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Bo Burnham: Inside ‘Inside’
Welcome to another Bo Burnham post. Yes, I might be considered a fan. Not everyone is and that’s fine.
Read on to find out why Inside is so brilliant and why the collection of edits ‘from the cutting room floor’, The Inside Outtakes, is not just a view into the bloopers and the process, but almost another version of Inside. These aren’t the only reasons why Bo Burnham is hilarious, but they are some of them and certainly a good beginning as to why you should enjoy his comedy.
Cal Yarborough was a farmer. A widower and old, he was living alone on his farm. While he was in the hospital, his children used their power-of-attorney to sell the farm and settle him at Sun City, a Central Texas retirement community.
Despite my best efforts—watching 
Before the pandemic, I’d perform on cruise ships every few weeks. It’s a great gig: well-paying, responsive audiences and an opportunity to visit places as diverse as Ushuaia and Singapore. While I’m certain that restrictions such as lockdowns impacted others more than me, they certainly changed my life significantly. Much of it was for the good: I began spending more time with my wife and children than ever. I learned to cook – and to love it. I spent months intensely rehabilitating an injury to my foot and then seamlessly transitioning to another rehab after surgery on my knee, culminating in the completion of my second marathon. (Pro-tip: getting physically stronger is the closest thing to a cure-all for aches and pains.) I’m now again fully fit and looking forward to our family’s skiing trip.
Remember that episode of The Simpsons where Homer becomes a judge for a film festival and is bowled over by a short film showing Hans Moleman take a football to the groin? Paramount Pictures has just released a film for those of us who laughed with, not at, Homer.
Ghostbusters (1984) is not a kid’s movie. Or to the extent that it is it’s by happenstance. Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis weren’t thinking of toy lines and Saturday morning cartoons when they wrote a script about schlubby middle-aged men running a startup in pre-Giuliani New York. We loved it as kids because of Slimer, proton packs, Ecto-1, Zuul, and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. We were oblivious to the jokes about mortgages and oral sex. It would take years before we appreciated Bill Murray’s charming indifference. Using “we” in this context might be presumptuous. As Ghostbusters: Afterlife shows, some people never moved beyond “proton packs are cool.”
Once upon a time, political priors were no match for a great comedy – funny was funny. Today many great jokes elicit an anxious over-the-shoulder glance to ensure that the culture’s tastemakers – or your firm’s 22-year-old social media intern – don’t disapprove. Rolling with it is a thing of the past.
