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RAMBLE ON: "How the World Works" by Bo Burnham
🕑 Added 2023-11-30 17:24:55 +0000 UTCSo, here’s my question for anyone watching: What do you think “How the World Works” is about? Who is Bo Burnham sympathizing with in this sketch?
For those who haven’t watched it, Bo Burnham’s brilliant and occasionally insufferable comedy special INSIDE was immediately hailed as the defining artwork of the pandemic. Written as a way for Burnham to expend some kind of creativity during the lockdowns, Burnham presents a bunch of sketches and songs about loneliness, boredom and the phoniness and isolation of the Internet. Early on in it – for my money, the first really impressive moment of the special – he sings a bright upbeat children’s song about how society works by everyone working together – cooperation makes the world go round, just like all the animals in the forest make the ecosystem thrive, that’s the way the world works. Then he pulls out a sock puppet – literally just an unadorned gym sock – who bitterly tells him that his smiley-time understanding of society is all wrong. Society is nothing but misery and degradation, the strong exploiting the weak, the 1% of our capitalist hellscape consuming the poor like vampires, etc.
Bo reacts with surprise, a little disillusioned but moreso curious, and asks to know how he can help. Socko bitterly responds, “Read a book or something, I don’t know. Just don’t burden me with the responsibility of educating you. It’s incredibly exhausting.” The conversation devolves. The sock complains that Bo is trying to make this about himself and his own self-actualization rather than actually helping anyone. Bo, starting to get angry, threatens to remove the sock, sending him back to the horrifying unreal limbo Socko existed in before Bo put him on his hand. Socko cowers, and Bo, having established his dominance over the judgy annoying sock, sings happily, the status quo restored. Then Bo tears the screaming sock off his hand anyway.
I’m always curious how people interpret this sketch. Who’s the bad guy here? For me, the first thing that always strikes me is that the sock is a dick. Just, a giant dick. I can’t know for sure Bo’s intentions, I don’t think he’s trying to downplay the effects of hierarchical exploitation, but I still think Bo thinks of this sock as an unlikable asshole. “The FBI killed Martin Luther King,” says Socko, repeating a common but largely baseless conspiracy theory. A dig at the “pedophilic corporate elite” veers dangerously close to QAnon rhetoric. Bear in mind that Bo Burnham wrote this, and Bo Burnham does not exactly make bomb-throwing revolutionary comedy or anything. I’d doubt he thinks that “neoliberal fascists are destroying the left” or that private property is theft by definition. On some level he’s mocking people who think in those terms; Socko is the one who escalates the conversation into pointless, unnecessary hostility. I think Bo naturally sympathizes with his own character rather than the militant leftist sock, and on some level I think Bo the writer enjoys reminding Socko who’s boss.
On the other hand, self-criticism is a common theme in Bo Burnham’s comedy. Bo writes himself as childishly naïve, completely oblivious to even the possibility of injustice in the world, so he must think Socko has a point at least. Bo responds to Socko’s harsh comments by saying that he’s just trying to be a better person, and Socko yells at him again for making social issues about his own self-actualization; essentially this is Bo not only criticizing himself, but criticizing his own self-criticism (something he also does in the defining sketch of the special, his self-criticism becoming self-self-self-self-criticism until it becomes unbearable). When Bo (the character) has his privilege pushed upon, he happily uses it to inflict unjustifiable cruelties on Socko, again pushing the sympathy away from Bo. So what if Socko is snappish and overheated? He’s the one suffering in a way that Bo will never understand. So whose perspective is this sketch really from?
If you go to discussion forums like Reddit or more explicitly communist forums, you can see people dissecting this from every which way, which I think is fair: Yes it’s a mock-children’s song in a silly comedy, but how often do you see a mainstream entertainment like this saying “private property’s inherently theft”? From what I can tell, leftists mostly like it; they think Burnham is criticizing the sock’s tone but endorsing its ideas. I don’t think that’s wrong, but it’s not exactly my interpretation of it. Whenever I share my thoughts on its perspective, though, I get shouted down (much like Socko!). Well, I have my own privileges, like a Patreon full of people ready to kiss my ass, so I’m going to share my interpretation here. Here’s what I think, when you drill deep down on it, is the perspective of “How the World Wants”:
The perspective is, Bo Burnham is going insane talking to a fucking sock on his hand.
