In September, The New Yorker published a story by Clare Malone that detailed five moments from comedian and then-rumored Daily Show host candidate Hasan Minhaj’s specials where he appeared to distort facts in ways that centered himself in stories of racial discrimination or exaggerated his victimhood. In his 2017 Netflix special Homecoming King, for example, Minhaj talks about a white date dumping him the night of the prom because her parents didn’t want them in photos together. When Malone’s reporting called into question the exact timeline and whether the decision was racially motivated, Minhaj defended such decisions to her as being in service of his comedy’s “emotional truth.†The consensus, at least on social media, seemed to be that Minhaj was in the wrong. Then on October 26, Minhaj responded with a very Hasan Minhaj–style video fact-checking The New Yorker’s fact-check, in which he argued that the reporter manipulated quotes and chose not to include critical information. The New Yorker released a statement standing by their reporting, but Minhaj’s defense was enough to split public opinion on which side was more trustworthy.
The story illustrates just how invested fans and assorted onlookers have become in the idea of comedians’ credibility. This is partly attributable to the 21st-century ascent of The Daily Show and political-comedy shows that provided takes on the news, all while the hosts evinced uneasiness with being called “journalists.†A watershed moment occurred in 2004 when Jon Stewart appeared on CNN’s Crossfire and squared off against actual political pundits Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, with many viewers coming away feeling that Stewart was the only one involved who had any journalistic integrity. That same year, a survey revealed that one in five 18-to-29-year-olds got their election news from comedy programs such as The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live.
By 2016, with Stewart off the air, Trump running for president, and the content industry booming, there were comedians for seemingly every demographic in America to trust as a source of news or political commentary. We’ve had shows from Stewart acolytes (including Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, and Samantha Bee), “funny†pundits on Fox News (Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters), and podcasters spanning from the Dirtbag Left (Chapo Trap House) to the Libertarian-ish Joe Rogan Extended Universe (The Tim Dillon Show and Legion of Skanks). Minhaj himself had a Netflix show, Patriot Act, that ran from 2018-2020, underscoring the argument in Malone’s New Yorker piece that comedians such as him have “become the oddball public intellectuals of our time, and, in informing the public, they assume a certain status as moral arbiters.†That perception, however, leaves Minhaj and his peers caught between opposing realities: As a host, he is an authority expected to speak truth to power and adhere to journalistic standards, and as a comic, he is an artist trying to elicit feelings from his audience on a deeper level than if he were to just provide facts and figures.
The relationship that comedians have with the truth has evolved over the last 75 years. While in the past comics were content telling stock jokes or riffing on familiar tropes (wife is bad; mother-in-law is bad; food is bad — and such small portions!), most contemporary comics agree their work should have some kernel of personal truth to it. They just have different perspectives on how to achieve that goal. That tension is something I’ve observed firsthand while interviewing upwards of 200 comedians, including Minhaj, on my podcast Good One over the past seven years. Every performer takes a different approach to stretching, reformatting, and intensifying the truth in their work. Some strive for 100 percent accuracy, going as far as to fact-check with other parties involved in their material. Others try to express their truth based simply on how they remember a given situation. A few invent stories and situations but hope to create something that feels universally true to their audience.
Most often, stand-ups start with the truth and then tinker with the particulars based on audience response. When we spoke in 2020, Bert Kreischer told me about a breakthrough he had while crafting his famous “The Machine†story: the realization that he was too attached to information that would prove the story was true. “I wanted to share things that couldn’t be faked, and that was a mistake,†he said. “I don’t think anyone really cared if it was true or not.â€
In the following excerpt from my book Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture – And the Magic That Makes It Work, I discuss the history of how stand-up comedians considered truth in their acts and feature a number of performers offering different perspectives on the concept. The chapter, it’s worth noting, was written well before The New Yorker story was published. How you feel about what Minhaj did or didn’t do may well depend on a number of personal factors, and this excerpt is not meant to dissuade you from your assessment. Instead, the chapter provides context for understanding the story and how something like this happens. The hope for Comedy Book was not to change what people think about comedians and their comedy but how. I do not use the term “emotional truth,†but I get pretty close.
