“It’s just me and my camera, and you and your screen: the way that our Lord intended,” Bo Burnham tells the audience in his introductory monologue of his latest Netflix special, Inside. This has been the nature of my relationship with Burnham’s comedy since I discovered his YouTube videos in 2009 while sitting in my first-year dorm room, the English Lit student in me drawn to his witty wordplay. A digital wall firmly between us.
Burnham tends to keep his audience at arm’s length. He has worked hard to establish a deliberate but blurred line between performer and person. His two stand-up specials, What. (2013) and Make Happy (2016) repeatedly draw attention to the fact that all his comedy is meticulously planned. Both productions are perfectly scripted, choreographed and staged. It’s something that often becomes a punchline in his material: the deliberate mistakes in What. (“Art is a lie, nothing is real.”), while telling his Make Happy audience that the show is “very planned, to the word, to the gesture”, miming in expert timing to pre-recorded sound effects. He wants the audience to know that entertainers are manipulating us. It’s their job to trick us.
This is just as important in Inside. Written, directed, performed, and produced by the now 30-year-old comedian, the show has been praised for its intricate exploration of mental health, the candid reflection of lockdown life, and the immaculate technical detail that helps bring the special to life. There’s not much else I can add to those conversations aside from my own praise. But what we can discuss is the idea of honesty: in art, in the performance, and in the audience. In Make Happy, Bo Burnham tells the audience that he isn’t honest for a second on stage. But his work still manages to be the most authentic and complex reflection of our modern relationship between art and audience.
Burnham’s latest special feels very intimate. It’s often hard to separate the performer from the person, which heightens the emotional impact as we watch him spiral, his mental health steadily declining. But Inside’s intense focus on social media and curated appearances reminds us that the performance isn’t real, no matter how genuine it might appear.
Bo Burnham, Inside, Netflix (2021)
This is reinforced by the multiple shots of Burnham’s workspace woven throughout the special: a behind-the-scenes glimpse that he purposefully chose to include. While he appears to be struggling, Burnham is in control of how the show will play out. We catch shots of whiteboards with ideas for the special mapped out. The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flash of his Twitch streamer character during a quieter scene further implies that Burnham is controlling his narrative; that there’s a level of artifice to his work. That’s not to say there’s no authenticity in the show. Burnham’s past work is again a good example of what to expect—snippets of truth woven between a larger narrative to create an intense emotional impact. He blurs the line between sincerity and artifice perfectly, creating a truly genuine performance as he interweaves truth with theatre.
Burnham embracing the role of performer is a crucial thematic choice that he typically revisits. In a powerful monologue in Make Happy, he says that he believes everyone is a performer, especially the younger generations who were encouraged to express ourselves only to discover no one cares about what we think: “Social media is the market’s answer to a generation that demanded to perform. Everything. To each other. All the time. For no reason … It is performer and audience melded together.” It’s an apt observation and something he has meticulously studied in projects since.
Social media performance is a core theme in the stunning Eighth Grade (2018), written and directed by Burnham. (If you haven’t seen it yet, I encourage you to stop what you’re doing and watch it immediately.) The film follows Kayla Day, played to perfection by Elsie Fisher, as she navigates the final days of eighth grade: a time when teens are arguably at their most awkward. Kayla has a YouTube channel where she teachers her viewers things like how to be confident. This starkly contrasts Kayla’s reality: a quiet introvert, she sits alone at school and suffers panic attacks before inserting herself into social situations. She wants to fit in, but it’s hard. Her quietness is seen as something strange; another topic Burnham revisits in his projects (“Why are you being all quiet and weird right now? … it’s because you’re an arrogant prick, that’s why,” a bullying voice tells him in What.’s closing number, ‘We Think We Know You’). As an introvert who has been called everything from “a bit odd” to “a sociopath” due to my reserved nature, these observations are incredibly human and incredibly powerful.
We see Kayla’s life behind the filters. The spots on her face which Instagram neatly hides, the preparation she does before talking to the popular girls at school, the painful nerves she feels being amongst people. This is hidden by her outgoing YouTube persona and her eager interaction with her classmates’ Instagram posts despite being unable to talk to them at school. “Kayla is being a terrible actress,” Fisher wisely notes in the blu-ray commentary (yes, I love the film that much). Kayla eventually decides to act confident in school and go after her dreams, but it’s still a performance: rehearsed and carried out, just as Burnham meticulously maps out his own comedy shows.
Eighth Grade shows the “cool” kids clearly, too. The teens in the film are playful and goofy until cameras are pulled out. They are shown diving and pulling faces and generally being a bit weird at a pool party until it’s picture time. When there is a lens, the teens perform their expected, Insta-worthy roles. The film is a wonderfully empathetic look at teenagers and how difficult it must be to grow up under the constant glare of social media.
