Exactly one year after he took the comedy world by surprise with his genre-bending pandemic-era Netflix special Inside, Bo Burnham treated fans to another full hour of material from the project, dropping The Inside Outtakes on his YouTube channel Monday night.
As the elusive comedian announced on Twitter, “a year ago today, i released a special called inside. i’ve spent the last two months editing together material that i shot for the special but didn’t end up using. it will be on my youtube channel in one hour. i hope you enjoy it.”
The new hour has already been devoured by Burnham’s loyal devoteés, racking up over a million views in less than 24 hours. And while it is mostly made up of even more often insightful and hilarious meta commentary that serves as a time capsule of what it was like to live isolated and online now that most of the world has attempted to move on from the pandemic, there is at least one segment that only feels more relevant in 2022.
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It comes about 18 and a half minutes in when Burnham presents a clip from “Bo Burnham’s Inside the Podcast with Bo Burnham and Bo Burnham.” The split screen chat with himself is an obvious takedown of podcast superstar Joe Rogan, whose Spotify controversy came to a head after Inside’s 2021 release.
“We are two comedians who are talking shit, no filter, not giving a fuck what anybody thinks and not apologizing for it,” Burnham says on the left side of the screen as his mirror image agrees with his every utterance on the right.
The two Burnhams sound off on “PC culture” (“It’s fucking exhausting, bro”) and “SJW feminist freaks” who are “anti-comedy and anti-joke.”
“It’s gotten to the point where you can’t say anything, literally,” they add, echoing the complaints of anti-“woke” comics like Rogan, who complains about censorship while broadcasting to tens of millions of listeners every day.
As they start to explain that modern comedians are “philosophers,” an ad for “Manstuff’s Dick Spray” appears at the bottom of the screen. And then they start to fret they might get “canceled” when they declare that comedy is “one of the only art forms that’s not…gay.”
“We’re not homophobes,” they insist. “If there was another word that meant ‘gay’ that wasn’t gay, we’d use that, but there isn’t one.”
The segment abruptly ends when one of the Burnhams casually mentions a conversation with his “sparring partner,” yet another Rogan reference.
In the original Inside special, Burnham used his song “Problematic” to reckon with some of his own past material that could be considered offensive and suggested that ultimately no one was going to hold him “accountable” but himself.
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