An Excerpt From ‘Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture — and the Magic That Makes It Work’
Quick summary of the history of the concept “truth in comedy.†In the 1950s and ’60s, “sick comedians†— your Shelley Bermans, your Lenny Bruces — became models of authenticity, inspired by the great postwar, existentialist-indebted look inward. “Many Americans were attempting to find their ‘real selves,’†wrote Michael J. Arlen in The New Yorker about this movement. “The new entertainers, in addition to playing off on these searches after identity, attempted to gain the goodwill and regard of their audiences by revealing — or, anyway, acknowledging — their ‘real selves.’†A decade passed and Lenny Bruce begot George Carlin and Richard Pryor, both with similar legends of eschewing their mainstream audience and clean-cut presentation in exchange for something more shaggy and “authentic.†Late-’70s Pryor modeled how various forms of truth-telling interweave with each other to earn an audience’s trust, mixing pitch-perfect behavioral impressions with dead-on observational comedy with an exploration of his inner self with openness about his faults and failures with challenging social critique. Then, reacting to the corporatization of stand-up-comedy clubs in the 1980s, ’90s comics showed their authenticity by, say it with me, “not selling out.†This resulted in, for example, Bill Hicks railing against advertising, fashioning himself a sort of maverick, saying things in interviews like, “I’ll continue to be me. As Bob Dylan said, the only way to live outside the law is to be totally honest. So I will remain lawless.†And alternative comedians in the 1990s at shows like L.A.’s UnCabaret, where everyone was required to bring completely new material and discuss things they haven’t talked about before, reacted to the rigid observational jokes and tight, late-night-ready five-minute sets of the ’80s by trying to not perform at all, espousing the mantra of “Fewer jokes; more you.â€
Now, the perceived culmination of a lot of these ideals —
Louis C.K. In the story of comedy’s march to be taken more seriously, C.K. was, for nearly a decade, its avatar. And at the center of this celebration was “truth.†The Los Angeles Review of Books called him “television’s most honest man.†The New Yorker wrote in 2015, in an article about a new C.K. special, “Comedians are seen as honest populists: laughter, we think, not only feels good but teases out universal truths.†This perception didn’t come out of nowhere but was cultivated through work and actions that either were genuine or seemed to be.
Like Carlin and Pryor before him, C.K. has his own legend of being awakened to the truth. After decades spent doing the same absurdist material over and over with the same result — writing gigs, but a relative disinterest from the entertainment industry toward him performing his own material — C.K. had a breakthrough after his first kid was born. Pointing out the bips and boops of the parenting marathon goes back forever — My son is always making such a mess! My daughter is always asking for money to go SHOPPING! — but C.K.’s frankness about how gross and boring and annoying it can be felt new, whether it was calling his 4-year-old an “asshole†or revealing “I literally scrape shit out of my daughter’s little red vagina a few times a day.†Besides making him more popular, doing this material gave him a feeling of closeness with the audience that he had not experienced before. He would then proceed to apply this style of frankness to all of his material — be it about sex, technology, or race — while slowly removing the open honesty that originally got him there.
The mythology of his honesty was then supported by a few professional decisions. First and foremost, he dressed like a sack of garbage onstage, wearing a poorly fitted black T-shirt and black jeans, presenting a white male averageness. Even though the decision to not care about how you look is as much a choice as trying, it helped him sell the image of “I’m just a regular guy just talking up here.†Also, he let Dane Cook take the rap on stealing a joke from him, even though in retrospect both jokes were riffs on an old Steve Martin joke. He put out a new special every year, self-releasing them and allowing his audience to pay what they want. But nothing did more for the public perception of him as a true artist than the arrangement he made for his FX show, Louie. Known in the industry as “the Louie deal,†it involved C.K. accepting less money in exchange for the freedom to do everything in the show — star, write, direct, edit — without outside input. Louie influenced the proliferation of semi-autobiographical comedies/dramedies about the life of a comedian and prestige sitcoms more interested in creating a surreal, abstract, comedic tone than hard jokes, but in terms of public perception, the fact that C.K. was doing it all by himself gave off — and there is no other way of putting this — auteur vibes. At his zenith, active and casual comedy fans with both of these perspectives considered him the greatest comedian alive, and he became the model to which all other comedians must aspire and by which they must be judged.