Elsie Fisher as Kayla Day, Eighth Grade (2018)
But it’s not just young adults who perform on social media, as Inside masterfully explores. We all do. We carefully create online personas, rarely letting people see the full picture. Almost every song in the special highlights artifice in the digital age.
Burnham acknowledges our aspiration to appear interesting and polished in the painfully relatable ‘White Woman’s Instagram’, carefully placing props in the square frame of the screen, as well as our desire to look educated and worldly: “some random quote from Lord of the Rings incorrectly attributed to Martin Luther King.” Yet Burnham expertly delivers his trademark move of sucking you in with funny jokes to suddenly slap you around the chops with a moment of heartfelt sincerity: the aspect ratio widens as the speaker reveals more about their life, revealing depth behind the nameless white woman character. While the window where she’s open is brief, quickly snapping back to the preened Instagram square, it’s enough of a glimpse to remind us that real people lie behind the vapid vanity of social media.
‘Sexting’ continues the idea of performing to appear desirable, choosing how we present ourselves to lovers. Burnham and his responder openly lie to each other in the lyrics, with Burnham singing that he’s naked “except for a top hat / You say LMAO, but I doubt that.” This quick gag reveals that, once again, we aren’t our true selves when messaging, even in an intimate exchange. Replies are curated on both sides. The act feels personal, but shots of Burnham staring blankly at his phone in the dark reminds us that it’s not. It’s performance-based intimacy.
He explores the idea of performative activism in ‘How the World Works’: a jaunty tune Burnham sings with his sock-puppet friend, Socko, who reveals some hard truths about the world’s status quo. Socko is arguably a representation of virtue signalling: he’s occasionally trotted out (“look who stopped by”) when it’s convenient for Burnham’s character to appear woke. Eventually, Burnham exerts his power as a privileged white man in America and silences Socko when his views are no longer convenient to him. He has performed his part in feigning interest in changing the system but has no real intention to take meaningful action.
This is further explored in ‘Problematic’, where Burnham confronts cancel culture and the insincere apology statements which usually follow public outcry. “I want to show you how I’ve grown as a person,” he sings as he physically prepares for his cancellation. He wants his righteousness to be on display, poking fun at the martyrdom of these types of public apologies by singing “I’m sorry” while leaning against the backdrop of a cross. Even the hilarious ‘FaceTime with my Mom (Tonight)’ confronts the idea of performance, as Burnham tells his friends he can’t hang out because he’s calling his mother. Artfully lit in blue as he acts cool and notes this “selfless” act, it cuts to his face being lit by the hard light of his phone screen during the call. The frustration he feels during the exchange with his Mom harshly contradicts the chill nature he displayed while chatting to his “boys”, again implying that we perform for others.
We’ve all become content creators thanks to the digital age. This is another idea that echoes throughout Burnham’s back catalogue of work, possibly stemming from his professional relationship with the internet: without YouTube, there’s a possibility he would still be sitting in his bedroom, playing funny songs for himself. In his song ‘Art is Dead’ (from 2010 album Words. Words. Words.), Burnham confronts the uncomfortable position of being a performer: “I must be psychotic, I must be demented to think that I’m worthy of all this attention, of all this money you worked really hard for.” This idea is repeated in Make Happy when he tells his audience that he’s part of the “service industry.” He’s explicitly aware of his role as performer, and the unspoken agreement that unfolds when people part with money to attend one of his shows: “you’re contractually obligated, so dance you fucking monkey,” he sings in What.’s opening.
He’s also aware that his audience’s time is valuable, so wants them to enjoy themselves. Again, he confronts the audience with this thought in Make Happy, revealing that he worked for three years to create an hour’s worth of comedy, and wonders if it was enough to be valuable for them. The audience’s awkward, flat silence in response to this statement speaks volumes.
This is explored further in Inside. We see the extreme efforts Burnham is willing to go to to entertain us. The equipment, planning, and preparation must have been exhausting in an already draining year; not to mention the act of filming, performing, and editing. And it all comes with an element of risk: that the viewer won’t enjoy it or engage. It’s a risk that comes with any creative pursuit, and the messy, chaotic tangle of cables and wiring we often see sprawled around Burnham’s creative space perfectly conveys the frantic hope that overshadows the creative experience.
Creating art has become more difficult in the digital era. Thanks to our daily access to anything we could ever want being carried in our back pockets, the lines between art and content have severely blurred. We don’t enjoy art in the same way we enjoy content. Yes, there’s an overlap of creative skill involved in each. But art has something to say; content has something to sell.
