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Bo Burnham’s 10 Best Songs, Ranked

By Ethan Shanfeld

Ethan Shanfeld

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“I’m healing the world with comedy,” Bo Burnham sings at the beginning of his latest comedy special, “Inside,” a hilarious and harrowing glimpse into the mind of an artist in quarantine.

While the assertion is clearly said in jest, poking fun at his egoistic urge to be heard amid a deadly pandemic, Burnham’s songs — which span from absurdist parodies to emotional confessionals — have positively impacted the lives of many.

Burnham, who recently sang, “Oh, fuck, how am I 30?” began his career on YouTube at age 16 and has released four comedy specials since then. In 2018, Burnham wrote and directed A24’s “Eighth Grade,” and in 2020 he starred in the Oscar-winning film “Promising Young Woman.” In March, he was cast to play Larry Bird in HBO’s upcoming Lakers series.

In honor of Thursday’s release of “Inside (The Songs),” an album of music from the special, Variety ranked Burnham’s best 10 songs, ranging from potty-humor to profound.

Long before he crooned about sexting in his latest special, Burnham was a 17-year-old kid rapping, “I’m a real G, shawty, that can really find your G-spot / What the fuck’s a G-spot?” Filled to the brim with geeky puns and childish innuendos, “I’m Bo Yo” is one of Burnham’s earliest and most viewed songs on YouTube. While Burnham’s comedic style has evolved significantly over the past decade and a half, it’s still fun to revisit old lines like, “Girl, don’t sit on that couch, ’cause I treat my objects like women” and many, many others that are far too inappropriate for this article.

One of the highlights of his stand-up special “what.,” “Sad” shines in typical set-up, punchline format. Throughout the song, Burnham sets up “sad” things, such as “a homeless man named Rich” and a “man with only one eye in a 3D movie,” but he throws in some twists for good measure: “I saw a little boy drop his ice cream cone, directly on his mother’s corpse.” In the song’s spoken-word interlude, Burnham discovers that laughter is the cure to sadness… well, “not for the people that are actually sad” but for those who have to “fucking deal with them all the time.” Both hilarious and dark, “Sad” perfectly sets up the rest of the show.

Art Is Dead

“This next song, honestly, is not funny at all, but it helps me sleep at night,” Burnham disclaims before launching into “Art Is Dead,” a two-and-a-half-minute mental breakdown in which the comedian begs for forgiveness for being an artist. “I must be psychotic, I must be demented / To think that I’m worthy of all this attention,” Burnham muses in the first verse. While many of the songs in his “Words Words Words” special are lined with dick jokes and immature puns, “Art Is Dead” serves as his first real dip into sincerity, something he’d dive into head-first in later projects.

Country Song

A reiteration of his beloved “Parks and Recreation” cameo Chipp McCapp, Burnham’s take on “stadium country music” is one of the high points of “Make Happy.” Mocking modern stars like Keith Urban, Burnham sets up his own country song in Mad Lib form (“Rural noun, simple adjective”). “I’m hoping my Southern charm offsets all these rapey vibes I’m putting out,” Burnham drawls before leading into the second verse: “A cold night, a cold beer / A cold jeans, strike that last one.” While there are so many brilliant lines in this twangy parody, none elicits a laugh better than the perfectly condescending “Y’all dumb motherfuckers want a key change?”

That Funny Feeling

In “That Funny Feeling,” the only guitar song in “Inside,” Burnham sums up our strange culture in what is essentially a pandemic version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Listing off items like “the live-action ‘Lion King,'” “carpool karaoke” and “Logan Paul,” Burnham encapsulates the modern dread, hopelessness and absurdity that can only be described as “that funny feeling.” As Burnham drifts from the mental health crisis to mass shootings to climate change, the song plays out like a stream of consciousness video diary shot during the end of the world. While Burnham surely doesn’t present the answers to any of these problems, “That Funny Feeling” is still eerily calm and comforting, a “quiet comprehending of the ending of it all.”

