I Am Not Feeling Good: My Experience with Bo Burnham’s “Inside”

“Um, and if you’re out there and you’re struggling with suicidal thoughts, and you want to kill yourself, I just want to tell you don’t. Okay? Can you not, please? Just don’t, all right? Fuckin’ quit it with the…So, let’s not, right? C’mon, guys.”

Near the end of Bo Burnham’s nearly-90-minute Netflix special, he speaks to a non-present audience about how he stopped doing live comedy shows five years ago due to crippling panic attacks he would suffer during performances. Watching on my couch, I furrowed my brow before opening Burnham’s Wikipedia page and found, to my surprise, that his previous comedy special “Make Happy” was indeed released five years ago in 2016. I found myself mildly shocked, as I had thought that special was only a couple of years old. Looking back at the TV I realized that, whether intentionally or not, I had been waiting for this new Bo Burnham special for five years.

“Inside” is the latest Bo Burnham comedy special released to the internet, following up 2016’s “Make Happy” and 2010’s “what.”, both of which received considerable praise for the then-20-something Burnham’s musical ability, sharp wit, ability to control a crowd, energy, and self-effacing relationship with his audience. In 2021’s “Inside,” Burnham sheds the familiar trappings of the stage and a rapt audience for a singular, claustrophobic room in which he creates a comedy show for Netflix all on his lonesome. Burnham is credited as director, writer, editor, and evidently plays every single role involved in the construction and creation of the show. Throughout its 87-minute runtime, Burnham strings together semi-related songs, skits, and performances into a program that sheds a light on his creative process, a lonely and alienating endeavor that he embarks on solo partially out of the needs of his creative drive and partially due to the lockdown measures of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Burnham’s role as sole creator and worker slowly takes its toll on him in every sense as his disjointed project reaches an end, whether he wants it to or not.

A major theme of “Inside” is Burnham’s declining mental health, something he alludes to and even outright states plainly throughout. Although never really naming anything definitive, Burnham shows the trademark signs of depression obvious to those who have suffered with it: General malaise, a feeling of worthlessness, deep sadness, and most troublingly, suicidal ideation (although he denies that he would ever kill himself). The World Health Organization cites that over 264 million people worldwide struggle with depression, an illness frequently co-morbid with other psychological afflictions, so Burnham’s struggles in front of the camera can be all too familiar to an audience member with similar struggles. Burnham has always approached his public, comedic persona as one tinged with a bit of sadness, a downward gaze filling the moments between silly songs. “Inside” puts these feelings on front street as he seems to deteriorate before the audience’s eyes, growing more upset, detached, and desperate by the minute. As Burnham himself jokes near the special’s peppier beginning, he is just a white guy trying to make a difference with comedy; however, as the special wears on, it becomes clear that Burnham is not just any white guy in comedy, but he’s a white guy in comedy With Depression.

I previously described “Inside” as a comedy special, but I believe that to be a misnomer. “Inside” is, perhaps more appropriately, an exercise in art and personal revelation as Burnham struggles with both his creative side and his mental health, at times under the guise of a comedy show. The problem is, comedy shows (and especially Burnham’s, in my opinion) are generally meant to be funny. There is no accounting for opinion in this matter, as comedy is one of the most subjective art forms practiced today, but it’s hard to deny that “Inside” is a fucking bummer. As one watches Burnham grapple with his identity, sleep on the floor, angrily restart a take, and eventually (appear to) genuinely break down on camera in tears, it’s less the funny bone that is being tickled and more the sense of concern for another human being’s health. At the same time, Burnham specifically has always been a comedian who has lampooned the idea of the parasocial relationship in his work, meaning that he frequently pokes fun at how his audience may feel they have an intimate relationship with him (and he may even feel the same sometimes) but that relationship is not real; in fact, if you believe that, you may be the very subject of a joke Burnham is constructing. Therefore, when Burnham stares off into the middle distance with a disaffected gaze familiar to a depressed person or someone who has ever cared about a depressed person, it seems to want to affect a kind of sympathy that long-time Burnham fans may have come to be suspicious of. Burnham is a smart and insightful performer and creator so it’s highly unlikely he was unaware of this while making this special but, if we aren’t laughing because what we’re seeing isn’t funny and we also aren’t supposed to feel bad for the comedian with the broken brain whom we don’t know, then why are we here?

