‘Should I Be Joking in a Time Like This?’
Bo Burnham’s INSIDE as a Metamodern Response to Crisis
‘To be very meta, the online discourse about this online discourse [focussed] special,’ writes Cassie de Costa in Vanity Fair, ‘has made it nearly impossible to question [it] because so many people have deemed the project worthy in and of itself’¹. Since its release on Netflix in May 2021, Bo Burnham’s Inside — a musical, stand-up comedy special written, performed, directed, filmed and edited solely by the 30-year-old comedian throughout quarantine in 2020 — has been described as the ‘essential document’² of the current crisis, the ‘definitive bit of Western popular art to come out from the pandemic era’³ and, despite falling within the stand-up comedy genre, ‘one of the most sincere artistic responses to the 21st century so far’⁴. As such, attempting to discuss this almost universally acclaimed work feels like wading into an overloaded online discourse shouting, ‘Me too! I’ve got thoughts as well! Listen to me!’. Perhaps, however, that’s an oddly suitable simile when examining a show that, in part, attempts to encapsulate the complete overwhelmingness of our continual online access to, as Burnham sings in ‘Welcome to the Internet’⁵, ‘Anything and Everything / All of the time’ — as well as echoing his own awareness of the hypocrisy of a white male who, while being critical of their privilege, still — sometimes — wants to be ‘the centre of attention’⁶.
Whilst others online have quickly analysed every lyric⁷, camera move⁸, and clever edit⁹ of Inside, this article addresses my particular interest in how Burnham’s special serves to answer a question that had been bugging me since the initial shock of the pandemic settled into our current lived reality — Just how would contemporary artists respond to this new crisis? And following that — Would their response still feel metamodern?
To explain my uncertainties: Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s seminal application of metamodernism as a cultural structure of feeling is inherently tied to their understanding of the 2000s and the crises that coalesced within this period. They conceive the 2000s not as a temporal decade (2000–2010) but as a historical period beginning towards the end of the 1990s and ending around 2011¹⁰ during which the constituent elements of metamodernism began to take shape. Within this period, specific political, economic and sociological crises including ‘the maturity and availability of digital technologies […] the so-called fourth wave of terrorism hit[ting] Western shores […] immigration policies and multicultural ideals backlash[ing] in the midst of a revival of nationalist populism […] and the financial crises inaugurat[ing] yet another round of neoliberalism […] emerged, converged and coagulated’¹¹.
According to some metamodern theorists, it is within, through and out of this ‘clusterfuck of world-historical proportions’¹² that the metamodern sensibility emerged — postmodernism no longer providing a meaningful label to the cultural and artistic responses to such a clusterfuck. Importantly, too, this is the historical period in which the millennial generation came of age. As such, these overlapping crises converged as ‘specific, internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension’¹³, into specifically ‘unique experiences and challenges this generation has faced’¹⁴ within our formative adult years.
I have previously argued¹⁵ that the metamodern cultural sensibility is most clearly observable in the artistic output of the millennial generation, of which Bo Burnham is a member, as a response to our formative adulthood converging with the crises of the 2000s. Over the past few years, I have spent time looking into how this metamodern response to previous crises is manifest in the contemporary performance work and political theatre of millennial artists. It’s understandable, then, that, whilst I was obviously undergoing my own personal response to the pandemic, I was also particularly interested in how other millennial artists were going to respond to this new, global crisis — one which we had no previous comparative experience for. If metamodernism as a cultural sensibility is inherently tied to the crises of the 2000s, would a metamodern sensibility still be observable in these artistic responses to this new crisis? Or, would the new sincerity of metamodernism be superseded by a fresh artistic response to the pandemic? Would the framework of what we understand to be metamodern no longer be applicable to understanding the art created during lockdowns? Then, in May 2021, Inside was released which, as it turns out, is an incredibly metamodern response to the pandemic.
