 Last November, I started working on what I intended to be my final video of 2020 and also my second ever 10 out of 10 review of Bo Burnham's Make Happy. It wasn't the first time I had thought about how to describe at length my favorite comedy special in the odd place that it occupies in my life, but it was the first time I made a serious effort at doing so. I very nearly attended the taping at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York on December 11, 2015, invited and then not by someone who was helping fuel the quarter-life crisis I had found myself in the midst of and who may actually be the person heckling Burnham early on in the recording. In retrospect, I am grateful that I was uninvited. When I saw it on Netflix some months removed from those events, several songs still hit too close to home and I heard them at the time, but life goes on and while Make Happy will still bring me to places I don't love being, I no longer spend hours with can't handle this open parenthesis Kanye Rand closed parenthesis on repeat, thinking about being the skinny kid with a steadily declining mental health trying to make his handful of friends feel some of those things he's numb to. And sure, when I shifted to YouTube the second half of the line took on a very different meaning and I can't pretend like it wasn't ever true or that longtime viewers of the channel haven't seen my mental state move like a fucking meme stock over the last year, but I have long since worked through that point in my life, primarily via a pair of one-man shows that would have been central to the review that I didn't write. Instead, they became key to my actual second 10 out of 10 review of Derek DelGaudio's In and Of Itself because art is how I work through shit, a sentiment that I have repeated ad fucking nauseam lately and you would think that I would be over this stupidly introspective bullshit. But then I was in the middle of having another existential crisis this time caused by John Green's The Anthropocene Review when I opened up Netflix and all of a sudden Bo Burnham had dropped something new, a beautifully produced solo project made over the course of a year whose first half is extensively focused on being a straight white man on the internet using content as a coping mechanism and also turning 30. Hello by the way and welcome to the week air view you can call me a straight white man now months away from 30 and today I am talking about that project inside and to give the same warning that Netflix does when you load up the show it's going to be some language and discussion of suicide. To save you some time though I never actually explain why the latter part of this is true inside is a better comedy special than make happy but it means less to me today than make happy did five years ago and it's not just that inside is better than make happy it is also better than all of the other comedy specials by all of the other comedians in fact it is the best comedy special and I don't say that lightly. Assassination Nation is my favorite movie but it is not the best one you know and it doesn't matter that I haven't seen every comedy special but to explain why we have to talk about whether inside is at its core a comedy special at all. On the one hand yeah duh Bo Burnham repeatedly calls it one in what feels like vloggy status updates pepper throughout saying I've been working on this special for insert amount of time here and I have long held the view that something is art if the creator claims it is trying to define art out from underneath an artist is some gatekeeping bullshit that I am not here for so since its creator thinks of it as a thing it's that thing and therefore I can safely call it that thing and also the best one. On the other hand it is kind of unfair on all sides to put any other special against it to say that inside is a better comedy special than George Carlin at USC might be true but what the fuck does it mean and obviously I could have put a thousand names there but George Carlin's death is the only celebrity passing that actually made me cry and Burnham has referenced him a few times in the lyrics over the years and also he's go unquestionably his importance to and impact on comedy is unmistakable and unassailable and that will probably end up being true about Bo Burnham as well but at the same time I can't imagine anything in inside will have the broad cultural impact of the seven words you can't say on television nothing he says will do as much for the form as Lenny Bruce's highly publicized obscenity trial he sings about whether comedy is even appropriate at this moment in history but Hannah Gadsby's Nanette made massive waves a few years ago as she pled her case against it albeit for very different reasons and while Burnham does dip his toe into some of the societal commentary that he has largely avoided until now it doesn't have nearly the impact of Dave Chappelle going deep on the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in 846 but so what the reality is that inside has basically nothing in common with any of those while they all have something in common with each other their traditional stand-up Nanette may have broken comedy or whatever but it did so straightforwardly a person standing on a stage facing out to an adoring crowd facing back the vast majority of specials follow the exact same beats cute little intro scene 45 to 90 minutes of jokes i'm only talking about hour longs here because obviously when you're dealing with shorter performances everything's just a little lower key and then either a cute little outro scene or just a cut to black from an empty stage and obviously there is more that can be done there Kevin Hart's recording of what now which actually played in movie theaters begins with the full-on comedy short Zach Galifianakis live at the purple onion has stand-up intercut with other little sketches that are sometimes more relevant than others. Chelsea Peretti's one of the greats does weird fun things like having her look offstage to see herself dressed in a clown suit heckling herself heck bo bernum has included jokes about editing in his previous live