The deeply meta comedian Bo Burnham released his latest special Inside (2021) on Netflix to widespread acclaim, furthering his conversation about the relationship between the comic and the artist which he began in his previous special Make Happy (2016). The now-30-year-old has built a reputation as one of the most forward-thinking, form-challenging, quick-witted artists in today's media landscape. Making heavy use of metatextual commentary, Burnham takes to task all manner of perspectives from absurdism, to surrealism, to nihilism, eventually using each to examine his own condition. By observing the trajectory of his messaging across multiple points in his career, the full gravity of Inside's ending becomes clear.
A child of YouTube, Burnham displayed an early talent on the nascent video-sharing platform where he first performed for a wide audience. He deferred admission to NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where he was to be an experimental theatre major—an impulse that would continue to shape his future work. After recording several comedy albums, accompanying his comic songs on piano or guitar in the model of Tom Lehrer, Brunham found tremendous success creating comedy specials for Netflix. He recorded two of his own that displayed his boundary-pushing instincts, and he directed specials for Jerrod Carmichael and Chris Rock. His latest special, Inside, was filmed during the COVID-19 Pandemic, and its darker tone - particularly its challenging ending - serves as another step in the thematic direction Burnham only touched upon briefly during 2016's Make Happy finale.
Make Happy ends with a dramatic musical number in the style of Kanye West's Yeezus tour, during which Burnham pleads with the audience that he can't handle the pressure of wanting to please them and the stress of performance art. A brief coda follows in which he presents the viewer a short questionnaire as to whether Make Happy lived up to its title. He exits the room he's in and embraces his partner in the distance, finding some happiness of his own. But Inside sees Burnham return to the room for the duration of the special, and, upon leaving, he is suddenly locked out, resulting in his panic but raucous laughter from the audience. Then, the screen pauses, revealing Bo to be viewing some hypothetical of himself from safely inside, and he gives a wry, sad smile. The distance between the two endings is about five years and a considerable decline in mental health.
Just as the legendary Dave Chappelle described in his Sticks & Stones special, the comedian is beholden to the whims of the audience in a way that challenges their mental health. Chappelle touched on the stress associated with cancel culture, while Bo Burnham laments the pressure he feels to please his patrons—to make them happy. This pressure led him to take a comedy hiatus after declining mental health caused panic attacks onstage. In the interim, he wrote and directed his feature debut Eighth Grade and starred alongside Carey Mulligan in the Academy Award-winning Promising Young Woman. Burnham eventually processed his complicated relationship to performance art through the oblique ending to Inside, as he watches the joke that his profession plays on him and lets loose a little smile.
As the audience laughs at a hapless Burnham, who can't seem to get back inside, Bo himself watches the whole ordeal and arrives at a reserved chuckle. Maybe inside represents safety, maybe it's condemning the vulnerability of performance, or maybe it's not so literal as all that. It ultimately comes back to another question posed in the early part of Inside: how can one do comedy at a time like this—when so many decidedly un-funny things permeate our lives? The ending suggests that there is nothing else to be done but laugh at the absurdity of it all. His struggle with audience expectations and external pressures in Make Happy, his subsequent comedy hiatus, his declining mental health Inside during quarantine—what else can one do but laugh? Hopefully, Bo Burnham finds comfort for his troubles, whether they be inside or outside.