Then, in 2017, the New York Times published a story revealing five accusations of sexual misconduct against him. Despite in the past having called rumors of such behavior “not real,†soon after, C.K. copped to all of it. And I remember feeling something breaking. “Why our perception of him changed, I don’t think it’s because of what he did but because he denied it for two years,†the comedian and Oscar-nominated Borat Subsequent Moviefilm co-writer Jena Friedman said, assessing the situation. “If you are in this position of truth-teller and then you gaslight people, I think that seems to a lot of people like a bigger indiscretion than jerking off in front of women without their consent, or tanking a lot of women’s careers on your path to success.†People understood C.K. was a creep. He talked about masturbating frequently in his act. But trust is essential for the comedian-audience relationship. It is impossible to carry on the same without it. It is hard to separate the art from the artist with stand-up comedy, because the art is the artist. Yes, what C.K. did was terrible, but it also is just terribly ironic. “The most honest man†is a liar?!
The truth is he was never television’s most honest man. In 2011, HBO brought together three esteemed stand-ups and Ricky Gervais for Talking Funny, a conversation about the trials and tribulations of being a (male) comedian. And there’s a fun moment in which Jerry Seinfeld talks about his favorite of C.K.’s jokes but in the process reshapes it to sound more like Jerry Seinfeld material. Gervais says Seinfeld turned it into a joke and that he doesn’t think C.K. even tells jokes. He explains, “I just [think], This is a man falling apart for my pleasure. This is a man spilling his heart out, telling me what a bad day he’s had.†C.K. compared Gervais’s naïveté about the joke-writing process to that of his toddler daughters and said, “I try to make it seem like, ‘I’m just getting this out,’ but I know all the moves.†It’s hard to know C.K.’s true thinking here, but my read is that as an artist, he was interested in his own truth, or he wasn’t interested in the truth at all but the veneer of truth that he could control. Beyond just C.K., historically and currently the veneer of truth has been dangerous for comedy, allowing comedians to cloak jokes based on harmful stereotypes in “It’s funny because it’s true†and spread baseless conspiracies by fashioning themselves truth-tellers. It wasn’t hard for Louis C.K. to talk about masturbating all those times because it allowed him to seem like he was putting himself out there without ever actually being at risk. What he wasn’t was vulnerable. And for there to be real truth in comedy, vulnerability is necessary.
“I believe being VULNERABLE is vital to creating MEMORABLE comedy,†wrote Gary Gulman in May 2019. It was part of a series he was doing in which he tweeted out a bit of joke-writing advice every day. It continued, “For the 1st few years just getting on stage is vulnerable. As a pro it means sharing a part of yourself that makes you uncomfortable and just as important, COMMITTING to the joke.†I would soon learn that at the time, Gulman was himself transitioning from his standard mix of impeccably crafted whimsical flights of fancy and detailed observational comedy to material about his struggle with mental illness, which almost ended his career. It was material that would become the acclaimed HBO special The Great Depresh. What I realized while watching is that if a comic is willing to forgo the gimmicks, tricks, or moves that give them control, thus giving themselves to their audience, there is an extraordinary vulnerability that emerges.