Burnham began his comedy career on YouTube around 2006, with his bedroom-recorded satirical songs quickly becoming viral and launching him into international comedy superstardom over the next few years. There is a line to be drawn between the mid-2000s postmodern viral musical comedy of Burnham’s YouTube contemporaries such as Neil Cicierega¹⁶ and the later, metamodern comedy Burnham subsequently developed; his stand-up tours and comedy specials throughout the following decade shifting to material ‘satirizing the very medium which gave him stardom’¹⁷, with the comedian fluctuating between ‘debating over and over again the healthiness of his desire to be a performer, while mentioning in every show that this is his “favorite thing to do in the world”’¹⁸. In fact, it is common to find the terms existential and meta in previous discourse surrounding Burnham’s work. His propensity to oscillate between witty satire and authentic, self-critical honesty in his reflections on the ‘prevalent anxieties in society [makes him] both entertaining and continually self-deconstructing’¹⁹, leading to his previous comedy specials being labelled ‘post-postmodern’²⁰.
Whilst the content of his catalogue can be considered metamodern (and worthy of other, separate writing) particularly through his use of hyper-self-reflexivity, the quirky, oscillation, constructive pastiche and ironesty within his jokes and songs, I am particularly concerned with how Inside expands on this in terms of both its form — particularly in its use of performatism or the double frame — and how, by doubling down on these strategies in his response to the effects of quarantine, Burnham’s Inside points towards a possible continual application of metamodernism as a strategy of understanding contemporary performance work — even possibly hinting that, at this very early stage at least, the cultural response to the Covid crisis might exemplify, and not eradicate, metamodernism as a cultural and artistic structure of feeling. The following discussion makes use of Greg Dember’s Metamodern Methods²¹, focusing on three major elements, in order to explore the metamodern strategies apparent within Inside and how Burnham uses these as artistic responses to the current crisis.
Hyper-Self-Reflexivity
‘I think that, ‘Oh, if I’m self-aware about being a douchebag, it’ll somehow make me less of a douchebag.’ But it… but it doesn’t. Self-awareness does not absolve anybody of anything.’
Burnham’s development of his ability to switch, seemingly effortlessly, between satire and self-criticism previously came to a head in his last comedy special, Make Happy (2015). The finale of the show, ‘Can’t Handle This (Kanye Rant)’²², includes Burnham decrying the big issues that have affected him over the years, which largely involve Pringle cans being too small to adequately fit his hand into. However, this satirical emulation of the finale of Kanye’s Yeezus tour — complete with eccentric lighting, backing track and autotune — suddenly shifts in tone when Burnham, kneeling, addresses the audience:
I can sit here and pretend like my biggest problems are Pringle cans […]
The truth is my biggest problem’s you
I want to please you, but I want to stay true to myself
I want to give you the night out that you deserve
[…] Part of me needs you, part of me fears you
And I don’t think that I can handle this right now
Such previous self-reflection becomes prescient when, five years later during Inside, Burnham reveals that he ‘quit performing live comedy, because I was beginning to have, uh, severe panic attacks while on stage. Which is not a great place to have them’. Whilst Burnham took time away from performing in order to address his mental health, he decided to return to live comedy in January 2020, ‘and then, the funniest thing happened…’.
Dember states that metamodernism ‘inherits self-reflexivity from postmodernism, but repurposes it in a manner that […] serves to affirm felt experience’. Whilst Sian Francis Cox (2021) labels Burnham a ‘postmodern entertainer’²³ because of the self-deconstruction evident in his work, postmodern self-reflexivity centres around the fact that, as Dember states, the artist’s ‘own perspectives, flaws or belief systems may distort any meaning that might be drawn from the work’²⁴. Burnham’s self-reflexivity, instead, reflects Dember’s understanding of a metamodern hyper-self-reflexivity working to affirm the artist’s felt experience; the ‘“self” being reflected upon in a metamodern work is the work’s author, [so] the result is a highlighting of the author’s own lived, inner experience’²⁵. Burnham is entirely aware that his own self-reflection can be self-aggrandising, problematic and exclusionary — with some critics arguing that the positive critical response to his own self-critique of previous material ‘shows the painfully low bar for white men’²⁶ — and yet, such self-reflexivity works to focus inwards, towards the artist himself, and his own felt experience in coming to terms with such reflection.