Bo Burnham, Inside, Netflix (2021)
This idea is aggressively confronted throughout Inside. The opening number is even titled ‘Content’. It’s parodied further in a skit where Burnham plays a brand consultant, nodding towards the increasingly blurred line between the need to buy a product and the desire to support a brand. Corporations have ultimately become performers to push sales; even if it’s something as banal as snack food. “Customers expect a lot more from their brands than they did in the past,” his character muses. He may be referring to himself here, having previously referenced the “Bo Burnham Brand” with a level of disdain in his two stand-up specials. This skit puts his art on the same level as the advertising content a company might use to sell something like Bagel Bites, devaluing his creative work.
The digital world has certainly played a key role in enhancing our role as performers and audience whilst muddying the waters between art and content. In ‘Welcome to the Internet’, Burnham explores the rapid evolution of the world wide web, focusing his gaze on younger generations who have only ever known the fast-paced, constant-content-provider version of the web, rather than the cosy recipe-blog, fan-forum internet older generations experienced. That’s not to say older generations haven’t been manipulated in similar ways by the media. Burnham explores this through the incredibly catchy ‘Repeat Stuff’ (What.) and ‘Country Song’ (Make Happy), in which his parody pop personas explore how corporate marketing teams exploit audiences through generic, manufactured music: boy bands for teenage girls and country singers for the American working class. But something about the corporate manipulation of the internet seems far more sinister. Burnham chillingly notes that two-year-olds were distracted with iPads and fed curated content with the explicit intent to be monetised.
We currently live in an attention economy: everyone is constantly battling for our response while we muscle in to try and get some reactions of our own. We sell pieces of ourselves for a fraction of someone’s time and money. The Twitch character again acts as a valuable example here as he thanks his streaming audience for subscriptions and payment. Thanks to the vast landscape of the internet, we can monetise ourselves to turn attention into financial gain, just like a performer: writers selling personal stories to glossy magazines, people live-streaming their days, or the opportunity to pay to subscribe to get exclusive thoughts delivered straight to our inbox. It’s a valid means of income: I’m part of the service industry and attention economy by freelancing. Heck, I even create content for businesses! But there’s a darker side, too. Kids are finding their way onto OnlyFans because they know they can make a lot of money quickly. We’re no longer people, but products. It’s easy to see why Burnham, who already had a complicated relationship with taking money from his audience in exchange for their time and attention, might come to describe his art as content. We’ve fulfilled his prophecy of becoming performer and audience all at once.
Burnham likes to challenge his audience. His shows have never been straightforward stand-up routines. They are always intricately layered with his blur of character: what’s real and what’s not. The interjection of startling honesty means his work has the power to take you from fits of laughter to tears and back again. I find parts of Make Happy uncomfortable to watch as he’s confrontational and stand-offish throughout the performance. We’ve come to view comedians as happy goofballs: sardonic, yes, but never belligerent. As an audience, we tend to believe comedians are there simply to please us. In Make Happy’s heart-wrenching closing track, ‘Can’t Handle This (Kanye Rant)’, he probes at the relationship between performer and audience:
“The truth is my biggest problem is you: I want to please you but I want to stay true to myself. I want to give you the night out you deserve but I want to say what I think and not care what you think about it. A part of me loves you, a part of me hates you, part of me needs you, and a part of me fears you. And I don’t think that I can handle this right now … Look at them, they’re just staring at me, like ‘Come and watch the skinny kid with a steadily declining mental health, and laugh as he attempts to give you what he cannot give himself.’”
(Can’t Handle This - Bo Burnham, Make Happy, Netflix, 2016)
Burnham launches immediately back into his gags after this very open, very vulnerable display, noting that he should probably “just do his job”. He leaves the stage and retires from stand-up. During the Eighth Grade commentary, he reveals he was unable to admit that he was anxious until he was 24 years old (he was 25 when Make Happy was filmed). In Inside, we learn that he was suffering panic attacks on stage and quit comedy to get better. In early 2020, when he intended to return to the stage, the world locked down.
Our desire for honest, relatable celebrities juxtaposes performance in art. We want authenticity, but what happens when people give it to us? We expect entertainers to be honest with us, but we too are performers who present false lives through our digital personas. It’s an unfair expectation to hold over performers when we can’t do it ourselves.
Our foretold role as performer and audience member hasn’t only come to fruition, the development means our role as audience member and consumer has blurred the line between art and content. It has become jumbled in the digital era where we get “a little bit of everything all of the time.” We confuse art with a product, driven by our habits of consumption. It’s a rabbit hole we’ve been falling down for quite some time (“[We’re] constantly relying on consuming to feel content,” Enter Shikari noted in 2009’s political anthem, ‘Juggernauts’). Content creation exists to keep the consumption cycle going.
