Inside review: Bo Burnham’s Netflix comedy special is fiercely inventive, but has little to elevate its dryness

Blue eyes, blonde hair, pale face, Bo Burnham wrote, shot, directed, and edited his comedy special Inside in a room — two windows to the left, a kitchenette behind, a door in front shorter than Burnham’s 6’5’’, and a pit of snake-like wires on the floor for the various lights, the flashes, the keyboard, the mic, etc. Burnham takes the isolation involved in creating, the isolation created by participating in the internet culture morphing oneself into filtered, interesting digital dust, and makes it indistinguishable from the isolation one feels during the pandemic. He takes various cliches, the “Deadpool self-awareness”, the self-effacement, puppetry, reaction videos, PewdiePie’s narrations, fireside singing in a wooded forest, the faux-edgy takes and runs with it. He doesn’t say anything new, wrapping the known in inventive phrasing — he calls the internet, “everything all of the time”, conjuring a chaos that is made accessible the second we split open our laptop or switch on our phones.