Theyre complicated. BURNHAM: (Singing) Start a rumor, buy a broom or send a death threat to a Boomer. It's like the mental despair of the last year has turned into a comfort. Now, hes come a long way since his previous specials titled What. and Make Happy, where his large audiences roared with laughter During that taping, Burnham said his favorite comic at the time was Hans Teeuwen, a "Dutch absurdist," who has a routine with a sock puppet that eats a candy bar as Teeuwen sings. At the forefront of this shift has been Bo Burnham, one of YouTubes earliest stars, who went on to make his own innovative specials with satirical songs backed by theatrical lighting and disembodied voices. So for our own little slice of the world, Burnham's two time spans seem to be referencing the start and end of an era in our civilization. Its horrific.". newsletter, On Parasocial Relationships and the Boundaries of Celebrity, Bo Burnham and the Trap of Parasocial Self-Awareness.. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. 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. "That's a good start. It's a quiet, banal scene that many people coming out of a depressive episode might recognize. As someone who has devoted time, energy, and years of research into parasocial relationships, I felt almost like this song was made for me, that Burnham and I do have so much in common. Now we've come full circle from the start of the special, when Burnham sang about how he's been depressed and decided to try just getting up, sitting down, and going back to work. And like those specials, Inside implores fans to think about deeper themes as well as how we think about comedy as a genre. Tell us a little bit more about that. How how successful do you think is "Inside" at addressing, describing kind of confronting the experience that a lot of people have had over the past year? Coined in 1956 by researchers Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, the term initially was used to analyze relationships between news anchors who spoke directly to the audience and that audience itself. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Because there's also a little bit Bo Burnham the character in this almost. Something went wrong. Long before the phrase parasocial relationship had entered the mainstream zeitgeist, Burnhams work discussed the phenomenon. Get the fuck up! Burnham walks towards the camera and grabs it like hes grabbing the viewer by the throat. Other than Fred Rogers, Bo Burnham is one of the most cited single individual creators when discussing parasocial relationships. Burnham can't get through his words in the update as he admits he's been working on the special much longer than he'd anticipated. When the song starts, the camera sitting in front of Burnham's mirror starts slowing zooming in, making the screen darker and darker until you (the audience member at home) are sitting in front of the black mirror of your screen. Is he content with its content? And did you have any favorites? 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. Only he knows. But then the video keeps playing, and so he winds up reacting to his own reaction, and then reacting yet again to that reaction. I got so much better, in fact, that in January of 2020, I thought 'you know what I should start performing again. This plays almost like a glitch and goes unexplained until later in the special when a sketch plays out with Burnham as a Twitch streamer who is testing out a game called "INSIDE" (in which the player has to have a Bo Burnham video game character do things like cry, play the piano, and find a flashlight in order to complete their day). The tropes he says you may find on a white woman's Instagram page are peppered with cultural appropriation ("a dreamcatcher bought from Urban Outfitters") and ignorant political takes ("a random quote from 'Lord of the Rings' misattributed to Martin Luther King"). And the biggest risk Burnham takes in the show is letting his emotional side loose, but not before cracking a ton of jokes. It's self-conscious. Known as "Art is a Lie, Nothing is Real," there's a bit Burnham did at the start of his 2013 special "what." Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul. Bo Burnham: Inside is a devastating portrait of the actor-director-singer-comedian's dysfunctional interiority and 2020's unyielding assault on mental and social health. he sings as he refers to his birth name. Throughout "Inside," there's a huge variety of light and background set-ups used, so it seems unlikely that this particular cloud-scape was just randomly chosen twice. Well, well, buddy you found it, now come out with your hands up we've got you surrounded.". "Everything that once was sad is somehow funny now, the Holocaust and 9/11, that s---'s funny, 24-7, 'cause tragedy will be exclusively joked about, because my empathy iss bumming me out," he sang. Poioumenon (from the Greek word for "product") is a term created by author Alastair Fowler and usually used to refer to a kind of metafiction. Netflix. Initially, this seems like a pretty standard takedown of the basic bitch stereotype co-opted from Black Twitter, until the aspect ratio widens and Burnham sings a shockingly personal, emotional caption from the same feed. One of the most encouraging developments in comedy over the past decade has been the growing directorial ambition of stand-up specials. WebA biotech genius tries to bounce back from the depths of grief with help from his son, who works to escape his dads shadow and save the family business. But he knows how to do this. The global pandemic and subsequent lockdown orders of March 2020 put a stop to these plans. MARTIN: So as you can hear in that bit, he sounds something like other comedic songwriters who do these kind of parody or comedy songs, whether it's Tom Lehrer, Weird Al or whoever. Burnham is also the main character in the game, a character who is seen moving mechanically around a room. In Inside, Burnham confronts parasocial relationships in his most direct way yet. Burnham watching the end of his special on a projector also brings the poioumenon full circle the artist has finished their work and is showing you the end of the process it took to create it. A distorted voice is back again, mocking Burnham as he sits exposed on his fake stage: "Well, well, look who's inside again. Burnham reacts to his reaction of the song, this time saying, Im being a little pretentious. MARTIN: And I understand you were saying that it moves between genres. At the second level of the reaction video, Burnham says: "I'm being a little pretentious. While he's laying in bed, eyes