specials to remind people that what they're watching is a construction all specials are despite how they appear these things are rarely just a single performance start to finish there are exceptions of course like a tony hinge cliffs one shot which was filmed in one shot i assume i didn't particularly enjoy that special and shut it off after 20 minutes but it probably kept going but by in large multiple shows are done in a night or over a couple nights at the same venue and the best bits of each get cut together shooting a special over time is much rarer it happens of course with the most famous example likely being chris rocks killed the messenger which contains the same material performed on three separate continents and also crowd work shows like david tells and todd barry's which were assembled from four and seven cities respectively but generally this is the purview of specials that function as like stand-up documentary hybrids that make a point of putting together different shows as part of the narrative some recent examples include ester pavitsky's hot for my name or they literally just released last Tuesday half my life by chris gethard whose career suicide was the best thing i saw in 2016 and is easily in my top five comedy specials some folks have called inside a sort of special documentary hybrid as well but even if we take what it's showing us at face value which we absolutely shouldn't and i will talk about that in a bit inside is to your typical comedy documentary what jafar panahis this is not a film is to your typical documentary documentary at some point we're just not talking about documentaries anymore but i am even less qualified to answer the question of what is a documentary than what is a comedy special so i'm just going to leave that thought there charting the progression of bo bernum as a comedian is fascinating because he has been in the public eye for so long now and started at such a young age he began on youtube as a teenager and made his first hour words words words at only 19 and going back to it you can hear the seeds of ideas that would eventually be the center piece of his work words words words is a pretty straightforward hour of comedy with a much heavier focus on stand-up than its successors songs break up the talking and not the other way around but while it is largely just a clever if sometimes problematic hour it does take a hard turn into the genuinely self-reflective with the song art is dead that he immediately undercuts by finishing off with some more crowd-pleasing stuff but with hindsight that reversion feels like a hedge like he didn't know if he could really pull it off and needed more confidence to commit to it and i can relate because i have done the exact same thing so fucking many times but we'll get there point is he was going half ass on something that he would eventually use his whole ass for 2013's what is much more theatrical than its predecessor something you realize on the first frame as someone who would leave netflix running in his pocket and manually scrub through to listen to tracks from make happy on repeat before realizing that several of them were on youtube and i could just watch them that way i definitely wish that his later work was on spotify or whatever but i get that most of what he's doing at this point just doesn't translate if you only listen to what which did get an audio release you spend the first nine and change minutes unable to comprehend what is actually an extended visual gag with the occasional auditory joke on top of it some sections are fine but the stuff that matters aren't pieces like the intro left brain right brain we think we know you are very difficult to parse out of context something he actually calls out in the audio version and make happy would be so much worse given that in many ways it feels like a realization of a joke that he had made in words words words i'm not a comedian i'm an artist i don't make comedy shows i make one man shows and i mean that's a blurry fucking line these days mic burbiglia's 2013 special my girlfriend's boyfriend was really my first introduction to this sort of hybridization of comedy with a serious narrative but burbiglia had actually performed his previous set sleepwalk with me off broadway which like that's a whole other thing and it is possible to distinguish between them by checking for a through line is it a series of jokes or does everything tie together in a grand narrative burbiglia's sets tend to do the latter but they are still classified more broadly as comedy specials and why shouldn't they be why would you make comedy smaller following make happy bernum went on a public hiatus from performances that he actually addresses and inside in a really heartbreaking way but he didn't leave the world of comedy entirely obviously he went to hollywood made the rightly beloved eighth grade and did some acting besides but he continued doing behind the scenes work elsewhere directing two specials for other comedians eight for jared car michael and tambourine for chris rock obviously comedy specials are not a director's medium but it's not as though they have no impact at all earlier this year rock released a new version of that show on netflix called total blackout with his own name in the credits rather than bernum's and it adds in you know 30 something minutes of material that was cut out by the former director and also makes some significant changes to the way that the same scenes play out the new york times has a really interesting breakdown of how the two are different and really emphasizes what bernum brought to rock stand up on a more than superficial level neither tambourine nor eight are flashy like a bow bernum performance but they have the same sort of cinematic sensibilities using light and staging in a much more subtle way but one that still maximizes their effect and in such interesting locations too eight is shot in the round at the masonic hall in new york staging a man in denim and untied workboots looking out onto a crowd of people in formal wear tambourine was shot at bam in brooklyn to a crowd of hundreds rather than rocks typical of thousands