What are you most afraid of? First you might think of your own cherished phobias: snakes, spiders, balloons, clowns. Or perhaps something more universal, such as death or mass extinction. You might skim over the myriad fears you worry about on a daily basis and which, in sum, probably cause you more trouble than anything else: tripping over your own foot in a busy part of town; a messy sneeze during a date; saying something offensive without meaning to; mispronouncing or misusing a word at the height of rhetorical passion; making conversation with the jabbering man on the train who for some reason has picked you from the crowd and wants to discuss the deranging effects of chemtrails. Everyday terror.
Why are other people so frightening? And how do we defend ourselves against them? Sheer avoidance doesn’t work. Being seen and being heard – these are now the twin preoccupations of all but the most stubbornly secluded. It’s part of the deal we think we’re making with big tech: I will sacrifice my secrets and you will provide me with a willing audience. But if we’re lucky enough to be both seen and heard, if we manage to cultivate A Social Life – online or offline – certain obligations must follow. It is these that scare or confuse us. So we perform, we put on a false front, we become caricatures of ourselves.
In Faking It (2003), the unflappable philosopher of emotions William Ian Miller explored social role-playing and sanctioned make-believe, the various masks we wear as a matter of necessity. Miller uses himself as an example: whenever he delivers a lecture he falls helplessly into the cadences and borrowed authority of his father. He can’t do anything about it, even as he begins to dissociate: ‘Still there is this me standing outside me watching me talk in someone else’s voice.’ His students, if anything, prefer this approach – ‘you never hear complaints after a day of bluffing’. Miller goes on:
The feeling of faking it forces upon us a recognition of a split between something that we flatter ourselves is our “true” self and the role we are playing. More modestly, it is the feeling of our incomplete immersion in the role, with impious thoughts intruding about the role. Sometimes, it is merely a vague sense of dislocation that takes the form of worrying where we are amidst all the roles we must play: I worry about who I am; therefore, I guess, I am.
This could describe anyone’s public persona, but it is particularly relevant to the role of the comedian. Much of stand-up comedy is about airing those ‘impious thoughts’ that plague our minds as we brave-face the full range of social rituals.
Comedian and musician Bo Burnham, who was a teenager when he became famous on the internet, claims that he started to experience panic attacks during live performances. Tunnel vision, breathlessness, and an abrupt division of the mind – he described it in one interview as ‘this inner monologue freaking out’ while he continues to perform the show. As with Miller, the spectators didn’t seem to notice. But it was enough to put Burnham off his stride: he subsequently went quiet for five years, using his time away from the stage to ‘improve himself mentally’. During this period of convalescence he wrote and directed his first feature film, Eighth Grade, a near perfect depiction of teenage unease, with Elsie Fisher in the lead role. It had a focused potency lacking in his other work up to that point, as though he was finally able to get out of his own way.
By early 2020 Burnham was ready to go on tour again – until what happened, happened. Once his retreat from public life hardened into a general law, the opportunity for respite and reinvention evaporated. For Burnham, as for numberless others, home became a prison. As Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote in the 18th century, ‘Sometimes I do not go out of the house for a week and live very contentedly: an equal period of house-arrest would make me ill.’
On the evidence of his new Netflix film, Inside – which takes place entirely in a small room that would barely accommodate a cartwheel, let alone a concert – Burnham is very ill indeed. Sick of himself, his audience, but most of all sick of the internet and its chattering hordes. Make Happy, his previous stand-up special, began with Burnham slouching to the theatre, doomy and determined like Jesse Eisenberg in the opening credits of The Social Network, while a robotic voice intoned ‘The world is not funny’. At the age of 25, Burnham had all the mope and misery of a seasoned bar comic, tempered somewhat by his fresh-faced and amphetamised stage presence. Five years later, little has changed. ‘The more I look, the more I see nothing to joke about,’ he sings during ‘Comedy’, Inside’s first big number. Once again he needs to explain himself before he can properly begin. Bad stuff is going on, nothing’s funny, I’m depressed – enjoy the show. He ends the song bathed in golden light, singing, ‘The world needs direction from a white guy like me.’ It’s a curious self-pardoning in the guise of a joke. Louis CK – that miasmic presence in American comedy, whose stain of influence cannot be scrubbed away – used to do the same thing in his role as the slob who hated himself, but who still thought it necessary to preempt the usual complaints by declaring the usual privileges. White guys have it easy – so why am I miserable? The answer is obvious: no one has it easy. But Burnham, with all of his carefully accrued credibility, gets himself into a tangle as he tries to make use of his unhappiness while drawing attention to the very characteristics that, in his terms, dull the seriousness of his complaint. ‘Self-awareness does not absolve anybody of anything,’ he says in one of his rambling interludes. So what is self-awareness for?
Burnham’s new look for Inside signals a turn outward, even as he sweats alone in his box-room. He is stylishly dishevelled, bearishly bearded, thicker and healthier. The goofier mannerisms and flailing transitions of his stand-up sets are mostly gone. It was always obvious that he is more comfortable within the tight edits of a camera. Liberated from the immediate responses of an audience, he has full control over his tonal shifts. What seemed disjointed in his live shows is now rhythmically cinematic. This is especially true of his new songs, which have much fuller instrumentation (mostly synthesizers and drum machines), stronger melodies, and prove to be a relief from the standard man-at-the-piano, plink-plonk-joke material.