In Inside, Burnham begins the song ‘Problematic’ by watching one of his first YouTube videos before, as Gabrielle Sanchez describes, reflecting on the ‘blatantly unfunny, homophobic, and misogynistic jokes he said in his early career’²⁷ throughout the song. The lyrics describe his viral wunderkind origins; ‘doing comedy when I was just a sheltered kid / I wrote offensive shit’, as well as addressing the racially insensitive fact that he dressed in an Aladdin costume for Halloween when he was 17; ‘I did not darken my skin / But, still, it feels weird in hindsight’, before stating that ‘Times are changing’, that he’s ‘problematic’ and asking whether ‘anybody [is] gonna hold me accountable?’. Where this song differs from previous critical self-reflection is when, in the second verse, Burnham immediately criticises the verse he has just been singing:
I want to show you how I’m growing as a person, but first
I feel I must address the lyrics from the previous verse
I tried to hide behind my childhood, and that’s not okay
My actions are my own; I won’t explain them away
I’ve done a lot of self-reflecting since I started singing this song
I was totally wrong when I said it.
Such comedic doubling down on his self-critique — and, as Sanchez points out²⁸, his apologising for using the common excuse of youth for being complicit in oppressive discourse — focuses the critique further in towards Burnham himself. Additionally, by beginning the song with a clip from his earlier YouTube video, Burnham emphasises how, stylistically, his performance process echoes between his bedroom origins and the self-produced Inside. As Sanchez brilliantly describes, across both Inside and the earlier YouTube clip:
He sits in front of a keyboard at home, writing piano ditties that he hopes make people feel something, if not laugh. He holds the same hunched posture and spills the justifications behind every song before playing them. But in Inside, his mannerisms sit on an exhausted, adult face, as he arduously reflects on his career and pieces together the special on his own.²⁹
Such arduous self-reflection is also evident in the piece’s first proper opening number, ‘Comedy’, in which Burnham asks, ‘Should I be joking in a time like this?’. He states that he’s ‘self-reflected [and] want[s] to be an agent of change’, but that, since he’s a white male, ‘maybe I should just shut the fuck up’. After a quick pause, however, he decries, ‘I’m bored!’, reflecting that there’s ‘only one thing’ he can do about the world being ‘so fucked up […] while being paid and being the centre of attention’.
The hyper-self-reflexivity throughout Inside also builds into what Linda Ceriello refers to as ‘Life-As-Movie’ — a ‘reflexive propensity [which] blurs the lines between lived and constructed realities’³⁰ in which, as Dember explains, ‘people’s identities are constructed quite self-consciously through a narrative lens’³¹. Through Inside being both a comedy special and an inside look into how this comedy special was made (the framing of which I will discuss in the third part of this article), we seem to watch Burnham’s mental state worsen throughout the duration of quarantine. As the special progresses, his reflection on this deterioration slowly moves to the forefront. The witty, upbeat songs of the first half are replaced with half-finished snippets and mumbled confessions; ‘Uh, my current mental health is rapidly approaching […] an all-time low […] and, you know, I feel okay when I’m asleep. Like, when I’m asleep I feel alright’. This self-reflection comes to a head when, in the final, orchestral song, ‘Goodbye’, he reflects upon the echoes between his beginnings and his time spent creating a show during quarantine; ‘Am I going crazy? Would I even know? Am I right back where I started fourteen years ago?’
Oscillation & Ironesty
‘A book on getting better / Hand delivered by a drone’
The oscillation between what can be described as modern and postmodern predilections is central to the metamodern sensibility, with Vermeulen and van den Akker noting that the term is ‘characterized by the oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment’³², or as Dember describes, ‘overall, metamodernism can be understood to revive the positivistic aspects of modernism while retaining postmodernism’s awareness of context and irony, via oscillation’³³. The structure of Inside follows a fluctuation between several states analogous to such metamodern oscillation; constantly switching, as it does, between satirical political jokes and honest criticism of Burnham’s positionality within this structure; between upbeat, well produced songs and quiet, seemingly authentic, ‘unstaged’ introspection; between music and silence; between singing and sighs; between laughing and crying; between hope and hopelessness.