Welcome to the Internet

For someone born from the internet, Burnham holds a pretty dark view of it. In “Welcome to the Internet,” Burnham imagines the world wide web as a demented carnival barker greeting its newest victim. “Could I interest you in everything all of the time?” he asks, offering healthy breakfast options, pictures of famous women’s feet and Harry Potter porn. Beneath the creepy, maniacally laughing narrator is Burnham — who uploaded his first YouTube video in 2006 at age 16 — warning the younger generation of the bottomless pit that launched his career.

Repeat Stuff

Burnham’s knack for conveying sincere messages within parody is best exemplified by “Repeat Stuff,” an exposé on the vicious cycle of pop stars and magazines preying on vulnerable young fans, delivered via catchy, vapid pop song. While the song initially mocks generic radio hits appealing to the widest possible audience (“I love your hands ‘cause your fingerprints are like no other / I love your eyes and their bluish, brownish, greenish color”), it also comments on the predatory nature of the music industry “cashing in on puberty and low self-esteem and girls’ desperate need to feel loved.”

Can't Handle This (Kanye Rant)

Burnham’s anxiety is no secret — he constantly talks about his mental health struggles, which are central to his film “Eighth Grade” and comedy special “Make Happy.” Burnham would later admit he had panic attacks on stage while touring the show, adding layers to its theatrical climax, “Can’t Handle This (Kanye Rant).” The song, modeled after a rant from Kanye West’s “Yeezus” tour, details Burnham’s own unique struggles, such as ordering overstuffed Chipotle burritos and not being able to fit his hands inside of a Pringles can. Drenched in autotune, Burnham eventually moves onto his final problem: the audience. “A part of me loves you, part of me hates you / Part of me needs you, part of me fears you.” Somewhere in between funny and heartbreaking, “Can’t Handle This (Kanye Rant)” captures Burnham at his best, making audiences both laugh and cry while breaking a fourth wall rarely breached by comedians.

From God's Perspective

While Burnham’s comedic arsenal spans from joking about masturbation to pondering the meaning of life, “From God’s Perspective” might be the only song that covers the entire range. Assuming the voice of God, Burnham opens the melancholy piano ballad with, “The books you think I wrote are way too thick / Who needs a thousand metaphors to figure out you shouldn’t be a dick?”, a line so clever even his most pious fans must chuckle. Throughout the song’s four minutes, Burnham offers the Creator’s views on rape (“a fucked up thing to do”), pork (“I created the universe, think I’m drawing the line at the fuckin’ deli aisle?”) and the afterlife (“maybe life on earth could be heaven”). Beautifully poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, “From God’s Perspective” immediately alienates the majority of the world and yet ends on a surprisingly profound, unifying note.

All Eyes on Me

There isn’t a single joke in “All Eyes on Me,” the climax of Burnham’s emotional odyssey “Inside.” Soaking in effects and drowning in harmonies, Burnham’s voice sounds like the physical manifestation of his own depression. Midway through the song, he talks about quitting live comedy due to severe panic attacks on stage, only for his five-year recovery and plans to start performing again to be derailed by the pandemic. “Get on out of your seats / All eyes on me, all eyes on me,” Burnham sings, grabbing his greatest anxiety by the throat, or perhaps succumbing to it. Eventually, Burnham rips the camera loose and parades around the room with it, laughing and losing control, embracing the terrifying catharsis and cosmic insanity of it all.

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Bo Burnham’s Inside begs for our parasocial awareness

The comedian’s lifetime online explains the heart of most of his new songs

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“I made you some content,” comedian Bo Burnham sings in the opening moments of his new Netflix special, Inside . “Daddy made you your favorite. Open wide.”

The tension between creator and audience is a prominent theme in Burnham’s work, likely because he got his start on YouTube. Instead of working his muscles at open mics or in improv, Burnham uploaded joke songs to the platform in 2006. He was only 16.

Burnham’s online success — and an awareness of what kind of his audience’s perceived closeness — made the comedian key to one of the most prominent discussions in a creator- and influencer-driven era of media: the idea of parasocial relationships. 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. Now, the term is applied to how viewers devote time, energy, and emotion to celebrities and “content creators” like YouTubers, podcasters, and Twitch streamers — people who do not know they exist.