and those venue choices inform the show's insignificant ways which just feels refreshing obviously the vibe of a show is completely different when it's shot in gotham comedy club versus madison square garden but it typically feels like the choice of location is a reflection of an artist's popularity rather than the intimacy of the set these two specials go hard in the other direction putting chris rock mere feet away from the front row means something being in a venue where most of the people are looking down on him means something putting on eight a show that includes climate change ambivalence the rejection of children as a concept and the general indictment of any man who was a husband before the 1980s in the home of the freemasons means something and i get that in shows that aren't so serious there's no real benefit to a meaningful venue but maybe i just want more shows that are serious and it's not like i'm not getting them or that they're not out there and this uh therapy with the jokes movement definitely feels like it has gained serious ground and i have listened to a whole bunch and listed many of them without mentioning daniel sloss one of my favorite comedians and a guy who has seriously impacted how i think about comedy and fucking life and to the point that i was just making i think x was more impactful in the smaller setting i saw it performed in than the huge space that was used for the actual taping of course i did comedy that's just a bunch of goofs but although i actually thought that nate bergatsis sat at 2019's new york comedy week was the best of the three that i saw it was the only one i didn't review because quite frankly i didn't have much to say other than that was a good time i just had and indeed i haven't thought much about that since and if we are tbhig i haven't thought a ton about the ones i did review either certainly not to the extent that i've thought about x or career suicide in x daniel sloss makes a joke about how his specials are often like an hour of comedy followed by a 15 minute ted talk and if we're thinking in the abstract again what's the difference between a biographical ted talk and one of these more serious specials power points hannah gadsby uses a power point in douglas to explain art history so maybe it's pretension bo bernum has clearly thought about this too during inside second song comedy we see him looking at a whiteboard that breaks down the current state of the industry in movies two hour indie dramedy zero laughs tv mockumentaries about how fun it is to serve the state social media sexually pranking unsuspecting women at public beaches stand up interesting virgins doing ted talks nice but bernum dropped the pretentious character that joked about being an artist and not a comedian in his 20s by make happy he was saying virtually the opposite he is an entertainer an overpaid member of the service industry and someone who you should toss aside the instant that he stops entertaining you don't defend him against detractors and certainly don't follow him off a cliff he doesn't know that you exist and it doesn't matter he needs to prove himself anew every single time which is why he can never rest on his laurels and he hasn't been even if inside seems to begin where make happy left off in that show after telling the audience that he hopes they're happy which i've always hated because most of the many many times i've listened to the kanya rant i haven't been bernum goes into a small room that we imagine to be a green room or something the final song are you happy is one done by himself and honestly to himself it's pretty bleak but when it ends we see sunlight coming in from around the door and he opens it to reveal his backyard and his girlfriend and their dog coming to meet him it's a nice moment even if we are left wondering how he really feels about the whole thing five years later we return to that same room with lights spilling in around the door there's a different piano and some new furniture but it is unmistakably the same place bernum comes in and you are struck by how big he is compared to this small spot something you didn't have time to internalize before the music starts and we are treated to a very different image bernum with a face full of hair lit by a single light off to his side he's staring at the floor stone faced and dead even as he begins to sing the camera zooms out real slow like and in a beautiful moment he sets the tone for the next 87 minutes the lyrics reveal that he has made us some content as he clicks on the headlamp that has been sitting at his forehead and points it towards the ceiling it hits a disco ball that has just come into frame and the room lights up and we know that whatever the hell this content is it is going to be wildly creative and visually stunning bernum calls himself daddy and says to open wide i was hooked for the next 87 minutes he will be in that room and we will be there with him it turns out to not just be a room but a full studio complete with a kitchen bathroom and even a pullout bed therefore everything one would need in order to survive the quarantine as someone who spent 2020 with another person in less than 400 square feet of new york city real estate i feel confident in that assessment and there is certainly some lying bio mission here it is not like he actually stayed in this room 24 7365 he never acknowledges the fact that actually he has a big old house and that same loving girlfriend and probably dog as well and so isn't actually alone in this space for a year but that doesn't mean he doesn't feel that alone and i'm sure he does and in those moments their presence may actually make things feel worse by the same token he neglects to mention in a song that sure he built a birdhouse with his mom when he was 27 but he also released a critically acclaimed film and while acknowledging that would undermine what he's saying it's slightly frustrates someone who at 27 did very little of consequence but again it is important to remember that all of this is a construction and oh what a construction it is the disco ball was just the beginning next we see camera and lighting tests