Bo Burnham's Inside: So What's That Funny Feeling?
So... Inside, the 2021 Netflix special that fans apparently call a "deranged masterpiece" aired a little while ago and there's obviously a lot of unpack. A one-man production but an unorthodox, creative and incredibly nuanced one at that. This special is a peek into the artist's colourful, chaotic, at times crestfallen mind. Raw and honest, watching it almost feels too intrusive, and I personally feel like that goes both ways. The words are woven so expertly, curated so exactly that you swear he sees you. (Not to mention the many closeups where his face is literally right up against the camera). It's not so much a "He read my diary" type feeling, but more of a "He saw into my soul without even trying" type thing.
So I just wanted to look at That Funny Feeling. I'm about to go on an epistemological dive into this particular song.
After a spoken humble-brag flavored apology in the beginning, the opening lines to the song are "Stunning 8K resolution meditation app." It's ironic because meditation is supposedly quiet, personal contemplation sans distractions. Yet, even that has come online so to speak, commodified and its 8K resolution giving you an approximation of an all natural outside -- a deep untouched forest that we'll probably never see. "Backlash to the backlash of the thing that's just begun" also hits us square in the internet. Physical and digital audiences are very reactive to most subjects these days. You're 100 times more likely to say the wrong thing.
He goes further just mentioning events or oddly specific people. Live-action Lion King, Carpool Karaoke, Logan Paul. Then "A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall" which aside from calling attention to mass shootings, puts capitalism and consumerism on the same plane as gun violence. It's more irony; arms are trivialised through merchandising and then, gun violence frequently visits consumerist buildings.
He also sings "full agoraphobic, losing focus" which is this like phobia of crowded places, fear of leaving your house, being afraid of being somewhere you cannot escape. Or the fear of being somewhere no one can help you. This is a whole new sphere of isolation and isolation hits us so hard in the neurons because we are a social species. We are built to coexist and cooperate and rely on each other. But we have become so focused on having the world in our palms and only being out for ourselves. "A book on getting better hand-delivered by a drone." What's colder than that? It's another troubling juxtaposition, the old physical world we knew and the alienating technological world we're progressing towards.
"Total dissociation" and "Googling 'derealization', hating what you find." Google search queries for derealization skyrocketed the night Inside came out. Derealization -- when people and things around you do not seem real and dissociation meaning separation or disconnection. Maybe part of why everything feels unreal is because so much is artificial. Coming back to isolation -- humans actually need other humans to survive and when we go too long without interacting with anyone, our personality can actually suffer. We can lose parts of ourselves and our traits, become nothing but an empty shell of a person. And are we now not the most isolated we have ever been? Quarantined and the "world" at our fingertips the only connection to society.
Finally he sings "the quiet comprehending of the ending of it all" and "we were overdue but it'll be over soon." Then, is he resigned to the end of the world? Is this his judgement? That these patterns will only repeat, that quarantine is pushing us further into ourselves as we try to be louder online but more and more silent in real life? Is this how we go? Not with a fatal meteor strike but little acts of violence, consumerism, technology and our evaporating personalities?
So all this to say, the song is about the warped passing of time to the bleak eventual end, marked only by viral internet trends and that funny feeling. So I argue that the funny feeling is disenchantment. It's the existential disappointment that life isn't all we thought it would be. And yet, there is no removing ourselves from being cogs in the machinations of the world because we'd be lost either way.