The label of “parasocial relationship” is meant to be neutral, being as natural and normal — and, frankly, inescapable — as familial or platonic relationships. Parasocial relationships can be positive too, as outlined in culture critic Stitch’s essay “On Parasocial Relationships and the Boundaries of Celebrity” for Teen Vogue. But in recent years, there’s been enough awareness of online behavior to see how parasocial relationships can have negative impacts on both the creator and the audience if left uninterrogated by both parties. Burnham is especially aware as a creator constantly reflecting on his own life.

Long before the phrase “parasocial relationship” had entered the mainstream zeitgeist, Burnham’s work discussed the phenomenon. His 2014 song “Repeat Stuff” and its music video parodies how boy bands and other “corporately-owned pop stars” prey on young fans’ desire to feel loved by writing songs with lyrics vague enough anyone can feel like it was written specifically about them. The performer, along with the record label and brand deals, encourage a parasocial relationship for increased profits. The song made such a splash in its insight that it earned its own episode in Shannon Strucci’s seminal “Fake Friends” documentary series , which broke down what parasocial relationships are and how they work.

Burnham’s 2013 special, what. , culminates in Burnham, the performer, reacting to pre-recorded versions of himself playing people from his life reacting to his work and fame, trying to capitalize on their tenuous relationship with him. The voices of the characters eventually blend together to tell the live Burnham on stage, “We think we know you.”

Likewise, the finale of Burnham’s next special, Make Happy (2016) closes in a song called “Handle This (Kanye Rant).” The song starts as him venting his hyperbolically small problems, until the tone shifts, and he starts directly addressing the audience, singing: “The truth is, my biggest problem is you / [. . .] A part of me loves you, part of me hates you / Part of me needs you, part of me fears you / [. . .] “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.” Like Strucci’s “Fake Friends” documentary, this song is highlighted in Anuska Dhar’s video essay, “Bo Burnham and the Trap of Parasocial Self-Awareness.” Burnham’s work consistently addresses his relationship with his audience, the ways he navigates those parasocial relationships, and how easy they can be to exploit.

Research and analysis of parasocial relationships usually revolves around genres of performers instead of individuals. Most sources discuss fictional characters, news anchors, children’s show hosts, or celebrity culture as a whole. Other than Fred Rogers, Bo Burnham is one of the most cited single individual creators when discussing parasocial relationships. Other artists have made works on the wavelength of “Repeat Stuff,” but few creators with a platform as large as Burnham’s return to the topic over and over, touching on it in almost all of their works.

In Inside , Burnham confronts parasocial relationships in his most direct way yet. Some of this comes through in how scenes are shot and framed: it’s common for the special to be filmed, projected onto Burnham’s wall (or, literally, himself), and then filmed again for the audience. Similarly, Burnham often speaks to the audience by filming himself speaking to himself in a mirror.

Burnham makes it textual, too. In “White Woman’s Instagram,” the comedian assumes the role of a white woman and sings a list of common white lady Instagram posts (“Latte foam art / Tiny pumpkins / Fuzzy, comfy socks”) while acting out even more cliched photos in the video with wild accuracy. 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. Then, of course, the aspect ratio shrinks again as the white woman goes back to posting typical “content.” The song untangles the way we view people’s social media output as the complete vision of who they are, when really, we cannot know the full extent of someone’s inner world, especially not just through social media. But, of course, it tangles that right back up; this emotional post was, ultimately, still Content™.

In “Unpaid Intern,” Burnham sings about how deeply unethical the position is to the workers in a pastiche of other labor-focused blues. The clearest inspiration is Merle Travis’s “16 Tons,” a song about the unethical working conditions of coal miners — also used in weird Tom Hanks film Joe vs. The Volcano , which touched on labor rights.