Inside’s constant fluctuation between impressively (self) produced music videos (largely consisting of Burnham’s clever use of projectors and LEDs) and ‘behind-the-scenes’ moments in which Burnham simply talks to the camera, also reflects an overarching oscillation between what Dember describes as the tiny and the epic. The musical performances throughout Inside are ‘extravagant performances, lush musical arrangements, cautionless[ly] embrac[ing] technology’³⁴, as per Dember’s understanding of the epic as a metamodern ‘rebellion against postmodernism’s tendency to shame ebullient, unabashed self-expression’³⁵. Additionally, the quieter moments throughout the special, in which we are privy to Burnham’s creative process and closer to his inner psyche, build upon the hyper-self-reflexivity described above in, as per Dember’s methods, their use of ‘the tiny [as a method of creating] vulnerability and intimacy, bringing the reader of a work closer to the felt experience expressed in the work’³⁶.
Additionally, the oscillation between sincerity and irony evident throughout Inside begins to reflect another of Dember’s methods — ironesty; the application of irony to express a genuine or heartfelt point. A particular illustration of this can be found in the song ‘White Woman’s Instagram’, in which Burnham satirises the ‘shallow and clout-chasing images that pop up on basic white women’s Instagram accounts’³⁷:
Latte foam art
Tiny pumpkins
Fuzzy, comfy socks
[…] Some random quote from Lord of the Rings
Incorrectly attributed to Martin Luther King
Towards the end of the song, visually accompanied by Burnham setting up a series of Instagram-style photos, the screen aspect ratio — which has been cropped to resemble a rectangular Instagram post — slowly peels back to widescreen dimensions, with the lyrics taking what Alec Bojalad describes as a ‘hard left turn to the stunningly real and heartbreakingly empathetic’³⁸ as we are suddenly given an insight into the woman behind the seemingly vacuous photos:
Her favourite photo of her mum
The caption says:
“I can’t believe it
It’s been a decade since you’ve been gone
Mama, I miss you
I miss sitting with you in the front yard
Still figuring out how to keep on living without you
It’s got a little better, but it’s still hard
Then, just as we understand the emotional twist Burnham has inflicted on the audience here, he takes it a step further — revealing one final part of this imaginary woman’s backstory that, after repeated listens, still manages to hit me hard emotionally:
Your little girl didn’t do too bad
Mama, I love you, give a hug and kiss to Dad”
As Bojalad describes, ‘among all of inconsequential social media posturing to be made fun of [this] is one unexpected moment of real heartbreak’³⁹. After revealing the backstory to this imaginary white woman being that both her parents have previously passed away, Burnham then immediately switches back to the humorous list of photos within this woman’s Instagram feed. The difference being, here, that the apparently ‘cheugy’ posts are now underscored by more upbeat music than the previous verses and also underpinned by our new knowledge of the human being behind them:
A goat-cheese salad
A backlit hammock
A simple glass of wine
Finally, the list of photos ends with what could still fit comfortably within the ‘White Woman’s Instagram’ aesthetic that Burnham has defined but are underscored with deeper meaning through the backstory this woman has now been afforded. Through our new connection to this imaginary Instagram user, the fact that these last posts consist of ‘Three little words, a couple of doves / And a ring on her finger from the person that she loves’ provides a hopeful, emotional endpoint to a song which, initially, appeared to be mocking the character whose posts we are privy to.