where he subtly flexes his professionalism by using an actual measuring tape to determine focus instead of the focus peaking that the rest of us use if we use anything more than autofocus he plays with wall lights and lights on stands and lights in hands and it reminded me a lot of times that i have set up lights on this channel staring into my monitor as i tested out some of my more complex or dramatic setups and through it we zoom in on a panasonic lumix s1h when i saw the lumix logo against that sweet sweet shallow focus i figured he had to be using a variant of the full frame s1 rather than the more common micro four thirds gh series and i specifically assumed the s1h because it's 6k shooting capabilities would allow for these sorts of long digital zooms that give the image dynamism throughout inside while still delivering netflix is required for k comparing this shot to the fronts of both cameras confirmed my hunch because of the front dial around the shutter button which isn't present on the stills focused s1h though i could have just saved myself the time by looking at the list of ridiculously specific requirements that netflix imposes on filmmakers and seeing that the s1h is literally the only camera of its type allowed on the platform and with a four thousand dollar msrp that is hardly a starter camera but it's also not like he's pulling an mkb hd and shooting on a red or even like a canon c series cinema camera i would guess that all of the gear he's using comes out to between 10 and $15,000 but you could decently approximate that kit for much less which gets to a sort of meta discussion that i think is important to address sooner than later i fully believe that inside will be used by a segment of the population as fodder for the argument that you can do anything if you put your mind to it look what bo bernum did with an empty room and a few thousand dollars worth of gear he wrote shot directed and edited this incredible piece what is your excuse i fucking hate that argument and it made me think a bit about a good tweet that went viral in a bad way earlier this year the entire account was deleted shortly afterwards probably because elijah would will actually did this tweet and twitter is a cesspool but i found it by the wayback machine so good for me it reads stop fucking saying you can shoot it on an iphone no you fucking can't tangerine had a budget and a custom fitted anamorphic lens adapter retire this example you are gaslighting filmmakers because you are really saying you don't want it bad enough shut the fuck up the argument that at some point a person needs to stop talking about a thing and eventually try to just do it makes sense when you are looking to start a youtube channel or maybe do a short film you can shoot those things on an iphone or whatever other cheap camera it's been done before and will be done again but you definitely won't get it on netflix and the feature films that have been shot on iphone that you have heard of your tangerines and unsanes they aren't suddenly possible for the masses just because a phone takes pretty good video now those films had 100,000 and 1.5 million dollar budgets respectively if they had been shot on a medium priced slr or mirrorless camera the budgets would have been virtually the same pointing to a film like tangerine and saying they did it why can't you also fundamentally misses the fact that it took a white guy to tell the story of two black trans women inside caused much less in dollar terms but it was made by someone who had the time to dedicate to it unlike most of the people stuck inside twiddling their thumbs during the last year bo bernum did not have to stress about his next paycheck throughout the pandemic he was perhaps still is mentally in a bad place but that is a very different kind of stress than a lot of people have been under there have been a million articles about the fact that the push for pandemic productivity was dangerous and the fact that bo bernum made something amazing during this time does not change that one iota but at the same time i think it serves as an interesting marker of where so-called pandemic art might go in the years to come i've been saying privately since last july that i think good pandemic art will come in retrospect but that i think it will exist i know others disagree and i do agree that this whole thing has been all bad with no discernible silver lining but there are a lot of purely bad things that have inspired great art it matters what the art centers on for example a few weeks ago i went to my first live theatrical production in a year and i'm still working out how to write about it because it's not just pandemic art in that it was conceived and executed during the last year it's also about a pandemic not the one we've all been living through though one nonetheless and that is certainly a way to go but it's not the only one and it's not where bo bernum went thank fuck instead he went deep on the way that society reacted with an obvious emphasis on his and my generation although he is not very online in the way that he was when he was younger he clearly has an intuitive understanding of how social media works which allows him to effectively critique it without sounding like a fucking boomer and perhaps ironically and definitely unfortunately it probably helps that he's depressed a few weeks ago i saw a headline that i can no longer find about the glut of suicide adjacent content on tiktok and the issues around moderation the next time i scrolled my for you page i became keenly aware of how chock full it was of teens and 20 something's joking about unaliving themselves and i thought huh i guess they were right and went right back on to liking all of them so that i would stay on the fun part of tiktok shortly thereafter i was listening to la di di by nessa barrett featuring jiksten and for the first time i thought about the fact that not 20 seconds into the song barrett sings i'll be dead at 27 only nine more years to go and that a few weeks prior i had been rocking out to smart death's track she told me to kill myself on repeat for days the second line of which is as if