I think of Margaret Cho, in her 2001 special, I’m the One That I Want, risking professional ramifications by naming names and revealing the dark side of her experience starring in All-American Girl, the first American sitcom about an Asian family. There had been a lot of attention paid to the show’s failures, but Cho sought to set the record straight, discussing the pressure she was put under to lose weight, resulting in an eating disorder that led to hospitalization and drug abuse. And somehow she made it all funny. In one moment in the special, she talks about coming home, after having a great time on set, when she gets a call from a producer she had come to trust who informs her in a panic that the network is “concerned about the fullness of your face†and that she has to do something about it if she wants to be a star. “I didn’t know what to say to that,†she tells the audience. “I always thought I was okay-looking. I had no idea I was [crescendos into a shout] this giant face taking over America! [Smiles, then switches into mock-horror] Here comes the face!†“It is also the classic tale of artists taking what moves them in life and creating something of worth about it,†she said, looking back on the special’s 20th anniversary. “It’s just bringing an ancient way of healing into this era of comedy, politics, gender, queerness.â€
I think of Tig Notaro, in 2012, going from being hospitalized from a gastrointestinal infection to a breakup, to her mom dying suddenly, to being diagnosed with breast cancer and four days later stepping onstage at the Largo in L.A. and starting her set with “Hello. Good evening. Hello. I have cancer. How are you? Is everybody having a good time? I have cancer. How are you?†What makes Notaro’s performance so incredible to think about is how it’s not only that these are difficult subjects to make art about but that her actual self, with her actually sick body, was performing it. In an interview with Slate in 2020, she provided the perfect image of what it looked and felt like. “I felt very much like a baby giraffe trying to stand up,†she said. “I had never been so vulnerable or personal onstage. I had not shared my dating life. Even when I was diagnosed with cancer, I called my manager and said, ‘I don’t want anybody in this town knowing that I’m sick.’ I was scared I wouldn’t work again.â€
And I think of Maria Bamford, who possesses a sheer technical mastery of so many of the skills at a stand-up’s disposal, but what sets her apart is the level of difficulty of the material. She is driven to talk about things that are hard to talk about. The stigma around mental illness is so prevalent that “stigma around mental illness†is now a phrase everyone is familiar with. But when Bamford was doing material about mental health in the early 2000s — like “I never really thought of myself as depressed, though, as much as [gets ironically wistful] paralyzed by hope†— it was scary to bring up. Unlike being a perv and sexual abuser, apparently, mental illness has led to people losing work, having difficulty maintaining relationships, and struggling to be considered a full member of society.
Through their work, all three of these women confront the popular idea of what it means to be fearless onstage. Fearless is often used to describe comics unafraid of hurting people when it should apply to the comedians afraid of being hurt by people and persisting anyway. These comedians were not motivated by trying to make themselves feel better — that’s what the doctors and meds and healthy-living practices are for. Instead, they are motivated to help, even if it is by offering their audience a surrogate for their own pain or by making it easier to have conversations about difficult subjects. One of the things comedians can do to empower their audience is give them the vocabulary and language they need to best represent themselves. If what is so difficult about living with something or dealing with something is the shame associated with talking about it, stand-up transcends the conversation by being able to shout a vulnerable truth. If it’s mockable, it is manageable.
What Bamford, Cho, and Notaro represent is a genuine authenticity, in contrast to the popular, constructed image of authenticity. The writer and philosopher Alexander Stern distinguished between the two, calling authenticity, as it is often conceived, a sham, a self-centered pursuit bastardized by “corporations that profit off our innermost desires,†whereas a genuine authenticity can be achieved through “resistance to self-absorption and fantasy†and “acknowledgment of our dependency on others and of the historical contingency that inhabits every corner of our lives.†It’s a point Notaro echoed when I spoke to her nearly a decade after her breakthrough set. She told me that when she meets people who were in attendance, she feels connected to them, as if they went through something together. “What I figured out more and more as time has gone on,†she told me, “[is that] I was looking for help. I certainly had friends and family, but my mother and my primary relationship were gone. It’s not too crazy to think that a dark theater where I do stand-up would be where I would go for comfort, having lost those people in my life.†Just as there is a closeness that comes from trusting a comedian, there is a closeness that comes when the comedian trusts their audience.
