INSIDE

After taking a five-year break from doing live comedy, YouTube star turned comedian Bo Burnham returns with an entirely self-written, self-edited, self-directed special. Equal parts comedy and existential crisis, *Inside* is a collection of synths, piano, and guitar put together to create Burnham’s signature catchy melodies, which bring up everything that we’ve been thinking about the past year while stuck at home. From hot-button subjects of news headlines like unfair wages (the jazzy “Unpaid Intern”) and the massively wealthy Jeff Bezos (’80s-style ballads “Bezos I” and “Bezos II”) to commentary on all the things cluttering the internet (“White Woman’s Instagram” and the circus-themed “Welcome to the Internet”), *Inside* is simultaneously a critique of internet culture as well as of our collective dependence on it. When not making us laugh, Burnham manages to get inside our heads, thinking about the darkness brought on by the pandemic and the social isolation it forced upon us. “Are you feeling what I’m feeling?/I haven’t had a shower in the last nine days,” he sings on the catchy song “Shit.” “Staring at the ceiling and waiting for this feeling to go away, but it won’t go away.” Balancing these feelings with uptempo songs and clever lyrics, *Inside* gets us to celebrate the full spectrum of human emotion from start to end.

Following his fourth comedy special, 2016's Make Happy, a then-25-year-old Bo Burnham announced his potential retirement from comedy.