i hadn't been working on it and when bo bernum says that he hopes that maybe inside can do for us what it did for him i keep him distracted from the desire to put a bullet into his brain i thought yeah that makes sense with only the vaguest awareness that that's probably not a good thing now let us be clear that i am not at this point in my life particularly enticed by the idea of killing myself but i definitely have been it's something i talked a bit about in my review of dear Evan Hansen which someone recently told me sounded disingenuous and that they didn't believe me but that's their baggage i guess i don't know even if the last year had been all peachy keen enough of my late teen to adult life has been spent around the edge that the idea that someone wouldn't periodically think about it seems a whole lot weirder to me than the other way around and so when i watch tiktoks that joke about it or songs that croon about it or whatever else it's like duh the world is fucked how are you supposed to cope with it an entire generation replaces the laugh cry emoji with a skull that's how and given that mental health has long been a key part of bo bernum's work of course suicide has been as well most explicitly with the song kill yourself from make happy that satirizes big anthemic songs like katie perry's roar which does take some time to say that it is a serious epidemic and anyone who is actually considering self-harm should seek help which to be clear is correct if that is you please talk to someone about it but if you get your courage from over produced pop bullshit and of course this is a joke he apologizes for it literally as soon as the song ends and clarifies that he doesn't actually think people should kill themselves point is it's something that's come up before but when it appears inside it's different for one thing he's pretty much always talking about in relation to himself and how he's feeling that thing that i just said where i clarified that actually i don't really want to die bernum does that too but it takes a much darker turn as he fails to find the words that might comfort someone who is struggling with issues of their own but he wants you to understand that it is all part of the show even on top of the insincere insincerity in this rant there's the art of it all he's projecting this clip onto himself clearly months later given the difference in beard length and the face of the present shows us nothing at all i mentioned before that bo bernum has long brought attention to the construction of his performances and that is even truer here though it is a bit more subtle back in make happy bernum made very clear that nothing he's saying is actually true after faking out the audience with a not improvised improv song he tells them i am not honest for a second up here if you want to see an honest comedian go see the rest of them we already discussed how the entire premise that he is alone during all this is false but it doesn't stop there throughout we are shown what seem to be bits of rehearsal or mistakes but there is no way that the restart we see in stuck in a room was done organically or the one more at its end a bit in the back half where he breaks down because he doesn't know what to say forcing him to storm all the way across the studio to turn off the camera because he put the camera about as far away as we have seen in the room more crowded than we've ever seen is so clearly staged to make that storming as dramatic as possible and that sounds kind of cynical but it's not the seams in the production help bring us into his headspace in songs that are more overtly comedic like white woman's instagram or the 80s inspired banger problematic you aren't being shown a cable stream floor or how he sets up and changes his lights in the moment your full attention is on the goofs but when the mood shifts everything gets a little less clean and none of this is an accident or a mistake the idea that he actually turned 30 in his studio alone and just so happened to perfectly time his monologue as the clock approached midnight is ludicrous i'm sure there are a dozen takes or more where he stares the clock just a moment too long or too short but seeing that would hurt the show and dishonest is not the same as inauthentic i'm sure that most of these seemingly secret glimpses into his emotional state are at least inspired by what was happening when the camera wasn't running and so he put in the most interesting version of them on screen just because your tears are fake doesn't mean you don't feel like crying and in considering authenticity i think it becomes clear that inside at least for the first two-thirds or so is a peak into an alternate universe where bo bernum still had a youtube channel in the year of our lord 2020 like every other aspect of his career had followed the same track but he had just kept posting or maybe started up again once he got stuck inside he warns us early on that this thing that may as well be a channel trailer the whole thing is is going to be kind of all over the place which you know relatable and he is right we get a funny song and then a weird meta sketch and then a guy sitting and talking to his camera and then blending of those produced by one guy in one place feels like youtube and that's not to say that inside should have been a curated playlist on a youtube channel while the satirizations of reaction videos or let's plays might hit a little harder if they had been done on the platforms that they were skewering your relationship to this video is obviously much different than it would be if the exact same thing had been posted to netflix for one thing but a lot more people would still be watching this far into the video being on netflix doesn't quite mean what it used to as the plot of content has made any given release on the platform less interesting than it was five years ago but i know that when i sit down on the couch to watch 87 minutes on netflix i'm planning on sitting there for 87 minutes and watching the whole thing dang my attention might wane at times but i'm in it to win it and that is not true at all on youtube i regularly watch very