An Inside job: lockdown has finally been turned into the stuff of irresistible art

I n the spring, I wrote about a wariness surrounding art that reflects on the pandemic – and how we nonetheless need to address it culturally in order to process it psychologically. I wrote mostly about novels and painting and only addressed comedy and performance in passing, so, while to an extent I feel vindicated by the release of Inside, the US comedian Bo Burnham’s Netflix special that was written, edited, shot and directed all by him, alone in a studio over the course of more than a year, I also feel chastened. After seeing it, it feels obvious that comedy – and musical comedy at that – is ideally suited to the strange times in which we find ourselves. Not that you could describe Inside in such limited terms: in scope and concept it’s so much more than a man sitting at a keyboard in a tiny room.

“It’s like everything happened all at once,” Burnham sings in one of his opening numbers. He doesn’t address Covid directly because he doesn’t need to. We know that his haircut got rescheduled, and indeed it’s the growth of his hair that tells you just how long he’s been holed up, working on what the Guardian’s comedy critic Brian Logan has called this “claustrophobic masterpiece.” “Is comedy over?” he sings. “Should I be joking at a time like this?”

He makes fun of the idea that you can heal the world with comedy and his own white guy saviour complex. But, he acknowledges, making this special is what is “distract[ing] me from wanting to put a bullet in my head with a gun”. It’s dark glimpses like this, interspersed with hilariously funny riffs on internet lockdown culture – FaceTiming with his mum (“She says, say hi to dad. He says, how you doing, Bud? And I say not so bad, and that’s the deepest talk we’ve ever had”) – that make the show feel so definitive. Because isn’t that how the pandemic has felt? Moments of helpless distress and complete absurdity, resulting, in Burnham’s case and certainly my own, in a sense of alienation that is compounded by our collective flattening into a digital space that tries to show us everything, all at once.

One of the questions that preoccupies Burnham is the meaning of an audience. When a laughing, cheering crowd is taken away, what remains? It’s something that comics and actors have been grappling with for more than a year now, with varying degrees of success. But in the case of Inside, stripping away the live spectators creates a kind of intimacy; this isn’t a lockdown video diary per se, but the way the songs are broken up by outtakes and test shots and glimpses of rehearsals makes the conditions of its own making so explicit: this is a man alone in a room trying to be funny and also, like so many of us, trying not to fall apart.

And it is funny. He dances in his underwear, interacts with a cynical sock puppet who tells him that “the global flow of capital essentially functions to separate the worker from the means of production”, makes fun of Jeff Bezos; in this sense it’s designed to appeal squarely to the millennial audience that has grown up alongside him since he started making YouTube videos in his teenage bedroom.

Yet, Inside also transcends that appeal: the emotions underpinning it are raw and at times harrowing. I don’t want to give too much away, but there is a dramatic shift in tone during the second half and it makes sense, because as the anniversary of the outbreak approached and people started computing that it had been, well, a year of this, a deep sadness set in. All I’ll say is that it’s rare to see such an honest portrayal of mental distress and vulnerability, especially from a man. It’s also rare to see a song about derealisation – the sense of finding the world around you to be unreal – performed in the style of an acoustic softboi, complete with projected forest in the background (“A book on getting better hand delivered by a drone”, he croons.)

If I were a comedian, I’d be furious with Burnham, because in turning his back on rapidly produced content and going away and quietly working on something this magnificent, he has set the standard so very high. He hasn’t flinched from the pandemic, either, convinced that no one wants to see work that addresses it: he’s made something that could only ever have been made in the last year. In my article on pandemic art I wrote about how TV commissioners were looking for projects that felt like “sinking into a warm bath.” This isn’t that. And thank God.

It’s made me hungry for more. There are four novels currently on my desk that are set in or acknowledge lockdown. I’m desperate to know how these times are being interpreted by artists, and I think others will be too. On a basic level there’s something comforting in knowing that, after so much aloneness, you are not alone. But it’s also about catharsis. I needed it. This completely insane, terrifying, surreal time: it warrants creative exploration. It could be that there’ll be a boom in works about Covid and then we’ll move on, or it might be, as I suspect, that we will spend the rest of our lives looking back on this time and thinking: “What was that?”

Whichever it is, laughter is healing, and tears are healing. And there’s comfort to be had. “We were overdue, but it’ll be over soon,” Burnham sings. I hope he’s right.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist