An Inside job: lockdown has finally been turned into the stuff of irresistible art | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

This strange time needs to be described and explored – and US comedian Bo Burnham has produced something special

In 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?”

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3grSOuT