Truth is an impossible-to-achieve standard. What matters is the “search for truth,†as UnCabaret founder Beth Lapides explained to me, more than a “fait accompli, like, ‘This is THE TRUTH.’†The search does not have to be done selflessly, but it cannot be done selfishly. It cannot be done alone.
In early 2017, John Early and Kate Berlant performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. It was quite an unusual set as late-night sets go. Going against a traditionally safe format, the duo boldly offered a new vision of what stand-up can look like and what truth in comedy can mean.
The set reminds me of something Early said to me when I first interviewed him: “People who are performing themselves, the way that we see who they really are is in the way that performance fails.†To do a bit like this, where the line between real and fake is ambiguous, in front of a studio audience of tourists and the most middle-American audience at home, is risky. Right away, this audience might not even register any of the performance as comedy, resulting in an excruciating four minutes of televised audience silence. However, it was still better than the alternative. “The weirdness of stand-up is that you have to pretend that it’s off-the-cuff,†Early explained on an episode of You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes, talking about the Tonight Show set. “That is so embarrassing to me.â€
A few months later, I was still thinking about the set when I went to see Early perform at the Bell House, a live-performance venue in Brooklyn. In the middle of his show, he asked the audience, “You know what straight men love more than pussy?†Early cocked his head and raised his eyebrows, as if he really wanted to know. Even I, one of the few straight men in attendance, was stumped. His face constricted and he made a fist to accentuate the answer. Lowering his voice to convey a passionate masculinity, he told us: “The truth.†It was a joke on a performative idea of truth in comedy that was propped up by the previous generation of comedians and soured by C.K. — an idea of truth that a younger generation of comedians, raised on the internet and within marginalized realities, has been questioning.
By this time in 2017, people had already started to remark that everyone in Brooklyn sounded like Early and Berlant. When the New York Times comedy critic Jason Zinoman asked on Twitter if everyone was copying Berlant, Bo Burnham, who would later go on to direct Berlant’s first stand-up special and one-person stage show, replied that she was the “most influential/imitated comedian of a generation†and the “millennial Lenny Bruce.†He explained that she was doing “hyper self-aware deconstructive performative liberal stuff 5 years before†anyone else. Both Early and Berlant went to NYU, with Early studying theater and Berlant creating her own major called “the cultural anthropology of comedy,†and together they’ve led a charge to blow up one specific facet of stand-up comedy: performance.
Early credits his comedic perspective to the confusion of watching his parents, both ministers, when he was growing up. “That’s the person who I know very well and I’m watching them in this heightened performance,†he told me in 2017. “Also, as a gay person, before you know it, you’re like, I’m trapped in a performance. Before you know what’s going on, you have a very fractured understanding of what it means to be authentic.†Berlant, whose father is a respected fine artist with work in the collection of the Whitney and whose mother worked in experimental theater before transitioning to set design, credits her perspective to getting a master’s in performance studies and not an M.F.A., as it is “a problem-driven, critical-theory-based world [where] you’re reacting to your own performance and performance of identity and thinking a lot about the politics of watching and being watched.†Berlant does for comedy what Alex Katz tried to do for art with works like 1959’s Ada Ada, a single painting that features two portraits of his wife in a blue dress that are very similar but not identical. With his work, he pushed back on the idea that any portrait can capture the singularity of a person, because there is no such thing; Berlant is pushing back against the idea that there is one real self that performance obscures. As she explained to Nathan Fielder, another comedian who wrestles with the concept of truth in his work, “This obsession with the truth, and this obsession with authenticity or sincerity. This idea of a self at all, that is totally devoid of fiction, or is not a fabrication … feels more and more like a total fallacy.†Judith Butler also came up in my conversation with Early, and their influence on Early and Berlant is obvious as well. As Butler writes in Gender Trouble, “Laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived.â€
There is no “true†self for you to show the audience. It’s why Berlant finds readings of comedy like Gervais’s of C.K.’s ridiculous. “‘Look how stripped down and raw.’ It’s so funny,†Berlant explained to Fielder. “We know what it’s like to construct a self in a performance, just existing walking down the street. So this idea that anyone is going to be onstage and not be an actor, or a performer, that performance is not a construction at all, it’s so bizarre.â€
It is this comedic philosophy that placed Berlant and Early at the forefront of a new comedy vanguard. As the original alternative-comedy movement was a reaction to a certain phoniness that Gen-X comedians saw in the shtick of comedy-club comedians, the millennial and Gen-Z “New Queens of Comedy,†as my Vulture colleague E. Alex Jung named them in 2018, were reacting against the phoniness of going onstage and acting like what you’re saying is authentic, whatever that would mean. These comedians were not pretending that “I’m just a regular guy just talking up here.†As Jo Firestone, a New York alternative comedian and writer on The Tonight Show at the time Early and Berlant performed, once explained it, “No matter what, stand-up is lying,†regardless of whether you’re singing a song or claiming you ran into your ex the other day. If the comedian, she argued, is going to be lying, singing and dancing “feels closer to truth†because the performer is not pretending they didn’t just make something up. “If we’re all going to be performing and making up this persona,†she explained, “you might as well put on an outfit and put on the tap shoes.†Although few literally wore tap shoes, since 2015, I’ve seen a least one comedian sing at each comedy show I’ve been to. Burned by comedians who didn’t back up the honesty of their presentation, a new class of comedy fans has embraced comedians who are honest about the fact that it is just a presentation. To their audiences, at least, this rings true.
In 2011, Burnham was 20, but he found himself chopping it up with four legends who prayed to the altar of truth in comedy — Marc Maron, Ray Romano, Judd Apatow, and Garry Shandling — on the Showtime show The Green Room With Paul Provenza. Swimming in a baggy gray V-neck T-shirt, the floppy-haired Burnham looked like a stretched-out eighth-grader, all torso with toothpick extremities. He remained silent for minutes at a time. Throughout, Maron and Romano were playfully dismissive of him in a boys-being-boys way, but the tenor changed after Burnham asked Shandling how he reconciled stand-up, which Burnham feels is an inherently western art form, with an eastern philosophical perspective. Shandling, who at that point was semi-retired from comedy, focusing instead on gaining a deeper understanding of Buddhism, explained that the real answer would take too much time, but, in short, “authenticity.†To him, it appeared the word meant being free of ego and free of fearing societal expectations. “When I saw you onstage,†Shandling said to Burnham, “I didn’t see a fake moment.†A curious Provenza wondered how this could be, as Burnham performs with such ironic detachment that he doesn’t reveal himself onstage. It’s a good question, and Burnham would spend the next decade trying to figure out how to communicate his answer, revealing his take on the truth-in-comedy conundrum.
Unlike the path of his friends and occasional collaborators Berlant and Early, it was Burnham’s unprecedented internet success that forced him to wrestle with what truth means and what truthfulness looks like at a time when honesty is equated with being publicly revealing. With 2021’s Inside, Burnham took this idea and blew it up into a virtuosic meditation on how to express yourself at a moment when the self is digitally fractured and how to connect with people when you’re forced to be socially distant. Shot in his guesthouse (must be nice), with equipment always in the frame and interstitials showing him setting up shots, it all felt overwhelmingly Brechtian. Contrasting the realism of his performance and the visual proof that it was clearly staged, over and over again in the special Burnham portrays how the internet has subverted the distinction between the real and the performed. And because it wasn’t stand-up, which has a built-in barrier between performer and performed-to, Burnham was able to call into question the very nature of digital performance that we all are compelled to participate in.
