Happy birthday to Bo Burnham’s Inside

A close reading of "That Funny Feeling"

This is The Snack Desk, a newsletter in which I’ll share personal essays, gems from different corners of the internet, and other bites for your snack break.

Today we’re throwing a special birthday party—that is, a birthday party for a special.

Bo Burnham’s genre-breaking comedy special Inside was released one year ago this week. To commemorate the day that it first reached into my heart, broke it wide open, and left me feeling simultaneously empty and full creative possibility, here is a tribute.

My favorite song from the special is “That Funny Feeling,” and today I humbly present a close reading of the lyrics.

Note before we start: This will dig into sensitive content relating to gun violence, depression, and suicidal ideation.

The song’s lyrics will be bolded, and my analysis will be in normal text.

“That Funny Feeling” - The song title references an unidentifiable uneasiness, a discomfort brought on by irony and the uncanny, and the type of looming dread whose source is difficult to pinpoint. The lyrics layer seemingly unrelated images that build to an revelation of how they all fuel this funny feeling.

Stunning 8K-resolution meditation app - In addition to being sonically satisfying when sung aloud, the song’s opening line introduces the first modern-day norm that makes Bo feel like something is not right. A beautifully-pixelated digital product that purports to improve mental wellness—despite study after study demonstrating that it’s the overuse of our screens that has chipped away at so many of our psyches—seems clearly counterintuitive to Bo. It also hints at one of the themes he returns to numerous times in this song, which is the question of who profits off of the things that create this “funny feeling.”

In honor of the revolution, it's half-off at the Gap - Corporations will capitalize off of protest movements that decry problematic issues they themselves perpetuate. The merch-ification of women’s equality, for example, pads the pockets of the megacorps that produce it rather than contributing to actual progressive work. The idea that a fast fashion brand like Gap would commemorate any kind of revolutionary movement with a half-off sale perfectly encapsulates this uneasy notion of incentives being unaligned. 

Deadpool’s self-awareness, loving parents, harmless fun - This line has two separate ideas: “Deadpool’s self-awareness” references the fourth-wall-breaking Marvel hero. The line suggests Bo is uncomfortable having a Blockbuster superhero act self aware, which doesn’t fully subvert the fact that Deadpool is a character in a billion-dollar franchise trying to seem more relatable. The second half, “loving parents, harmless fun” is a broad reference to well-intentioned parents who brush off some of their children’s behavior as “harmless fun” rather than intervene in behavior that hurts themselves or others.

The backlash to the backlash to the thing that's just begun - Bo has been outspoken about his dislike for Twitter. Alongside other social media sites, it proliferates the idea that everyone has to have an opinion on every single thing, and it’s a machine that hums with particular efficiency when those opinions are fueled by outrage. The cyclic nature of news stories or one-off comments that ignite backlash, which in and of themselves spark further backlash, is unsettling and unnatural. 

There it is again, that funny feeling

That funny feeling -- In the chorus, Bo ties together all the ideas in the first verse to this “funny feeling.”

There it is again, that funny feeling

That funny feeling 

The surgeon general's pop-up shop, Robert Iger's face - The first half of the line may reference the emergence of for-profit mask and sanitization supply stores during the pandemic that made money off of a global crisis. For the second part of the line, Robert Iger was, at the time of Bo writing the song, the CEO of the Disney Company. As the head of the mega-corp that controls more and more of the media we consume, his visage is almost uncanny in its embodiment of what a prototypical clean-cut white male CEO should look like. Looking up a photo of the company’s modern-day CEO feels like drawing back the curtain on who is pulling some of the most powerful levers in the world. 

Discount Etsy agitprop, Bugles' take on race - Agitprop is political propaganda, historically tied specifically to communism. Etsy became a popular site for selling cutesy handmade goods. To think of the convergence of the two strikes a dissonant chord, and evokes the earlier reference to the merchification of politics. Similarly, to consider that a popular snack like Bugles would suddenly have something to say about social issues seems absurd, but it is a norm in today’s world where brands attempt to self-personify in order to connect with consumers and boost sales.

Female Colonel Sanders, easy answers, civil war - In 2018, KFC ran an ad campaign featuring a “female Colonel Sanders,” triggering memes that expressed qualms of this campaign feeling distorted, and questioning whether it was meant to be a misguided nod to progressive or feminist values. The pairing of “easy answers” and “civil war” may allude to an increasingly polarized political climate in which either side follows the easy answers provided by their party’s logic so far down their respective roads that inevitably, embattled conflict ensues.  

The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door - As Bo laments in a later song on Inside, our connection to the internet gives us access to, quite simply, too many things at once. Having this kind of unfettered access to all knowledge and all commerce is unnatural, and feeds into our collective anxiety and dread. Climate change is a constant global hazard that continues to worsen without any real solutions in sight, literally bringing the ocean to the doorstep of communities on coastlines who are already impacted by rising tides. 