As Michael Vawter (one of the first to write about the metamodern traits in this song) brilliantly explains, the piece’s oscillation between satire and sincerity ‘both humanizes and redeems the group we were just making fun of [and] articulates a nuanced take on [Instagram] that is equal parts ironic and sincere’⁴⁰. As much as Burnham appears to be initially mocking the imagined woman behind the posts, it becomes clear that he is also mocking the viewer for mocking her. Critics such as Lili Loofbourow have been quick to point out that the ‘reveal that silly Instagrammers are real individuals with a private struggles […] doesn’t feel […] like a searing insight’⁴¹. However, it is the emotion imbued from this use of ironesty (including the quick shift back to the inane posts that are now underscored by this emotion) which adds a metamodern twist to what, without such, would simply be a satirical, postmodern song about a particular Instagram aesthetic. Instead, as Vawter explains, Burnham enables ‘genuine, open hearted, vulnerable, and kind’⁴² moments to peek through.
A similar effect is produced through the folksy, guitar-led ‘That Funny Feeling’ — a song that, at first glance, appears to be a seemingly haphazard list of contemporary ironies:
Stunning 8K resolution meditation app
In honour of the revolution, it’s half-off at the Gap
In this sense, the song initially feels like a return to postmodern irony and even — dare I say it — randomness, reminiscent of the bricolage of David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’. However, Burnham weaves in particular moments of existential dread, which suddenly undercut the intellectualism of the ironic lyrics with the sincere emotion of the awareness of the incoming climate crisis:
The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door […]
That unapparent summer air in early fall
The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all
Burnham ties these ironic and sincere lyrics together by the refrain, ‘There it is again / That funny feeling’ — underscoring the song with an attempt to describe his own debilitating anxiety, and the relatable (and, in this case, physically felt) anxieties that arise from the convergence of contemporary crises — in this particular case; the overarching, combined reach of the internet and late stage capitalism into our lived experiences, the climate crisis and the pandemic. Whilst the ironic lyrics of ‘That Funny Feeling’, at first, feel like postmodern satire, it is, again, Burnham’s insertion of understated sincerity (and sincere urgency) that imbues this song with emotion in an ironestic, metamodern move that, again, serves to reinforce the felt experience of both his and the audience’s physical and emotional response to crises — ‘that funny feeling’ of existential dread.
The Double Frame
‘I’ve been […] thinking I’m never gonna finish this special and be working on it forever. And recently, I’ve been feeling like, “Oh, man, maybe I am getting close to done with this,” […] and that has made me completely freak out because if I finish this special, that means that I have to — um — […] just live my life. And, so — I’m not gonna do that […] I’m gonna work on it forever, I think.’’
‘In a sense’, writes Orla Smith, ‘Inside is more a documentary about the making of a comedy special than it is a comedy special’⁴³. The piece is framed around the fact that Burnham’s intention to return to stand up coincided with pandemic-imposed quarantine, with Burnham explaining that these conditions mean that the piece is not ‘a normal special because there’s no audience, and there’s no crew. It’s just me and my camera, and you and your screen [and] the whole special will be… will be filmed in this room. And instead of being filmed in a single night, it will be filmed in — uh — however long it takes to finish’. Throughout the special, we see the one room slowly overflow with musical instruments, cameras, lights, projectors, and the lengths of cables that come with such, as well as the detritus of everyday life. Burnham appears to write, record, edit, eat and sleep in this space — quite literally confined inside for the duration of the creative process — which, we come to learn later, lasts over a year.
Through Dember’s understanding of Raoul Eshelman’s performatism as one part of a wider metamodern shift, he proposes that Eshelman’s concept of the double frame is one observable metamodern aesthetic strategy. An ‘outer frame’ surrounds the ‘inner frame’ of the main narrative, the former consisting of a larger narrative or structure, as Dember explains, ‘imbued with enough fantasy elements that the reader is forced to make a choice to buy into all of it, if they are going to commit to engaging [with] the work’⁴⁴. As Eshelman describes, the ‘implausibility [of an outer frame] cuts us off — at least temporarily — from the endlessly open, uncontrollable text around it and forces us back into the work’ in order to understand the narrative at play⁴⁵. The form of Inside quite obviously plays with the idea of framing — both through the fact that Burnham appears to be, quite literally, trapped inside the ‘frame’ of the room itself, as well as the framing of the comedy special being built from footage of Burnham making the comedy special itself. It is the edifice of this outer frame, however, that shifts such an application into the realm of performatism.