I spent a lot of “Inside” waiting to laugh. I leapt with excitement when I realized a new Bo Burnham special had dropped on Netflix, as I had massively enjoyed his previous comedy specials. The manic, creative energy on display in “what.” is infectious still, and my wife and I still quote Burnham’s country music pastiche from “Make Happy” regularly (“Y’all dumb motherfuckers want a key change?”). I was so excited to have another hour-and-a-half of comedy from one of my favorite funny men, which made me impossibly unprepared for what I got instead. I had been trained, through Burnham’s previous work (especially the cutting “Repeat Stuff” and the revelatory “Can’t Handle This (Kanye Rant)”), to separate the person I thought he was from the work that he made. He and I are not, and will never be, friends. It is ludicrous of me to expect that. He’s an entertainer and I should just keep the “relationship” there, lest I be looked down on or made into a fool. As Burnham spills his guts on the camera lens and pours his mental troubles into his work, and as the special gets less about telling jokes and more about the isolating process of renting an undersized performance space and barring oneself inside for semi-unexplained reasons (yes, yes, the pandemic and all that), I found myself callously thinking, “Make me laugh, funny man!” The clown is crying and I’m still begging him to make me laugh.

Well, yeah…isn’t that his job?

I came into this Netflix show expecting another hilarious outing with Burnham but instead got a far more personal, and far less funny, journey into his psyche. There is value in that, make no mistake, but I dunno, I just wanted some fuckin’ yuks. Aside from a couple of chuckles in the opening songs (“Comedy” and “FaceTime with My Mom”) and some clever visual humor in those and in “White Woman’s Instagram”, I barely managed a titter at the continuing 60+ minutes as he topically lampooned his depressive state as a video game played by a Twitch streamer, offered up ho-hum observations about the pervasiveness of the internet in an admittedly catchy song, and returned to a malformed bit about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (a name I could stand to hear a lot less of). The pieces of the special (admitted to be such by Burnham, who pre-emptively apologizes for some of the jagged editing) come across as half-formed ideas that Burnham patched together to support the narrative of his declining mental health, which again, I’ve been trained to not care about. Burnham is a comedian and we do not know each other, so why should I care if he’s sad, if that’s even true? As much as Burnham can be seemingly honest about his feelings toward fame and the demands of his audience, (“A part of me loves you, part of me hates you/Part of me needs you, part of me fears you”) it’s impossible to truly know if it’s real or a calculated put-on, another layer to separate the real Bo Burnham from the stage persona (and often, a necessity to keep that separation between performer and audience). I kept asking myself throughout “Inside” if it was a bit or not, likely part of the creator’s intention, but the ambiguity never gave way to answers or a feeling of clarity, leaving me in between laughter and crying, feeling nothing.

Although Burnham and I are strangers, we do share an upset mental health. I also have depression and, like Burnham does in “Inside,” I struggled with it as well as several other conditions mightily during the throes of the 2020 pandemic. It’s a time I don’t remember fondly: States of emergency and stay-home orders were declared in my province of Nova Scotia as my wife and I glommed onto any information we could about the spread of coronavirus; my work was completely interrupted and I spent my days dragging my body between the couch and the bed, napping, eating chips, drinking boxed wine, and occasionally leaving in an anxious haze to procure more chips and wine; we celebrated Easter, our niece’s birthday, and our anniversary inside and over FaceTime; our planned trip to Disney World, our last hurrah before trying to have kids, was canceled as were our immediate plans for kids; I stopped going to therapy as I couldn’t handle online or over-the-phone counselling; we missed friend’s birthdays, friends and family missed ours and, although our jobs afforded us the luxury of working from home, we felt afraid and alone together. I sadly recall a moment early in the pandemic (before masks were even mandatory) where, in a bid to have some time by myself, I went out for groceries early. Upon returning home, I cried in my car realizing that I felt the need to go outside and risk my life just to get away from the person I was stuck inside with, the person I love the most in the world and who I couldn’t have gotten through 2020 without. I felt embarrassed, upset, and frustrated. It was not a good time for a lot of us and certainly not for Burnham either, who takes his isolation about as nobly as I or anyone else did. As the special begins to spread among a growing viewer base, I see a fair amount of (anecdotal) reviews from friends, online acquaintances, and even online writeups celebrating how Burnham’s special was able to bring them back to the pandemic era of mid-2020 through its exploration of loneliness and sheltered breakdown, but you’ll excuse me (as I write this in the middle of another provincial lockdown all too similar to 2020’s) if entertainment evoking the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic is the last goddamn thing I want to see and will be for a long time.

