Netflix
With electro-pop social commentary, bleak humour and sock-puppet debates, the comic’s lockdown creation is astonishing
Well, now we know what Bo Burnham did with his lockdown. Inside is his new Netflix special, created alone in his LA home throughout 2020. And it was not – if its narrative, and the evidence of our own eyes, is to be believed – a project casually tossed off to pass the time. It is, rather, a comedy Gesamtkunstwerk, a journey to the nerve-centre of the quarantined entertainer’s mind, a son et lumière Robinson Crusoe musical for the age of not just social but digital isolation. It could be a breakdown – or it could be the pandemic’s wildest gift to comedy.
But is it comedy? Naysayers may complain that, with silences in laughter’s place, bleak jokes, and sections that eschew humour entirely, Inside has little comical about it. But if the material isn’t chucklesome, you’ll laugh with sheer astonishment at the accomplishment of Burnham’s enterprise. This prodigiously talented act has performed an extraordinary feat of construction and production, its restless audio-visual invention drastically expanding lockdown’s dramatic, comic and emotional range.