The outer framing of a year-long filming process, of which we are continually reminded throughout the special by Burnham’s continually lengthening hair and beard, may, of course, not be entirely authentic. Indeed, some⁴⁶ have criticised Burnham for portraying authenticity throughout the special (as we are made to feel as if this special is a record of Burnham’s lived experience of lockdown) whilst not accurately presenting the facts. Before Inside, Burnham was becoming well known for his acting skills⁴⁷ and his framing of Inside as an authentic experience asks us, as Loofbourow writes, to forget that ‘he’s a wealthy celebrity! He lives in a nice house with his partner, who’s a successful director, and two dogs! This room isn’t where he lives. Quite the opposite: It’s extra space he has to play with’⁴⁸. Instead, as Loofbourow continues, Inside’s frame can be considered ‘a claustrophobically dominant metaphor’ where feeling trapped ‘inside’ is not only about the reality of being stuck in quarantine, but where ‘inside’ also ‘means existence on and with the faux-connectivity of the internet and the hell of your own brain’⁴⁹.
Burnham’s use of the double frame in this way continues to play into and exemplify this edifice when, at the end of the special, he finally goes ‘outside’ the confines of this creative space, only to find himself on the stage of a theatre, the glare of the spotlight highlighting him against a theatrical set replacement for the real outer walls of his guest house. As the unseen audience laughs at his performance, he attempts, futilely, to get back ‘inside’, but finds the door locked. Whilst this shift ‘outside of the frame’ is a clear visual metaphor for Burnham’s anxiety at now being able to get back into the outside world and back onto a stage, as if — as Kim Renfro describes — ‘the mental despair of the last year has turned into a comfort’⁵⁰, it also serves to highlight the edifice of Inside’s double framing; of course his confinement wasn’t entirely authentic — neither is ‘outside’! However, his use of the claustrophobic metaphor of this outer frame allows the audience to view his confinement as if it were true (even though we know it’s an aesthetic and allegorical choice) which, again, re-focuses our attention on the felt experience of Burnham throughout the making of this special, and the period of this crisis.
‘Unpaid Intern’: a ‘micro’ metamodern moment
‘I’m so worried that criticism will be levied against me that I levy it against myself before anyone else can’
To go into detail about every sketch and song throughout Inside in relation to how the piece exemplifies metamodern sensibilities would take up a much longer text. Instead, I want to point towards one more excerpt — the song ‘Unpaid Intern’ and the segment that immediately follows it — as a portion that exemplifies all of the metamodern methods I’ve drawn on above simultaneously.
The song begins with a monochrome close up of Burnham in sunglasses, next to a microphone, as he sings along to a jazz-inspired melody: ‘Who needs a coffee? ’Cause I’m doing a run / I’m writing down the orders now for everyone / The coffee is free, just like me / I’m an unpaid intern’. Initially, the piece is a humorous satire of the millennial job market — peppered with unpaid interns that are ‘Barely people / Somehow legal’. It’s also, as Burnham then points out, a reapplication of a historical trope of songs focusing on working class jobs⁵¹ towards a contemporary context in order to focus on the particular ‘labour exploitation of the modern world’.
The self-reflexivity occurs when, immediately following the song cutting out mid-line, Burnham begins to ‘react’ to the song in the manner of popular YouTube reaction videos — offering the above insight regarding his intentions in the lyrics, as well as the fact that his ‘beard is a little shorter in this video ’cause I filmed it a couple weeks ago’. It is at the end of the song that when, in a typical reaction video, the original video being reacted to — overlaid in the top right of the screen — would cease. However, this video continues to play, showing Burnham immediately reacting to the song — a moment that both the viewer and the ‘main’ Burnham on the screen have only experienced moments ago. This leads the ‘main’ Burnham to question what is going on, before deciding; ‘Okay, so I’ll just keep reacting…. So, this is me reacting to the song’. In this reaction-to-a-reaction, Burnham — in an echo of his lyrics to Problematic — critiques the self-reflection he had made mere seconds ago, stating that, ‘I’m being a little pretentious. It’s — it’s an instinct I have where I need everything that I write to have some deeper meaning or something. But it’s a stupid song, and it doesn’t really mean anything’.