long videos on this year platform but i watch them on my laptop or my phone as i am doing other things unless it's a big release from someone like contra points or tim rogers i will almost certainly start and stop and put my laptop down and forget i was watching the video and end up with a half dozen partly finished videos among the several dozen open youtube tabs that i know deep down that i will never get through but i just can't bring myself to close and that's just how it is like it is it is pretty impressive if you have made it this far but i imagine that even you probably aren't super dedicated to watching this video when you realize that the intro was a gorgeous fluke and instead of a regular video essay it is just some loser talking to you for a really fucking long time you probably started treating it like a podcast maybe you're in the shower or in your car or someone else's car i'm not your mom i don't know your fucking life but inside deserves to be given your full attention and seen in its entirety with maybe a single break at its intermission it is definitely the case that some bits land better than others but this isn't like saturday night live where you're just better off watching the handful of good sketches on youtube each sunday and it is unfortunate that so many people will do exactly that now have done exactly that in the immediate wake of the show's release i saw rips of virtually every song recommended to me on youtube my tiktok for you page has been flooded with clips and comments as well and of course there are a few that show up more than others because some of the songs are more broadly digestible but i fully agree that welcome to the internet was the right piece for bernham to post to his own channel to rep the show i think it is better in context with the whole special but it gains new meaning being on a platform that has had such an outsize role in giving everyone everything all of the time netline certainly means more on youtube than it does on netflix and speaking of politics the most obvious bit to be clipped was in fact the first one i saw bernham's performance with soco the sock puppet called how the world works in it he sings a pretend children's song about how the world is built on all life coming together in this incredibly superficial way before his anti-capitalist hand costume well actually is the fuck out of him the tiktok showed only the latter with the caption where's the lie and actually i want to make a small but important critique here because when i was watching the special i was immediately reminded of a broader discourse thing that i don't know the name of and honestly i'm not politically pure enough to make but oh well so soco initially presents as an incredibly reasonable and factually accurate puppet with a statement that the version of history we've been taught is just false and that the world is built with blood and genocide and exploitation great but then he moves into conspiracy the fbi killed mlk and lefty talking points that a lot of people need jerk reject like private properties inherently theft i believe that bo bernham thinks that the history that we are taught in schools is bad i don't believe that he believes that every single politician and cop is working to protect the interests of the pedophilic corporate elite but he puts those two things in the same verse of a song and depending on the beliefs that you bring into the show you will hear it in radically different ways a few years back i worked with a guy who was probably in dc on january 6th and before i really understood how far gone he was i engaged him in a few political discussions in which he would just troll me by doing things like lumping snopes and mother jones in with the onion and though this tiktok was being shared on the lefty side of the app i could just as easily see him posting the exact same thing with a different caption claiming it was actually aimed at the left and look how dumb these people are believing all of this bullshit that said this doesn't really matter because it isn't really the point of the bit what it first seems to be a critique of oppression quickly reveals itself to be a demonstration of it the literal puppeteer asks what to do and the puppet becomes frustrated at being forced to teach basic humanity to a rich white guy but as things become more pointed the puppeteer becomes angry and literally figuratively pummels them into submission threatening them with the void that they exist in any time he doesn't see fit to offer them a platform and when the puppet has calmed down and accepted their place well the puppeteer forces them off anyway because of course he does this all feeds into a pretty constant theme in bernum's work throughout his career about his place in the world and now his place in a moment with increasing unrest and public division epitomized by one of the show's first lines what can a white guy do while still getting paid and being the center of attention i'm not in this for the money but we can't pretend like my self-centered youtube channel on which i pretend to review things so that i can talk about myself is not a function of my self-centeredness and i am super aware of it and can pretend that makes it okay but as bernum says self-awareness does not absolve anybody of anything and yet why shut up when i can just not do that a straight white man have collectively had the floor for hundreds of years but what about me and my guess is that on some level you're bothered by what i just said while also being conflicted because like you're a lot of fucking minutes into this so you have clearly accepted the idea that this particular white guy must have something worth saying at least some of the time sucks right it's not like any of this is new but the fact that bernum is using not just comedy but musical comedy means it just sticks in your head so much more and one of the fundamental differences between inside and the previous specials is that the songs feel so much more like songs many of them are longer and he goes back to the chorus much more than usual occasionally to the detriment of the show's pacing like i'd bop to