‘Could I interest you in everything, all of the time?’
I was only vaguely aware of Bo Burnham as the guy from Promising Young Woman until a few months ago when everyone started recommending his Netflix special Inside. I have mostly managed to supress the feeling of wanting not to like something if I myself haven’t discovered it, but there was an element of that in how long it has taken me to watch Inside but eventually the avalanche of recommendations from people whose opinion I trust became too much to ignore. And as ever, all of those people were right.
Recorded over lockdown in Burnham’s guest house, Inside is a wildly inventive and genuinely unique experience that goes far beyond the remit of ‘comedy special’ and spills over into performance art, poetry and some kind of demented lockdown musical. Burnham covers sexting, the internet and the Instagram of white women – all in a way that is both innovative and often hilarious whilst never losing sight of the darkness of the situation. It helps that he is a stellar musician but he also manages to transform a single room into an ever evolving series of visual set pieces that are just as vital to the musical numbers as the music itself.
Burnham perfectly captures the giddy, incomprehensible insanity of being locked inside your house, your head, your living room for months at a time whilst still finding time to skewer middle America in the same way that Alistair Green has perfectly captured middle England throughout lockdown. To watch Inside in all its claustrophobic unhinged glory is to witness a true polymath at work, a master of his craft(s).
Inside will eventually be remembered as the ultimate howl of anguish brought on by a cataclysmic once-in-a-lifetime world event. Don’t think. Don’t mull it over. Watch it now. And then read Tim Key’s similarly deranged lockdown book He Used Thought as a Wife. And then weep.