Bo Burnham’s Existential Content Crisis

By Jake Skubish

It’s hard to pinpoint when, exactly, everything became “content.” Was it the proliferation of video-sharing platforms like Vine? Netflix’s quest to collapse the barriers between television and film? The boundless rabbit holes of Reddit? It’s unclear, but somewhere in the 2010s what used to be distinct realms of entertainment—movies, television, podcasts, video clips, books, news, sports, music—were cannibalized and flattened into one indistinguishable soupy mess of content.

Bo Burnham occupies a unique space in the rise of the content economy. He joined YouTube in 2006, less than a year after the site’s inception, and quickly established himself as one of the earliest YouTube stars. But his comedy specials, and his 2018 directorial debut Eighth Grade, have all been concerned with the destructive artifice that living a life on the internet engenders. These dual roles, as elder statesman of content creation and cautioner against the digital world, come to a head in his latest Netflix special, Bo Burnham: Inside.

In the song “Turning 30,” Burnham, adorned only in his underwear, wails about aging for millions of Netflix viewers. But midway through the song, he cautions Gen-Z against this very sort of behavior. “Now all these fucking Zoomers are telling me that I’m out of touch,” he says. “Oh yeah? Well your fucking phones are poisoning your minds, okay? So when you develop a dissociative mental disorder in your late twenties, don’t come crawling back to me.”

Inside was written, produced, and directed entirely by Burnham inside his home during the COVID-19 pandemic. I hesitate to call it a comedy special. Inside is one of the most depressing works of art I’ve ever consumed, and if suicide is a trigger for you, you might want to avoid it. The show maintains the structure we’ve come to expect from Burnham, delivering his thoughts on depression and social anxiety in a series of self-effacing musical numbers. (The musical production is, without question, his best yet.) These issues are not new territory for Burnham, but the way they are presented in Inside is a significant departure. In Make Happy, his previous special, Burnham delivers an ironic song titled “Kill Yourself” before clarifying to the audience, in order to preempt internet backlash, that people should *not* kill themselves.

In Inside, he makes the same sort of speech—only this time, he cuts away during the speech to show himself watching the speech. The added layer suggests the speech, like the silly song that preceded it, is just another form of content. Tell people to kill themselves, tell them not to, light your farts on fire; it doesn’t matter. Once you send it into the digital abyss it’s all the same. “Don’t kill yourself, you don’t want to,” Burnham says. “But if I could kill myself for a year? I’d do it today.” It’s the hardest I laughed during the entire show, which should give you a sense of what you’re in for.

The show is not entirely like this. The early musical numbers are more lighthearted examinations of life stuck indoors: the mistrials of FaceTiming with your parents, sexting, and a particularly catchy song about the white woman Instagram aesthetic in which Burnham captures the imagery with striking accuracy. But Inside gets progressively more depressing as it continues, mirroring the deteriorating mental well-being of its subject.

It’s significant that, despite the premise of the special being necessitated by the pandemic, Burnham does not mention it once. Yes, the virus drove us all indoors, but Burnham’s thesis is that this sheltered experience is how we experience the world when the digital realm becomes primary, pandemic or not. “The outside world, the nondigital world, is merely a theatrical space in which one stages and records content for the much more real, much more vital, digital space,” Burnham laments.

This is a more defeatist vision of virtual life than in Burnham’s previous projects. In Make Happy Burnham directly addresses the audience to tell them that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it. In Eighth Grade, his protagonist is able to wrench herself away from the solitude of the digital world by finding a group of people she can connect with. But in Inside, there is no escape. The world is run by exploitative capitalist monsters, the internet is destroying our brains and warping our sense of reality, and we kind of like it there.

The production value reinforces this comfort in solitude. Despite filming the entire special in one room in his home, Burnham orchestrates enough distinct camera perspectives and lighting demonstrations to make the space feel expansive. It’s an impressive feat to a depressing end. “The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door,” he sings. Sure, there’s some interesting stuff out there. But in here I have everything, always. Why would I ever leave?

Burnham has long been the internet’s preeminent ethnographer, and he understands better than anyone how the access to infinite content has the effect of making everything feel equally insignificant. “Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul / A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall,” he sings in “Funny Feeling,” possibly my favorite song of his in any special. I have a hard time articulating why these lyrics make sense, but they do. He never defines the funny feeling in the chorus; he doesn’t have to.

The ever-present problem with Burnham’s bemoaning of the internet’s ills is that he is making this point by himself spewing content into the void. He takes on this inconsistency with his usual flair for self-awareness: “Is there anyone out there? Or am I all alone? It wouldn’t make a difference,” he knowingly remarks. But self-awareness can only get you so far, and the show does have a sort of old-man-yells-at-cloud energy. This is not a flaw, per se, but the futility of his effort is accentuated in a production so thoroughly pessimistic.

How is it possible, then, that Inside feels so comforting to me? I think it’s because I can identify so precisely with the conditions Burnham is decrying. This is the paradox of his message: the internet flattens everything into nothingness and despair, but on the end of each one of those infinite data points is an individual person having an experience. Inside might disappear into the abyss, but I’ll still have felt something watching it.

When Burnham says it wouldn’t make a difference whether anyone is out there, he’s right: we get nothing out of giving to the internet, but everything out of receiving content from it. Inside shows how the internet operates as a perverse black hole of empathy, where we try to give everything of ourselves over to each other and get nothing back in return. The value of the show is its articulation that we all know we’re doing it. We’re all stuck inside, alone, but we’re all there together.