this shit for sure and lines like making a literal difference metaphorically with its descending melody is going to be in my head forever in a way that that exact line told flat just what in and of course i wish that there was an album so i could bop but the visuals do so much to make the points land far more concretely than they ever could on stage all of the beautiful design was crucial to make happy success and there are a handful of moments where it gets to be the center of attention but while the Kanye rant is visually stunning the effects aren't part of the joke there's only so much you can do in a live setting but with inside the imagery itself can be in on the joke is in on the joke and bernum takes full advantage of his ability to craft every single image into something amazing whether that's a quick insert gag or changing colors and aspect ratios using lights in visually striking ways plus ever since i watched zarda's in sophomore year of college i have felt like projections are a woefully underused form and clearly bernum agrees because dude goes fucking hard with them and also everything this whole thing goes hard while writing i saw this tiktok where a white woman compares her actual instagram photos to the mocking setups he did in white woman's instagram and ouch but the fact that i think that maybe inside's most gorgeous bit probably means i am unironically into that aesthetic which but what else was he going to do other comedians have released specials during quarantine like marylyn ryskub's live from the pandemic where she's just standing in her garage in front of some colored lights and doing her thing and that's fine a bit awkward but fine but bow bernum has never been a traditional stand-up he has been known and lauded for the complexity and precision of his design and that was before he was a celebrated feature film director if bow bernum made live from the pandemic in a garage or even like a facsimile of his childhood bedroom it would it'd be weird like i'm sure it would be funny and whatever but anyone tuning in would be at least confused and almost certainly disappointed five years waiting after make happy for that plus it's not like he released the thing for free on youtube the way he did what back in 2013 you probably do have a netflix subscription but that shit is getting more expensive every year and cheaper competitors are making that number harder and harder to justify and i'm not saying that inside needs to single-handedly justified the monthly cost but it's also not like he could just slap something together and put it out even if he had wanted to and we all know that he didn't because how could he going back to the awkwardness thing by keeping the performance dynamic and visually interesting he is able to largely avoid the very strange silences that plagued a lot of regular comedians who went virtual over the last year and we saw some people who figured it out and a lot of people who didn't so much because it is hard to sit here alone in a room and make jokes because if someone says a punchline in a forest and there is no one around to hear it it's not really a joke comedy requires at least two people but so much of what you see on youtube is asynchronous as bernum says early on it is just me and my camera and you and your screen the way our lord always intended that's the internet right with maybe the sole exception of good mythical mourning where the crew is on set to be the laugh track this year platform consists of people joking into a void but for that reason the jokes are different and we've all gotten used to it but youtube comedy is not comedy special comedy and so bernum asks does anyone want a joke when no one's laughing in the background and i come up with one answer drew michael in 2018 michael released his self-titled special on hbo directed by jared car michael of age directed by bo bernum fame this special feels exactly two years ahead of its time because it is a comedy special done without an audience michael stands alone against a black background not entirely dissimilar from the one that was featured in my recent videos shouting into a literal rather than figure to void the only time we ever see another person is with the occasional cut to a skype or whatever conversation that he is having with a woman who we see in close-up in her own colored void some unknown distance away these calls exist outside of the monologue though fundamentally this is just an hour of him in a dark room with the camera that he is talking to about a wide variety of subjects such as disability brussel sprouts suicide herpes and incest so much about incest and he's saying this to no one by choice michael and car michael together came up with the idea because they felt it would make the special stand out and just generally compliment the material again car michael saw great success with eight and the staging really does play into its impact and the same is true here to an even greater degree a comedy show to a crowd of suits is odd a comedy show to absolutely no one is bananas and it's worth knowing that his material was tested in the usual way performed in clubs to see what worked and did it in watching it you can feel where the laughs would have been and also the types of laughs that there were which isn't really the case with inside though bernum actually uses a laugh track a few times as someone who has been to an anthony jesslemick show i can perfectly imagine the increasing hysteria in the audience as michael goes deeper and deeper on the idea that life would just be way easier if everyone would marry their moms because hey you already love each other but it's not there instead it's just a dude yelling at you about it and that hits real different a lot of comedy taken out of context of the performance is pretty unhinged but you don't realize it until the audience is taken away you can't understand how critical audience reaction is to your impression of a comedy special until you've seen it done without one but it works here because it is depicting a man losing his fucking mind drew michael ends with a braiding that reminded me a whole heck of a lot of my