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MENTAL HEALTH | CREATIVITY | SOCIAL MEDIA
Why Comedian-Singer-Songwriter-Director Bo Burnham’s Inside Special Hits So Close to Home
And how the pandemic quarantine and questions about what’s real online and off contributed to a work of art like no other
Since it dropped about three weeks ago, the 90-minute Netflix special Inside by U.S. comedian-singer-songwriter-director Bo Burnham has been reviewed in more than two dozen online outlets. The basic facts of the special were intriguing enough to garner media attention as Burnham — a well-known comedian since he was 18 — was its sole writer, director, performer, and editor over a year of COVID-19 pandemic quarantine. But there’s so much more to it than that.
Inside Inside
One of the best Inside reviews I’ve read is the Guardian article “How Bo Burnham’s Netflix special Inside set the bar for quarantine art” by arts journalist Adrian Horton. As Horton puts it, Inside “captures something near-universal about the enervating, jittery, fractured experience of the last year, in which our digital lives far outpaced our IRL ones.” She adds that Inside is “an anguished, ambivalent journey whose intense self-focus gives viewers license to trace their own…