At the end of the overlaid reaction video, this then continues — with the outer frame becoming a reaction-to-a-reaction-to-a-reaction-to-a-song, with Burnham now criticising his preceding criticism as he states that the Burnham in the video is ‘reacting to my own reacting, and I’m criticizing my initial reaction for — for being pretentious, which is — which is honestly… it’s a defence mechanism [but] self-awareness does not absolve anybody of anything’. In this continual cycle of reactions, the initial impression — echoed by the ‘main’ Burnham each time — is one of satirical absurdism, before switching wildly to apparently honest hyper-self-reflection.
The sketch oscillates between the surreal and the sincere before Burnham, evidently disturbed, stops the video and suddenly switches his demeanour back to that of an amicable Youtuber, hoping that the viewers ‘enjoyed’ his reaction to the song. The whole section exhibits a number of metamodern sensibilities at once in its application of an oscillation, of hyper-self-reflexivity in his overlapping critique, and in the double frame and constructive pastiche of the application of a YouTube reaction video to provide an ironest insight into Burnham’s own felt experience — highlighting his own self-critical anxiety as an artist.
[Post]Pandemic [Metamodern] Performance
‘I’ve learned something over this last year […] the outside world — the non-digital world — is merely a theatrical space in which one stages and records content for the much more real, much more vital digital space’
Burnham’s previous work has already achieved the label of post-postmodern⁵² through his playful application of an oscillation between existential sincerity and ironic, political satire. It is the artistic and aesthetic strategies he employs in Inside however, which have emerged through the limitations imposed upon his creativity during the realities of pandemic-related restrictions, that exemplify the overarching metamodern sensibilities within his work. In regards to my initial worries addressed at the beginning of this article about the relevance of metamodernism through and beyond this crisis, this analysis of Burnham’s Inside indicates that a continued hermeneutic application of metamodernism as a strategy for understanding contemporary performance will continue to be useful post-pandemic.
Whilst this discussion has been largely academic, I feel that it is important to highlight that a large element of the metamodern sensibility apparent within this work is in the emotion that is imbued throughout. My personal response to this emotion as an audience member is largely reflected in the positive critical and public responses to the work. Burnham’s apparent vulnerability and openness as a performer at his seemingly lowest throughout the overlapping crises of the pandemic, global heating and the ever-growing control the internet continues to gain over our cultural and personal psyches, has led to numerous online comments similar to my own reaction, with posts such as ‘actually hear[ing] someone with such a platform talk about such issues and not just use the umbrella term “mental illnesses” really crushed me and also made me feel so seen and normal’⁵³, and ‘I feel like this special helped me realize and confront a lot of the thoughts that have been in my head over the past year’⁵⁴ echoing across online forums.
Of course, Burnham’s apparent vulnerability is juxtaposed with moments of sarcasm, extreme levity and humour. The point is that Burnham’s response to the overwhelming convergence of crises (including the current one, which we can now add to the list of challenges this generation has faced) is not only blasé postmodern cynicism that leads to comforting escapist and ironic humour, but is also interspersed with sincere, emotional and, dare I say it, hopeful moments of truth. In between the jokes, impressive, one-man-lightshows and intricately detailed, pretend Instagram posts are genuine moments that, I am not afraid to say, really made me cry.
Whilst Burnham decides not to name the pandemic directly throughout the whole piece, in the final refrain of ‘That Funny Feeling’, he makes perhaps the most direct reference to the overwhelming realities of the current situation:
Hey what can you say?
We were overdue
But it’ll be over soon
Just wait
It is both a hopeful gesture towards a future post-pandemic — or at least post-quarantine when Burnham will eventually be able to venture ‘outside’ — and, when coupled with the fact that the song’s underlying focus is on the anxieties induced by the inescapable climate apocalypse, a terrifying reminder of the upcoming ‘ending of it all’. It is at once hopeful and hopeless — and, in my mind, there is nothing more metamodern than that.