second one-man show honesty is being open and being vulnerable it's not just standing in front of everyone and telling them that you fucking suck he's told you've constructed this whole elaborate way to never change where is the funny none of this has been funny but of course he wrote that he may not have said the words but they were his and it's that exact sort of thing that folks like he and i and bo bernum uses a second level con by calling ourselves out on our bullshit we're not just stopping criticism in its tracks we're getting the people who rightly saw through the bullshit to think hey you know what at least he gets it and then they he prays upon us while we sit hoping that no one goes down to that next level insides best meta joke a reaction video that goes on about four times longer than one would expect forces him to confront his motivations and acknowledge the artificiality of each layer of performance as the cosmic horror of the slightly delayed feed of his current existence just keeps being streamed in and that probably won't mean as much to you as it does to me but you can still just enjoy the joke when it is a joke i kind of lied to you like 45 minutes ago or whatever when i said that bo bernum referred to inside as a comedy special he doesn't he just calls it a special now comedy may be implied but as with everything else the lack of a word is intentional there are a lot of genuine laugh out loud moments in inside that anyone can enjoy but there's at least as much that requires you to have at some point been in a headspace like the one he is in to really appreciate it a lot of this stuff would probably be pretty off-putting to a lot of folks and sometimes the punchlines clearly aren't looking for a laugh there's a substantial turning point in the last third ish with the song funny feeling which hints at dozens of jokes without ever actually making one it is the point where inside becomes most like a traditional special while also being the point where it stops trying to be funny a week out from my first watch in a couple days from my second this is also where i keep finding myself returning aside from the complete watches i have spent hours replaying individual segments both because i wanted to make sure that i was quoting things right and accurately representing what i was seeing for this you know monstrosity but also because i just fucking wanted to like i don't know if i've been clear enough that inside is really really good but the ones that i have been returning to for myself haven't been those youtube type bits i talked at length about the sketch with soco and could have talked at least as long about problematic but when i think about what moment i want to be there with i keep coming back to the same place hands up open parenthesis eyes on me close parenthesis it's fitting because that song is inside's equivalent to make happy's kanya rant which i will reiterate i have watched well over 100 times at this point a big show stopping number that makes heavy use of vocal effects and serves as the emotional peak after which things quiet down and we get one final song played at the piano it also contains the line that stuck with me most of the entire show now i'm not sure that anyone has ever said anything that has struck me in quite the way that bo bernum did when he said something i paraphrased way back at the beginning of this come and watch the skinny kid with a steadily declining mental health and laugh as he attempts to give you what he cannot give himself me that was me in many ways it still is the last year it's definitely felt like that at times and inside is full of incredible lines even if none of them drill down into my soul like that one did on wednesday a facebook friend posted a quote from funny feelings which immediately proceeds hands up the whole world at your fingertips the ocean at your door and like fuck what a beautifully evocative image one that is so reflective of what this last year has felt like especially for millennials and gen z we were supposed to go out and change the world everything is there for me but i can't open the door and it's about so much more than the pandemic the ocean is capitalism and systemic oppression it's also just the fucking ocean and it was the return of that image in the next song that really hit me after an incredibly depressing interlude where bernum talks about his hiatus from live performance he says you say the ocean's rising like i give a shit you say the whole world's ending honey it already did you're not going to slow it heaven knows you tried got it good now get inside i recently come to see myself as an ambivalent nihilist i genuinely don't want to believe that not only is all of this meaningless but also i am meaningless and yet the ocean's rising and it's raging and there's fuck all any of us can do to stop it i am constantly fighting against the impulse to just shut down because the world is so fucked and even if one aspect of it is getting better plenty else is getting worse how to care even when you know that you have no power is one of the key questions of this moment and it is one that i have struggled with for as long as i have thought about anything outside of myself i spent a year inside for the greater good and yet nearly 600 000 americans are dead would it have been more if i hadn't if i just gone down south and partnered with all the other 20-somethings who didn't give a shit probably not 2020 made clear that collective action is the only kind that matters and also that individualism continues to reign so what do you do make a comedy special clip it for tiktok review it on youtube comment on the youtube review anything to remind the world that you exist that's all this is but please keep your eyes on me thank you so much for watching thank you particularly to my patrons my mom hammering marco katsarikata benjamin shiff anthony kohl magnolia dentin eliot fowler greg lucina kojo phil bates willow i am the sword tomatown one timmo and the folks would rather be read than said if you like this video that's great if not oh well if you want to see more please subscribe i hope to see in the next one