Bo Burnham Releases Hour Of Outtakes From ‘Inside’ Special

The comedian Bo Burnham was able to create one of the only non-cringe-inducing pieces of art about the COVID-19 pandemic when he released his self-produced comedy special Inside to Netflix last year.

Now, he’s breaking the internet again a year later by releasing a full hour of cut content he filmed for the special. He tweeted out that the material would be hitting YouTube just before it was released on Monday.

Inside featured Burnham’s typical strange and satirical comedy songs, but also featured a much more mature directing style from him, and displayed insightful commentary on Burnham’s half, which touched on living through the pandemic, and his issues with panic attacks and mental health struggles after completing his previous special Make Happy.

You can now go back into the strange, claustrophobic and hilarious world Burnham created for the special with The Inside Outtakes.

A note in the video mentions that all of this material was shot between March 2020 and May 2021, which would definitely be an odd stretch of time to record your own comedy special with no crowd.

There’s far too much footage to review everything Burnham shared, but even the small snippets were entertaining. Among some small samples and short moments of unfinished songs, a BTS montage of Burnham’s first month of shooting plays early in the video, showing him goofing with much shorter hair than he has in most of Inside‘s shots.

Burnham’s hopeless-sounding voice then comes on in an update saying, “So I’ve been filming things for like a month now, and I don’t really have anything that’s really kind of close to usable yet.” He dryly adds that if he doesn’t come up with something more clever soon, “I’m gonna just stop and play, uh, Playstation.”

Luckily for us, Bo did not give up on his project and just start playing Call Of Duty. While most of the Outtakes showed him putting shots together, or flubs of songs that made the cut, there were also some fantastic full songs and sharp sketches on display.

One bit in the video titled “The Podcast” showed Burnham roasting male-fronted podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience. It showed Burnham playing two co-hosts of what he described as “two comedians who are talking s––t, no filter, not giving a f––k what anybody thinks.”

Bo perfectly captured the energy of the two hosts talking over each other with “anti-SJW” ranting and skewering the conflicting points that comedians getting criticized often say. “We’re joking, they’re jokes, it’s not that serious,” Burnham says, and immediately adds, “and also, we as comedians are philosophers!”

After the release of Inside, which received significant acclaim and won him three Emmy Awards for Outstanding Writing, Directing and Music Direction For a Variety Special, Burnham has been about as silent online as he was before. Before the outtakes dropped, Burnham was also recently involved as director of the well-received Jerrod Carmichael special Rothaniel, in which the comedian came out as gay.

You can watch it here.