References
[1] da Costa, C., Murphy, C. (2021) ‘What Is Bo Burnham’s Inside Really Trying to Say?’, Vanity Fair, June 10 [Online] Available at https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/06/what-is-bo-burnhams-inside-really-trying-to-say Accessed 27 July 2021
[2] Quinn, K. (2021) ‘Bo Burnham’s Inside is the COVID-crazy comedy the world needs right now’, The Sydney Morning Herald, June 7 [Online] Available at https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/bo-burnham-s-inside-is-the-covid-crazy-comedy-the-world-needs-right-now-20210604-p57y6o.html Accessed 27 July 2021
[3] Bojalad, A. (2021) ‘Bo Burnham: Inside’s Moment of Breathtaking Empathy’, Den Of Geek, June 2 [Online] Available at https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/bo-burnham-inside-white-woman-instagram/ Accessed 27 July 2021
[4] Dessem, M. (2021) ‘Inside, Bo Burnham’s New Special, Captures Just How Badly 2020 Sucked’, Slate, May 31 [Online] Available at https://slate.com/culture/2021/05/bo-burnham-inside-netflix-special-fantastic-good-funny.html Accessed 27 July 2021
[5] boburnham (2021) Welcome to the Internet — Bo Burnham (from “Inside” — ALBUM OUT NOW) [Online] Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=k1BneeJTDcU Accessed 27 July 2021
[6] Bo Burnham (2021) ‘Problematic’, Inside. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/6NBAtnU5ICF7fazEFn2hKL Accessed 27 July 2021
[7] Williams, W. (2021) ‘Bo Burnham’s Inside begs for our parasocial awareness’, Polygon, June 28 [Online] Available at https://www.polygon.com/22553396/bo-burnham-inside-begs-for-our-parasocial-awareness Accessed 27 July 2021
[8] Aldredge, J. (2021) ‘How Bo Burnham Shot His Netflix Special “Inside” with a Lumix S1H’, The Beat, June 3 [Online] Available at https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/bo-burnham-netflix-special-lumix-s1h/ Accessed 27 July 2021
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[47] Donaldson, K. (2021) ‘The Case for Bo Burnham as 2020’s Best Supporting Actor’ [Online] Available at https://www.rogerebert.com/features/the-case-for-bo-burnham-as-2020s-best-supporting-actor Accessed 27 July 2021
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[51] Flourishanyway (2020) ’58 Pop, Rock, and Country Songs About Working, Jobs, and Employment’, Spinditty, April 20 [Online] Available at https://spinditty.com/playlists/Pop-Rock-and-Country-Songs-About-Working-and-Employment Accessed 27 July 2021
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[53] mistyziggy (2021) ‘Bo Burnham: Inside. This is a claustrophobic masterpiece’ Reddit. Available at https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/npc0b6/bo_burnham_inside_this_is_a_claustrophobic/h1lnj70/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 Accessed 27 July 2021
[54] Jammon152 (2021) ‘Megathread #1: Bo’s new Netflix special “Inside”. All personal thoughts and reviews go in here. Spoilers!’ Reddit. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/boburnham/comments/no526d/megathread_1_bos_new_netflix_special_inside_all/h05degq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 Accessed 27 July 2021
Special Thanks
Thanks very much to Greg Dember and Linda Ceriello for your extensive support, feedback and willingness to allow me to publish with the brilliant openly accessible format that is What Is Metamodern?
Thanks, too, to Connor McGurl. I was lucky enough to supervise Connor’s superb practical dissertation project (which merged metamodernism and Bo Burnham) at De Montfort University in 2019, leading to some very interesting, extended discussions regarding post-postmodern authenticity in stand-up comedy.
Thanks, also, to Charlotte Marshall, who’s brilliant lockdown-filmed, existentialist comedy project at the University of East London that I had the pleasure of supervising this year was rudely interrupted by Burnham releasing something *eerily* similar…
This article was a joy to write — in part because of the source material and in part because of the support of a never-openly-bored-of-me-discussing-this-article Bibi Francis. Thank you.