Although an audience can feel like we play a passive role in media, we don’t. Just as we drive sales by reacting to corporate content, we also actively engage with and analyse art. Our brains and emotions are engaged in the thrill of it. Some of the very best art questions our state of being and encourages us to think critically. It’s why studying the arts is still so important: everything can by analysed through a creative storytelling lens. Through Burnham’s work, we’ve seen the toll a demand for “content” we passively consume, rather than art we actively engage with, can have on the creator. If you look past the handful of poorly-aged gags, there is so much to pick apart in Burnham’s work. But I think this is the crux of his latest release: Inside examines the position of the audience.
Bo Burnham, Inside, Netflix (2021)
We frequently find that we are looking back at ourselves throughout Inside. The camera lens is often pointed at us, not Burnham. Between the giggles, the discomfort, and the gut-wrenching sadness, the camera encourages us to look at ourselves. He uses mirrors too, further implying we need to take time to reflect. We’re so distracted by the constant onslaught of content that we rarely stop to listen; something he’s well aware of as he questions whether or not Inside is on in the background while we scroll through our phones in the more vulnerable number, ‘Don’t Wanna Know’.
Burnham finally declares he is unwell and begins to sob, positioning himself at the side of the frame. Dead centre is the camera: the one that embodies the audience throughout the special. His cries become drowned out by a cheering audience as we slowly zoom into the camera’s lens, the screen finally turning black so we can catch sight of ourselves in the device we’re watching from. “I hate to ask. You’ve given me so much,” his stand-up character says. But as we look at our reflection and he sobs in the background, it’s a moment to remember that we take too.
As he launches into the incredibly powerful ‘All Eyes On Me’, Burnham looks at us directly, holding eye contact through the screen. It’s hard to look away, and that’s the point. This song is a direct challenge to the audience. He provides instructions to us throughout and invites us to respond by asking questions too. He tells us to look at him, to pay attention. But this time, the demand for attention is not ego, as implied in the opening track, ‘Comedy’: it’s to encourage the viewer to be an active audience member. The song is an explicit reminder that art isn’t a passive experience for performer or audience member, emphasised even further when Burnham uses physical force to engage us, grabbing the camera and swinging it around the room.
The special is bookended by moments of emotional sincerity where I believe we see the real Bo Burnham. He doesn’t know what will solve the world’s problems, as he set out to do at the start of the show. He knows comedy won’t heal it alone—we’re already in too deep: “You say the whole world’s ending / Honey, it already did.” But if we, the audience, actively engage with art again to think critically and honestly, maybe we can help find the answers.
‘All Eyes on Me’, Bo Burnham, Inside, Netflix (2021)
By the end of Inside, Burnham himself takes on the role of the audience member and pushes us briefly into centre stage in the closing song, ‘Goodbye’. He suggests we switch places and entertain him for 90 minutes next year. He asks why we’d want to joke at a time like this. But still, at the end of the song, he sits naked—exposed and vulnerable to audience demands—finding himself in the spotlight once more as we demand he put his hands up, “we’ve got you surrounded.”
Finally, the door opens and Burnham is freed from what has become his creative prison. But instead of being in the outside world, he finds himself outside a prop house on a theatre stage, surrounded by rapturous applause. In a farcical moment, he wrestles with the door to let him back in; to escape the attention he so confidently demanded 90 minutes earlier. We cut to a version of Burnham back inside the room, smiling as he watches a projection of his attempt to get back in. His desire to be inside—to be away from the spotlight—is now a performance, quite literally staged.
When I originally started writing my response to Inside, compelled to write about it in some way, it quickly morphed into a very personal piece: one which the attention economy would gobble up, but one I don’t need—or want—to share. Instead, I wrote it in a letter to Burnham. It’s a letter I’ll never send, but the act of writing it was cathartic enough to be a worthwhile exercise. Not every experience in life has to be converted into content.
The line between creativity and content is thin. As an artist, the power lies in the act of creation. As an audience member, the power lies in engaging with art. We’ve been tricked into an unhealthy relationship with art through corporate meddling to drive capitalism, believing manufactured content selling us things will deliver the same satisfaction as exploring the world through curated art. But artists ultimately don’t owe us anything; nor do we owe the artists anything. We both hold the power to walk away at any time.
With Inside, Burnham has proven that art is, in fact, very much alive and well. It’s how we engage with it that makes the ultimate distinction between art and content. Hopefully the resonating power of Burnham’s latest special will encourage us to pay attention and reflect on the differences so we can return to being active audience members, even in our performance-driven digital world.