chorus: There is is again, that funny feeling.

What funny feeling? That’s not for articulation. It’s just that funny one, which you feel when you reach the stage when nothing is surprising any more, no matter how awful (though BB does drop a hint about ‘derealization’ in the tune). It all just blends together in this meaningless swirl of things we’re supposed to have ideas about. Things that everybody else is dropping reckons about in the echo chambers. But, like, after a million cycles of this... what is really the point? Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul/A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall.

But that’s the consumer’s reaction. How does the content creator navigate this poisonous atmosphere? By smiling for the camera no matter what. All this content is disposable and nobody wants to see your pain and suffering. You stumble once and a hundred new jerries take your place in the queue. It’s a mindless procession. Boost that low end, drop the lights, get those fuckin’ hands up.

Man, even just that one clip really makes your jaw drop at what he’s achieved with the visuals of this thing. And then the fake crowd noise? It’s remarkable. All these little touches. All these brilliant details. Also my dude looks cool as hell with the long hair and beard too, just saying. The Jesus look for the comedian who’s sick of putting up airs – shout out to the late great George Carlin. Krusty the Klown had a no-more-fucks-to-give moment too, briefly. Quite the lineage. Although an even stronger lineage, given the earlier stuff about blurring the line between performance and reality, has gotta be Andy Kaufmann. (Might chuck a hint of Father John Misty in there too on the musical side).

Just to make sure that you really get the idea that this isn’t just an hour and a half of cultural/societal takedowns and heavy depression, gotta reinforce once more that Inside is funny as hell too. The reaction vid scene was shatteringly hilarious. The sock puppet with an existential crisis. The imagery on screen and in his lyrics, particularly on White Woman’s Instagram. The lockdown video game. And all throughout the first half this thing is littered with top tier immense satire. The brand awareness skit is such a clever stab at corporate ‘activism’, while Socko’s lil verse pretty much savages the entire wesetern system in a single foul 100% cotton swoop...

The simple narrative taught in every history class/Is demonstrably false and pedagogically classist/Don't you know the world is built with blood?/And genocide and exploitation/The global network of capital essentially functions/To separate the worker from the means of production/And the FBI killed Martin Luther King/Private property's inherently theft/And neoliberal fascists are destroying the left/And every politician, every cop on the street/Protects the interests of the paedophilic corporate elite

Only, you know, sung by a sock puppet with a silly voice in a bouncy children’s tune melody. Not to mention this is one of those screenshot gems chock-full of easter egg jokes written on whiteboards or projected on walls which you’ve gotta dig a little deeper to catch. Also the songs are actually really good. They’re catchy as hell. They stick with ya. A lot of the reaction to Inside has been about how emotionally shattering it is and for sure the heaviness lingers too. It lingers in the way that top notch drama films are able to do – which ultimately is what art is supposed to do, right? To elicit an emotional response that makes you feel like your atoms have been all shuffled up and put back in a slightly different order, something that changes your perspective in a measurable way. Bo’s done a good thing with this one.

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