In one of his essays on attention and distraction, Joshua Cohen argued that in a fully connected world we cannot possibly absorb the blizzard of data coming at us, we can only react. ‘We’re all becoming too disparate, too dissociated – searching for porn one moment, searching for genocide the next – leaving behind stray data that cohere only in the mnemotech of our surveillance.’ Inside is itself a form of voluntary surveillance. When Burnham isn’t singing or monologuing he’s working on the practicalities of a one-man show, arranging the sets, measuring the distance from the camera, botching a verse and starting again. He doesn’t take it for granted that an audience is paying attention, however. ‘Am I on in the background? Are you on your phone?’ he sings. ‘Is there anyone out there or am I all alone?’ Lacking instant feedback – laughter, shock, wails of adoration – he develops his tendency to self-scrutiny. We watch as he reacts to one of his songs, and then reacts to the reaction, and so on. In another scene – none of these qualifies as a ‘bit’ or ‘routine’ – he is a streamer playing a videogame in which he himself is the main character, moving stiffly within the confines of his room, responding to commands to cry or play the piano.
Inside works as entertainment, but some critics have taken it to be something weightier. Polygon’s Joshua Rivera called it a ‘staggering work of depressioncore’, which nicely demonstrates the inanity of most online criticism. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett was more measured, claiming that it’s ‘rare to see such an honest portrayal of mental distress and vulnerability, especially from a man’. But I’m not so sure it’s a wholly honest portrayal. For Burnham, anxiety is a device, a fulcrum; it would be harder for him to work without it.
Asked about the thread of anxiety running through his work, the cartoonist Will McPhail made a joke that we should take seriously: ‘Anxiety, yeah, that’s my brand.’ In In, his first book-length comic, the title does not signify retreat but its opposite: access to authentic relationships and conversations, admittance to Yeats’ ‘labyrinth of another's being’ – a way in. McPhail made a name for himself as a cartoonist for the New Yorker and Private Eye, among other outlets, and his single panel drawings consistently outsmart their surroundings. His work has a high level of polish, portraying young, attractive people struggling to keep it together in urban environments. In one cartoon a man is being dragged to a party by his girlfriend: ‘Just be myself? Fine, I’ll go cry in the shower.’ Another shows a woman not quite crying in the shower, but staring into a void as a dozen accusations pour down like water: you’re broke; you’re a fraud and they know; give up. The faces of his characters can be deadpan, with hyphen-wide smiles and heavy-lidded eyes, or they can be wildly expressive, with thrusting chests and crazy grins. While McPhail’s humour is often mordant, there is a comforting quality to his work which keeps it safely within the New Yorker’s scope. He lives in Scotland but knows his audience: affluent 20- and 30-somethings who grew up on the latter-day American TV canon, from Friends to Girls.
In features jokes that would be at home in a sitcom, even if McPhail takes a cartoonist’s liberties with realism. When Nick, the emotionally stunted lead (and a lanky, sockless ‘woke boy’), goes on a date with a sharp and sarcastic oncologist – the question of what she sees in a third-tier cartoonist who draws for Carp Weekly is never asked, never mind answered – the sequence of events leading to the bedroom is presented as a stage production across 12 panels, in which the couple dance like Fred and Ginger before riding a cardboard Uber prop back to the doctor’s apartment. Afterwards, they take a naked bow to an empty auditorium. For Nick, the experience is hollow: ‘I didn’t feel anything and performed every emotion.’
Anhedonia can be exaggerated. At one point, Nick wonders why he feels nothing when he eats an almond croissant, as though he’s missing out on the full extent of what pastry has to offer. He lives in a world of cafés that have their own haranguing slogans: ‘Your Friends Have Kids’; ‘Tote Bag Trustfund Tea Room’; ‘Gentrificchiato’. But he can’t even handle an ordinary cup of coffee – he likes it ‘to taste like I’m being breastfed by the honey monster.’ What he doesn’t find in people he seeks in snacks and caffeinated beverages.
While many of McPhail’s single panel cartoons hinge on a character heedlessly expressing their thoughts, In is about someone mired in meaningless conversations, not just with baristas and neighbours but with those closest to him: his nephew, his sister, his mother. In the book’s most crucial scene, Nick makes small talk with a plumber who has come round to fix the loo in his apartment. As Nick recites the easy formulas – ‘Got much work on at the moment?’ – it occurs to him that he could say something meaningful, that communication of a deeper kind is possible. Eventually he makes a confession: ‘I feel embarrassed about myself around people like you, Steve.’ Steve responds: ‘I feel like that sometimes’ – and suddenly McPhail turns on the watercolours and Nick is transported to a sublime fantasy landscape. At the foot of a mountain he gawps in wonder, before looking down to see a disintegrating ledge. It’s intentionally overwrought, an indictment of modern interiority, where being open and engaged is enough to trigger a shamanic epiphany. Yet the optimism is almost touching – the belief that if we strip away the layers of performance there is something else there, something pure and essential and true. No reason to be afraid, after all.
In his Harper’s piece on TikTok influencers and the fresh hell they represent, Barrett Swanson, an English professor, revealed something that is both distressing and, given what mass culture has become, predictable: ‘In the past ten years, my email correspondence has been increasingly given over to calming down students who are hyperventilating with anxiety – about grades, about their potential marketability, about their Instagram followings. The previous semester, for instance, during a class on creative non-fiction, twenty-four of my twenty-six students wrote about self-harm or suicidal ideation.’ Reading this passage, I couldn’t help but think: is everyone breaking down? Where have they gone, the serene and the complacent, the happy-go-lucky extroverts? They used to be around – I can’t be the only one who remembers them, those bright engines of joie de vivre. They were everywhere, you had to make a special effort not to end up in their company. Were they only pretending? Or was there simply a reversal in market preferences? Whatever the reason, maybe it’s time for a change. Tranquillity, yeah, that’s my brand.