The live-action Lion King, the Pepsi Halftime Show - If there is anything in this world that embodies the uncanny, it’s the live-action Lion King movie, with its hyper-realistic but not-quite-real CGI reanimation of a beloved children’s classic that was created in order to renew the IP for Disney’s profit. The Pepsi Halftime Show is another entertainment industry monolith that packages artists to fit into the Super Bowl Television Event, with the fundamental purpose of selling the most expensive ad spots of the year. 

Twenty-thousand years of this, seven more to go - To Bo, the cumulative effect of all of these deeply unsettling phenomena is that the world’s end is merely a handful of years away. 

Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul - This trio of cultural representations is a hilarious grouping. Carpool Karaoke, James Corden’s signature segment in which he sings along with professional musicians to their own music in a car, and DJ and producer Steve Aoki are commercially successful products of the music industry. What they have in popularity, Bo seems to insinuate by including them in this song, they perhaps lack in groundedness, authenticity, or true artistry. Logan Paul as the linchpin of this line drives home the critical eye pointed toward fame and notoriety, as Paul a controversial (read: widely despised) entertainer who clawed his way to where he is with all the shamelessness of a Hilton heiress. 

A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall - The $28 billion gun industry in the United States has a long reach, stretching into outposts as innocuous-seeming as a gun range where one might go for an afternoon of leisure and spend money at the attached gift shop. By pairing this image with the second half of this line, Bo draws a connection between such profit-driven incarnations of gun-centric culture and the rise of mass shootings across the country. 

There it is again, that funny feeling

That funny feeling

There it is again, that funny feeling

That funny feeling

Reading Pornhub's terms of service, going for a drive - The distinctly online and highly uncommon behavior of reading the terms of service of a porn site paired with the real-world mundanity of taking a drive creates an incongruous tension. 

And obeying all the traffic laws in Grand Theft Auto V - Because the intent of a video game like Grand Theft Auto V is to give the player a virtual world in which to wreak as much havoc as possible and commit violent and destructive felonies at every turn, obeying the traffic laws in such a world would be a choice steeped in irony. 

Full agoraphobic, losing focus, cover blown - This reads as a first-person documentation of something Bo may have experienced as a celebrity with a devoted following. He may have suffered from feelings of agoraphobia that caused him to lose focus on remaining discreet, perhaps even having a panic attack in front of others, which would blow a cover he’d want to maintain to remain anonymous in public spaces. This would be the physical manifestation of the swirling anxiousness and dread expressed in this song. 

A book on getting better hand-delivered by a drone - Similar to the line about a digitized meditation app, the idea of attempting to improve one’s mental health, but having to engage in the mechanisms that make our world simultaneously more and less connected than ever before, hinges on the ironic. 

Total disassociation, fully out your mind - Disassociation, the sensation of disconnecting from one’s own thoughts or identity, takes a person out of their own mind in a deeply disorienting way.

Googling derealization, hating what you find - Bo’s reliance on and complicated relationship to the internet comes through in this image of turning to a search engine to self-diagnose feelings of detachment from one’s surroundings. The notion that the results would be unpleasant to read suggests that they hit too close to home.

That unapparent summer air in early fall - Something that should be a simple pleasantry to be enjoyed, warm weather in the fall, belies a sinister force: the encroachment of climate change.  

The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all - To sit in an outwardly peaceful position while internally attempting to grasp what it means to feel like the world is ending is the ultimate encapsulation of the funny feeling described in the whole song. The “ending of it all” may also reference the ideation of ending one’s own life.  

There it is again, that funny feeling

That funny feeling

There it is again, that funny feeling

That funny feeling

Hey, what can you say? We were overdue - This casual dismissal of the catastrophic ideation described in the song recalls the kinds of responses that are sometimes offered in the wake of tragic events, including those related to concepts introduced in earlier stanzas like climate change and gun violence. 

But it'll be over soon, you wait - Again, Bo references the impending end of the world. 

Hey, what can you say? We were overdue

But it'll be over soon, just wait

Ba-da-da, ba-da-da, ba-da-da-da-dum

Hey, what can you say? We were overdue

But it'll be over soon, you wait

Ba-da-da, ba-da-da, ba-da-da-da-dum

Hey, what can you say? We were overdue

But it'll be over soon, you wait

Ba-da-da, ba-da-da, ba-da

Hey, what can you say? We were overdue

But it'll be over soon, you wait

Ba-da-da, ba-da-da, ba-da-da-da-dum

Hey

---

So, not the happiest of birthday parties.

Even so, there is beauty in the way an artist can distill common sensations of disquiet and unease, and can hold up a mirror to society’s shortcomings so that listeners may self-assess. Moreover, there is power in the vulnerability of sharing dark thoughts in a way that may make others feel less alone.

Okay, time to go outside. And have a snack!

Let’s end this with a nice calming breath and a picture of dandelions <3