Burnham quickly shifts from the song to a reaction video of the song itself in the style of a YouTuber or Twitch streamer. “I like this song,” Burnham says, before pointing out the the lack of modern songs about labor exploitation. Then, the video keeps going past the runtime of the song — and into that reaction itself. Burnham reacts to his reaction of the song, this time saying, “I’m being a little pretentious. It’s an instinct I have for all my work to have some deeper meaning or something. It’s a stupid song, and, uh, it doesn’t really mean anything.” The video continues. Burnham reacts to his reaction to his reaction: “I’m so afraid that this criticism will be levied against me that I levy it against myself before anyone else can.” The video keeps going. Burnham reacts to his reaction to his reaction to his reaction, focusing so intently on his body and image that he panics, stops the video—and then smiles at his audience, thanking them for watching.

It’s easy to see “Unpaid Intern” as one scene and the reaction videos as another, but in the lens of parasocial relationships, digital media, and workers’ rights, the song and the reactions work as an analysis for another sort of labor exploitation: content creation. Most creator-made content online is available for free, meaning creators usually have to rely on their fans for income via crowdfunding like Patreon. While platforms like Patreon mean creators can make their own works independently without studio influence, they also mean that the creator is directly beholden to their audience. This is especially true for Patreon campaigns that give fans direct access to creators on platforms like Discord.

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. “Unpaid Intern” isn’t just about unpaid internships; when your livelihood as an artist depends on your perceived closeness with each individual fan, fetching a coffee becomes telling someone they’re valid when they vent to you like they would a friend (or a therapist). “Sitting in the meeting room, not making a sound” becomes the perceived 24/7 access fans have to DM you, reply to you, ask you questions. And like unpaid interns, most working artists “can’t afford a mortgage” (and yeah, probably “torrent a porn”).

Later in Inside , Burnham thanks the audience for their support while holding them at knifepoint. In another scene, Burnham gives a retroactive disclaimer to discussions of his suicidal ideation by telling the audience, “And if you’re out there and you’re struggling with suicidal thoughts and you want to kill yourself, I just wanna tell you… Don’t!” “Look Who’s Inside Again” is largely a song about being creative during quarantine, but ends with “Now come out with your hands up, we’ve got you surrounded,” a reflection on police violence but also being mobbed by his fans. In the song “Problematic,” Burnham sings about his past problematic behavior, asking the audience, “Isn’t anyone going to hold me accountable?” The special’s intermission looks like a clear view into Burnham’s room, until Burnham washes a window between himself and the viewer — an explicit, but invisible, boundary between creator and audience.

“All Eyes on Me” takes a different approach to rattling the viewer. The song begins with a fade in from back, the shot painfully close to Burnham’s face as he looks off to the side. The song is a pitched-down Charli XCX-styled banger of a ballad has minimal lyrics that are mostly just standard crowd instructions: put your hands up, get on your feet. Burnham’s eyes are sharply in focus; the rest of him faded out subtly, a detail you might not even notice with how striking his eyes are. 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. The first comes when Burnham looks directly into the camera as he addresses the audience, singing, “Are you feeling nervous? / Are you having fun?” The crowd directions are no longer stock pop song lyrics; now, the audience understands them as direct orders to them from Burnham. He’s been addressing us the entire time. Still, it’s difficult not to be lulled back into, again, this absolute banger. And it’s easier to relax when the video focuses on a separate take of Burnham singing from farther away, the frame now showing the entire room.

The second emotional jump scare comes when Burnham monologues about how he stopped performing live because he started having panic attacks on stage, “which is not a great place to have them.” The monologue increases that sense of intimacy; Burnham is letting the audience in on the state of his mental health even before the global pandemic. For fans who struggle with panic attacks (myself included) it’s a comfort to see yourself represented in an artist whose work you respect.

Then comes the third emotional jump scare. After more sung repetitions of “get your fuckin’ hands up,” Burnham says, “Get up. I’m talking to you. Get the fuck up!” Burnham walks towards the camera and grabs it like he’s grabbing the viewer by the throat. He points it at himself as he sways, singing again: “Get your fuckin’ hands up / Get on out of your seat / All eyes on me, all eyes on me.”