And then … the funniest thing happened. I went on TikTok, and between videos of people befriending stray cats, I saw video after video of teens analyzing Inside, white women showing photos from their Instagrams to prove Burnham nailed them in “White Woman’s Instagram,†and people of all ages lip-syncing “All Eyes on Me†as if the lyrics (“Are you feeling nervous? / Are you having fun? / It’s almost over / It’s just begunâ€) were a conversation between the same person at the start and end of the pandemic. I was bewildered: How could a special so pointedly against online performance result in so much reverent online performance? It didn’t make sense until one day, when I was scrolling, I heard my voice. Or at least I thought it was me. It sounded like me, off-camera, faintly agreeing with Burnham, as he is explaining the reason behind the panic attacks that inspired Make Happy. I scrolled more. Stray cats. Tips on cooking steak. “All Eyes on Me†lip sync. Me again. This time, I could clearly see it was me talking to Burnham at Vulture Festival in 2018. I confirmed this as I was shown another video of myself later that day. And another the next day. At one point, the comedian Moses Storm sent me a message on TikTok: “If you even think about Bo Burnham while on here, the algorithm will send you 91 videos of you interviewing him.â€
@elmsglu Bo talking about meanings behind lyrics. From the yt video “In Conversation: Bo Burnham Live on Good One†#boburnham #inside #makehappy
♬ original sound - elmer
It felt bad and weird. It made me uncomfortable. I felt compelled to reply to these videos, saying “This is me!†as a way of reconnecting myself with this image of me. Although I didn’t like any of this, it did make me understand the reaction to Inside better. A lot of people had been feeling really bad, seeing how the isolation of the pandemic mirrored the self-imposed isolation of living online. The disassociation I was feeling in this moment was what a lot of people who grew up knowing only digital existence had been feeling their whole lives. As Burnham explained to me on TikTok, “Your self is atomized into a thousand different versions of you that are watching each other and taking inventory of each other.†And it made me understand what Shandling saw in Burnham all those years ago. On The Larry Sanders Show, Shandling’s influential ’90s late-night-show send-up, the curtain that separated the front-of-stage and backstage was meant as a sort of allegory for the divide between, as Apatow would put it, “what people are trying to project versus what they’re actually feeling.†Inside explores what happens when it’s not clear which side of the curtain you’re on anymore.
Inside isn’t a live performance. There are multiple takes and camera setups over the course of many months. Still, Inside is the special of Burnham’s that connects the most emotionally with people, not in spite of its being his most contrived but because of it. It posits that attempts to remove artifice are actually artifice, but one can attempt to create artifice genuinely. In contrast, around the release of Inside, it became popular for comedians to include documentary footage in their specials, as if they were scientists offering mathematical proof. “See?†they’d say. “This proves that it’s real.†But how people behave in a documentary to a person like Burnham is also a performance, so to call it “true†feels false. Inside feels true because it’s honest about being manufactured.
Burnham, as I see it, is going after the ecstatic truth, an idea put forward by the filmmaker Werner Herzog, who is known for including fictional elements in his documentaries, like staging his subjects or having them perform scripted scenes. Out of a belief that facts are shallow, and rejecting cinema verité, Herzog is after an inner, deeper truth that “is mysterious and elusive and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.†It is why Michelangelo slapped a big ol’ noggin and large oven-mitt hands on his David, knowing the 17-foot-high sculpture would be looked at from below, understanding that exaggeration was necessary for it to register as realistic, if not more than realistic.
Part of Burnham understands that stand-ups, also often seen from below, are doing this, too, so to shoot them as if it were otherwise might feel dishonest. Inside is not a literal depiction of what the pandemic was like for Burnham (he, for one, probably slept in his actual house) but a real attempt to capture what he wanted to communicate about it. People shouldn’t take it literally and leave the special worried that he is a suicidal recluse now but rather leave it worried for people generally who might have had a hard time during the pandemic. Opposed to the self-interest of C.K.’s “truth,†Burnham offers a “truth†that can help the viewer better understand themselves. The goal for Burnham, like Shandling, is never personal truth but truth — period.
Adapted from Comedy Book, by Jesse David Fox. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023 by Jesse David Fox. All rights reserved