My wife makes fun of me because I like really depressing and sad media. I love watching “The Mist” because the ending is so soul-crushing. My favorite band is Staley-era Alice in Chains, especially near the end of his life. I voluntarily go back to the December 30, 2020 edition of professional wrestling show AEW Dynamite to watch the emotions of the wrestlers as they celebrate the life and mourn the death of fellow wrestler Brodie Lee. I’m only happy when it rains. That said, my first thought that I expressed to my wife when we hit credits on “Inside” was that it was too fucking depressing, even for me.

It has been a privilege of mine to follow Burnham’s career from “what.” up to “Inside,” especially because we are the exact same age. Discovering him at age 20 singing about “A World On Fire” and masterfully managing a stage in front of a captive audience was inspiring to me as I discovered it through a Tumblr GIF collage at age 21. His final words at the end of “Make Happy” about not seeking a life on camera (“If you can live your life without an audience, you should do it”) were a wake-up call to me at 26, a young man seeking validation and praise from everyone except myself. There are some things to like about “Inside” like Burnham’s incredible composing ability, his lack of fear in presenting himself on-camera in various stages of physical and (seeming) emotional nakedness, and the sheer impressive feat of how he created the special’s various mise-en-scene (lighting, sets, camera shots) set-ups all on his own. However, I did not receive any such wisdom as I did from his previous specials when I finished “Inside”; worse yet, I found myself looking at Burnham not with admiration but, instead, with pity. Being the white guy comedian who makes jokes and gets all depressed about the state of the world while his “stupid friends are having stupid kids” is not as funny as it was nearly a decade ago. It used to be exhilarating to see someone as young as Burnham make as incisive of points about culture and relationships and mental health as he was, especially at the age he was doing so, because it reflected a promise of the years to come in his career; if he is this good now, it’ll only get better as he gets older! This is the first time I have felt that Burnham has not grown with me as an audience member and I find myself regarding him sadly, still stuck in the cycle of self-hatred and jokes-as-defense mechanism that gets more obvious and less cute as one ages. “Inside” is the first time I looked at Burnham’s style of sharp, emotionally tinged, morose comedy and thought, “This isn’t funny anymore.”

I used to romanticize my depressive bouts as being the wholly self-focused exercise in seemingly deserved mental degradation they were until I got one during my wife’s friend’s wedding ceremony and ruined the night for her, leaving her sobbing in bed as I lay catatonic on the couch. I can feel how much it hurts her when I lay in bed for 12 hours straight without eating anything. At some point, you realize that your self-destructive habits are not just limited to you, and they have a measurable effect on the people who must see you at your worst. Seeing someone suffer and not being able to help them is an exercise in sympathy and empathy that we all go through and that can end in any number of good or bad scenarios, except most times, we know that the other person cares, even somewhere deep down. It is an experience that we all have to do with no expectation of compensation, so why would I choose to do it for someone I don’t know and whom I have no relationship with?

At the end of the day, Bo Burnham was able to monetize his suffering to Netflix for a million dollars, while I’m a depressed bastard for free. There’s not much I can say that will change that fact.