While sifting through fan reactions to Inside , the YouTube algorithm suggested I watch a fan-made video that pitch corrects “All Eyes on Me” to Burnham’s actual voice. Most of the comments talk about how visceral it is to hear Burnham’s real voice singing the upsetting lyrics. And many of them discuss their personal connection to the show — and their analysis of how Burnham must have been thinking and feeling when he made it.

One comment stuck out to me: “There’s something really powerful and painful about, hearing his actual voice singing and breaking at certain points. I feel very close and intimate with him in this version. My heart hurts with and for him. This special spoke to me closer and clearer than I’ve ever felt with another person. I actually felt true mutual empathy with someone for the first time, and with someone I’ve never even met, it’s kinda funny.”

I can’t say how Burnham thinks or feels with any authority, but as text and form-driven comedy, Inside urges the audience to reflect on how they interact with creators. Even when confronted with works that criticize parasocial attachment, it’s difficult for fans not to feel emotionally connected to performers they admire. 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. And we might. That YouTube commenter might be understood by Burnham if they were to meet him. But in both of those cases, similarity and connection would come from the way the art itself connects people, not any actual tie between Burnham and myself, Burnham and the commenter.

Inside has been making waves for comedy fans, similar to the ways previous landmark comedy specials like Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette or Tig Notaro’s Live (aka “Hello, I Have Cancer”) have. And like those specials, Inside implores fans to think about deeper themes as well as how we think about “comedy” as a genre. Inside takes topics discussed academically, analytically, and delivers them to a new audience through the form of a comedy special by a widely beloved performer. Audiences who might not read a 1956 essay by researchers about news anchors still see much of the same discussion in Inside . Not putting a name on parasocial relationships makes the theme less didactic, more blurred while still being astute—such sharp focus on the eyes, you don’t notice the rest of the face fades into shades of blue. And notably, Burnham’s work focuses on parasocial relationships not from the perspective of the audience, but the perspective of the performer. Inside depicts how being a creator can feel: you are a cult leader, you are holding your audience hostage, your audience is holding you hostage, you are your audience, your audience can never be you, you need your audience, and you need to escape your audience.

Parasocial relationships are neutral, and how we interact with them is usually a mixed bag. Inside doesn’t give clear answers like “parasocial relationships good” or “parasocial relationships bad,” because those answers do not, and cannot, exist. They’re complicated. We’re complicated. But when reading songs like “Don’t Wanna Know” and “All Eyes On Me” between the lines, Inside can help audiences better identify that funny feeling when they start feeling like a creator is their friend.

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The Problem With Bo Burnham’s Inside

Confessional meta-comedy doesn’t have rules about the obligation to truth. yet..

I am keenly aware as I write this that I do not want to hurt Bo Burnham’s feelings. That’s one of many triumphs of his latest special, Inside , a work I’ve seen almost universally not just praised but loved . Even I, a person outside Inside —the special mostly fell flat for me—was moved to sympathy by the desperately self-conscious agony of its protagonist.

In trying to better understand the zeitgeisty nerve it hit—combing fan forums, eavesdropping on loving discussions of it online—I’ve been struck by the number of viewers for whom the special captured some essential aspect of their experience of this past year, with a specificity and precision that made them feel seen, recognized, understood. “I wept openly during the latter half of that song. I didn’t know I was still experiencing such immense grief but there it was. Thanks for helping me process my shit, Bo,” one person wrote in a television forum on Reddit. “Watching this entire thing has made me question how severe my depression is. I’ve always thought that I ‘just feel sad’ and am just in the same boat as everyone else struggling through the last 18 months. But a lot of this resonated with me so much,” wrote another. A third: “It left me feeling immensely vulnerable and depressed. I had to pause a few times before I could go on cause I had a hard time watching someone who clearly looked like he was in pain and just not okay. Saying he had gotten panic attacks on stage and then ending it with him on a ‘stage’ panicking to get back inside. Fuck.”