about the close, the screen shows a flash of an open door. Parasocial relationships are neutral, and how we interact with them is usually a mixed bag. Audiences who might not read a 1956 essay by researchers about news anchors still see much of the same discussion in Inside. The hustle to be a working artist usually means delivering an unending churn of content curated specifically for the demands of an audience that can tell you directly why they are upset with you because they did not actually like the content you gave them, and then they can take away some of your revenue for it. When he appeared on NPR's radio show "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross in 2018, the host played a clip of "My Whole Family" and Burnham took his headphones off so he didn't have to relisten to the song. But it doesn't. HOLMES: Right. The frame is intimate, and after such an intense special, something about that intimacy feels almost dangerous, like you should be preparing for some kind of emotional jump scare. This is especially true for Patreon campaigns that give fans direct access to creators on platforms like Discord. But the lyrics Burnham sings seem to imply that he wants to be held accountable for thoughtless and offensive jokes of his past: "Father please forgive me for I did not realize what I did, or that I'd live to regret it, times are changing and I'm getting old, are you gonna hold me accountable?". A harsh skepticism of digital life (a life the pandemic has only magnified) is the dominant subject of the special. For all the ways Burnham had been desperate to leave the confines of his studio, now that he's able to go back out into the world (and onto a real stage), he's terrified. I've been hiding from the world and I need to reenter.' Also, Burnham's air conditioner is set to precisely 69 degrees throughout this whole faux music video. He was only 16. @TheWoodMother made a video about how Burnham's "Inside" is its own poioumenon, which led to his first viral video on YouTube, written in 2006, is about how his whole family thinks he's gay, defines depersonalization-derealization disorder, "critical window for action to prevent the effects of global warming from becoming irreversible.". Bo Burnham, pictured here at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, wrote, directed and performed the entirety of his new Netflix special, Inside, by himself. According to a May 2021 Slate article, the piece was filmed at Bo Burnhams Los Angeles guest housethe same room used for June 2016s Are You Happy? and the closing shots of the Make Happy special. "I don't know that it's not," he said. I don't think it's perfectly morally defendable.". Might not help but still it couldn't hurt. At first it seems to be just about life in the pandemic, but it becomes a reference to his past, when he made faces and jokes from his bedroom as a teenager and put that on the internet. Were complicated. "Trying to be funny and stuck in a room, there isn't much more to say about it," he starts in a new song after fumbling a first take. For the album, Bo is credited as writer, performer, and producer on every song. HOLMES: Well, logically enough, let's go out on the closing song. Bo Burnham; former YouTuber, iconic Viner, and acclaimed stand-up comedian has recently released a new Netflix special. Its an uncanny, dystopian view of Burnham as an instrument in the soulless game of social media. Under the movies section, there's a bubble that says "sequel to classic comedy that everyone watches and then pretends never happened" and "Thor's comebacks.". Finally doing basic care tasks for yourself like eating breakfast and starting work in the morning. Burnham reacts to his reaction to his reaction to his reaction, focusing so intently on his body and image that he panics, stops the videoand then smiles at his audience, thanking them for watching. Burnham has said in interviews that his inspiration for the character came from real YouTube videos he had watched, most with just a handful of views, and saw the way young women expressed themselves online. Mirroring the earlier scene where Burnham went to sleep, now Burnham is shown "waking up.". ", The Mayo Clinic defines depersonalization-derealization disorder as occurring "when you persistently or repeatedly have the feeling that you're observing yourself from outside your body or you have a sense that things around you aren't real, or both. "I was in a full body sweat, so I didn't hear most of that," Burnham said after the clip played. If we continue to look at it from the lens of a musical narrative, this is the point at which our protagonist realizes he's failed at his mission. According to the special, Bo decided he was ready to begin doing stand-up again in January 2020, after dealing with panic attacks onstage during his previous tour, the Make Happy Tour of 2015-2016. Throughout the song and its accompanying visuals, Burnham is highlighting the "girlboss" aesthetic of many white women's Instagram accounts. The comedy special perfectly encapsulated the world's collective confusion, frustration, and exhaustion amid ongoing pandemic lockdowns, bringing a quirky spin to the ongoing existential terror that was the year 2020. of the internet, welcoming everyone with a decadent menu of options while disco lights twirl. The whole song sounds like you're having a religious experience with your own mental disorder, especially when new harmonies kick in. And he's done virtually no press about it. And its easier to relax when the video focuses on a separate take of Burnham singing from farther away, the frame now showing the entire room. He puts himself on a cross using his projector, and the whole video is him exercising, like he's training for when he's inevitably "canceled.". But, like so many other plans and hopes people had in the early months of the pandemic, that goal proved unattainable. It's conscious of self. "Truly, it's like, for a 16-year-old kid in 2006, it's not bad. Entertainment correspondent Kim Renfro ranked them in ascending order of greatness. The lead-in is Burnham thanking a nonexistent audience for being there with him for the last year. And while its an ominous portrait of the isolation of the pandemic, theres hope in its existence: Written, designed and shot by Burnham over the last year inside a single room, it illustrates that theres no greater inspiration than limitations. In one interpretation, maybe the smile means he's ready to be outside again. HOLMES: I liked a bunch of the songs in this, and a lot of them are silly songs about the things that his comedy has already been concerned with for a long time, right?