I’m quoting internet commenters at some length here because Burnham’s special is of and about the internet. I think Burnham would agree that the online reaction to Inside is part of its story and these raw, admiring confessions suggest it smashed through the alienation the special describes. Inside is so meta that one sketch has Burnham commenting on himself commenting on himself commenting on himself. People liked that, just as they liked his stunt as gamer and avatar, and his song about “That Funny Feeling” on the peristaltic context collapse of the internet, including the exhausting “backlash to the backlash to the backlash” cycle of which I dread this piece may form a part. “It literally brought me to the edge of tears,” one viewer wrote of “That Funny Feeling.” “It shook me. Bo was never ‘just a comic’ and ‘ art is dead’ showed me that, but this song was the point he transcended his medium as a comedy special and just straight up made poignant, evocative art.”

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In those forums I saw something else too: Many, many people expressed deep concern for Burnham. A lot of viewers responded to the ultra-relatable misery of that figure trapped in that tiny studio, sleeping in a messy bed, living on cereal, desperately tormented and desperately alone. Was he OK? And so a funny pattern developed in which some fans began to reassure others that this was not Burnham’s actual life . He’s a wealthy celebrity! He lives in a nice house with his partner, who’s a successful director, and two dogs! This room isn’t where he lives. Quite the opposite: It’s extra space he has to play with. It’s his guesthouse. Or his attic. Or his studio, people wrote. This was a character he created, a thing he was trying. Don’t worry . As one commenter put it: “Art is a lie. The film is presented like a captain’s log of a man living entirely in a single room by himself for a year. It’s a fantastic framing device. Burnham might actually be depressed, and we know he has mental health issues (5 years of crippling anxiety), but he also has millions of dollars, a partner he has been with for years (which it seems his character in this film does not have), a family and friends, a magnificent career. It’s obviously artifice but that doesn’t take away from any of it because there’s still a parallel sincerity in the art and a self awareness.”

I disagree. Given the confused concern so many fans expressed, the artifice—specifically, the mismatch between Burnham’s circumstances and his protagonist’s—isn’t obvious. And it does take away from it. Confessional meta-comedy of this type, being relatively new, hasn’t yet developed rules about the obligation to truth. Burnham’s special thrives in that ambiguity. Framed by a claustrophobically dominant metaphor, Inside is about feeling as if you were trapped “inside,” where “inside” means existence on and with the faux-connectivity of the internet and the hell of your own brain and the confining square footage of a plain studio apartment during the pandemic. I take no issue with the first two; it’s the last bit that rankles. Opinions will differ on this: Does it matter that Burnham was not actually trapped in cramped, depressing, uncomfortable spaces that a lot of people actually and nonmetaphorically occupied? Or that he’s conflating immensely interesting artistic and existential questions with mundane but urgent material ones? I realize this sounds like a “privilege” argument and in a certain sense it is: I do question the choice to situate the story of your misery (and I believe Burnham’s pain to be extremely real!) in squalid conditions not your own to make your suffering seem greater. I’ll go further: As a piece of social commentary, I find the framing device clunky. Say, to take only a slightly more extreme case, that you see the modern condition as one of detachment, rootlessness, and precarity. Should you, a wealthy but tortured creator, channel this into art by presenting yourself as literally homeless and then encourage confusion between the character you’re playing and yourself?

None of this is to say wealthy creators should refrain from tackling universal issues. And my main frustration with this special has less to do with any of that than with genre—specifically, the tiresome perils of nonfiction (to which Inside makes at least a partial claim). People have argued over whether works like David Sedaris’ should be called nonfiction given their relaxed approach to the truth, but most agree that you can exaggerate upward to make a story funnier. But can you exaggerate the other way? Can you make your story even more of a bummer? Does it matter—not even ethically, I mean, but just in terms of juicy narrative payoff—if the spine of your story isn’t true?

We all know comedians punch up jokes or make stuff up completely: the thing that happened as they were walking down the street “last week” or at the airport or waiting in line usually didn’t and no one cares. James Acaster—the British comic whose remarkable 2019 show Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999 feels like a useful point of comparison for Inside —was not in fact going into the Witness Protection Program as he repeatedly insisted in his older 2016 show Reset . Neither did he use one industrious bee to make five jars of honey.

But different genres have different demands, and Acaster’s Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999 differs from his previous work because it jumps from comedy to confession. It’s based on his actual struggles and his actual life. Acaster adjusts accordingly and so do we; we may be watching the same exact performer and laugh at his jokes, but we understand that this particular show has higher stakes and weirder and arguably deeper payoffs. It’s that old “based on a true story” bonus: Most jokes are funny regardless of whether they happened, but Cold Lasagne shares a genre with specials like Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette and Mike Birbiglia’s The New One that only works if the central claim is true. These are meta-shows that borrow a comedian’s stage and stagecraft and identity to smuggle in talk about real and more complicated things. Would Nanette land the same way if Gadsby—while truly struggling with mental health—didn’t actually get assaulted in the devastating encounter that special starts off joking about? What if Birbiglia didn’t have a kid or a sleep disorder but felt those conditions best captured his inner state? Would Cold Lasagne hit differently if—though tormented by anxiety—Acaster never actually had a girlfriend who left him for Mr. Bean? If the aggrieved fan reactions to John Mulaney divorcing his wife demonstrate anything, it’s that people cling to apparently autobiographical aspects of comedy specials they thought were true—like Mulaney adoring his spouse—even when the shows aren’t remotely serious or especially confessional. What happens when the whole show is about pain?

I know my answer: If the inciting incident or “plot” is merely metaphorical, then a confessional special’s impact declines, no matter how eloquent its portrayal of anxiety or dread or self-loathing. So much of its effect depends on the claim—not true anywhere else in comedy!—that the stakes are real .

Burnham’s special deserves much of the praise it’s gotten. Inside is a major technical achievement, and it took immense talent in a dozen different fields to put it together. The best parts of the special flesh out his peculiar and fascinating position as a talented creator with a creator’s unattractive but very real need for validation. For example, when he starts screaming at the audience he hopes is watching but suspects of being on their phones, in a twist I find genuinely and intentionally hilarious given the artifice of the whole construct, he demands sincerity: He wants them to actually lift their hands up. When it strayed from this to broader themes, it struck me as a little generic. “White Woman’s Instagram,” to choose one very popular bit, was a slickly produced if somewhat hackneyed sendup of influencer performativity whose twist was the reveal (emphasized by the camera pulling out of that trademark aesthetic square) that silly Instagrammers are real individuals with private struggles. This is true of course but doesn’t feel in retrospect like a searing insight. And while Burnham beautifully articulates the hells of internet disconnection and overstimulation—”Welcome to the Internet” will stick with me—those themes are sufficiently resonant (or generic) that the Marines are using identical arguments in their recruitment ads.

I don’t doubt that Burnham feels much or most or even all the angst Inside depicts. Perhaps he is a young creator who feels old, a rich person who feels poor, a man with more than usual freedom who feels trapped in a tiny space. These interesting and extremely human but abstract dissatisfactions suffer by dint of the forced comparison to crappy conditions real people really lived with during the pandemic. If Instagram women use filters and staging to make their lives seem better—and accidentally make them seem frivolous or insubstantial— Inside is no less artificial when it uses not just cameras but setting to make Burnham’s life seem worse.

Or maybe he is just playing a character, an everyman eating cereal and feeling like a “saggy massive bag of shit” (who also happens to be a performer very like Burnham). To me, fudging that difference made it harder to care. But those discrepancies didn’t appear to matter to the people who loved it, and that it didn’t matter to them … matters to me. Maybe what Burnham had to say about guilt and isolation and boredom and vanity and hopelessness and anxiety was profound enough to annihilate any irksome mismatches between the irony and the truth. Maybe the spiritual malaise he captured mattered more than the metaphor it came in. Maybe that’s a measure of something Burnham understands about truth on the internet that I still don’t.

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Bo Burnham: A Song about Problem Solving

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• November 1, 2021 (Norway)
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Bo Burnham: A Song about Problem Solving

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About Bo Burnham: A Song about Problem Solving Episode

Bo Burnham sings about problem solving in his Netflix special, Make Happy.

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