Inside is a special about being trapped indoors with no one to talk to except the Internet; everything about it has to be understood by that perspective, and by the fact that Bo Burnham’s first instinct has always been to tear himself apart. There are elements of social satire in there, yeah, but what I mostly see is a rich white guy reading too much overheated Internet rhetoric, getting annoyed by it and then grappling with his own reaction to it. I might be projecting; I relate to Bo Burnham a little much, as both a piano-playing content creator and a helpless Twitter addict. Let us not forget that the lockdowns were also when the George Floyd protests broke out, after three years of a Trump presidency. When he got elected, I wanted to do nothing but be politically engaged; by the midterms I was so miserable and exhausted that I could barely think about it. That’s why for me “How the World Works” is not, to me, about two opposing worldviews and the mechanics of privilege; it’s about being too online. This is basically all Burnham has (at least as portrayed in this special); he has FaceTime with his mom, and he has the Internet – “everything, all of the time,” as he puts it, but also simultaneously nothing. This is what I remember of the lockdowns: having no company except the voices on social media, formless blobs with no faces but loud mouths being unproductively hostile, and ultimately feeling like you’re just talking to yourself.
There are points in Inside where I am repulsed by Burnham’s self-indulgence. I don’t care about Bo fretting about his problematic jokes. I don’t need to see him crying. Every second he self-flagellates about self-flagellating I get embarrassed for him, and then the embarrassment turns inward on every second I’ve spent thinking about myself. Social media is often called an echo chamber, but the echo chamber on display in “How the World Works” is in one’s own brain. Did you know social media use is way down? Not just because all of the social media sites have gotten shittier, but also people just spend more time in Discord, in group chats, in online spaces where you are not encouraged to be as anti-social and phony as possible. It feels a billion times more productive, though there’s still that anti-social disconnect. In the wake of the war in Israel/Palestine, Twitter has yet again become a sewer of pointless arguing, horrific opinions and misinformation. I’ve curtailed my social media use as much as I can and I can still feel my brain rotting from seeing it; I can’t help but feel like I’m not doing my part if I disengage. There’s gotta be something more productive than this, right? I guess. Read a book or something, I don’t know.
Comments
Z the Stranger
I think you might find some interesting insight from this video if you haven’t already seen it https://youtu.be/UvYcunuF3Eo?si=V7N5UH88-6txDgdv
Zachary McAnally
Yeah, I like this. Honestly, the song works for me because both of them are extremely annoying, allowing me, the viewer, to enjoy hating both of them. And that "reaction" to Unpaid Intern is rough. I can't even rewatch it now, having clicked the link. A little too close to home.
RedBedroomRecords
I think Schumer and Pelosi are progressive just not in the same that The Squad like AOC are, they're more old-school progressive. Personally i'm not really a fan of this kind of meta-comedy so Inside did absolutely nothing for me, it just came off as pretentious, self-absorbed, confusing, incoherent and up it's own ass. I ultimately got nothing out of it. Like Todd I find self-flaggelation tiresome and cringy and I dislike seeing Youtubers like Caddicarus and Moviebob excessively beating themselves up over videos they made in the past.
James Wood
I think about "How the World Works" in contrast to "That Funny Feeling" With the former I think the politics is much more in question and the lens of "This guy is literally talking to his own personified hand" is the reading that makes the most immediate sense. But with the later it's a very different tone and presentation, the jokes in it are meant to enhance the seriousness through comparison. That Funny Feeling I think is a much more solidly ""Leftist"" song. It's a song about the underlying feeling that things are only going to get worse and soon; explicitly talking about climate change, guns, consumerism, racism, etc. Especially with the fractured and somewhat pointless nature of political labels nowadays I don't think Bo turning to the camera and saying "I'm X Ideology" really would clear things up any, nor would it make for good watching. But I think here it's easy to see that he's making some points that are not revolutionary but are left wing beyond just being left of center. It's still very much online though so if anything that only reflects back and strengthens you're main perspective on "How the World Works" When looking at both together, Socko and the character of Bo come off as extreme manifestations. Socko is disaffected and defeatist in much the same way the end of "That Funny Feeling" more or less accepts the end of the world as inevitable, overdue. But when actually faced with his possible demise he immediately folds and begs for his life. Meanwhile with the character of Bo he at first appears naive, before revealing that he is all too aware of how the world really works as he demonstrates on Socko. Bo feels like the main antagonist of this song to me. Socko is somewhat consistent but Bo has this switch and after it he reads as a stand in for privileged fair-weather allies or people in power who want to appear progressive without putting in the work. I can't help but think of Schumer and Pelosi with the others kneeling while wearing the kente cloth stoles. What if this Bo did read a book or something? But then again I fear I may just be overly sympathizing with Socko, seeing in him the hopelessness of the modern leftist political project, seeing the world crumbling by a thousand avoidable cuts each day. I think then that "That Funny Feeling" comes across as him again telling us how the world works. Rather than TFF Bo's cynical naivety or Socko's fringe edginess, this one feels more in line with actual Bo's reckoning of the world. Here it's a muted helplessness, it's not "the world is built with blood!", but it is speaking about the kind of stupid situation we find ourselves in and how it might just end us all.
Orellien
My read is that while Socko is a bit of a parody of far-left spaces, the main thing I get from Socko going "read a book or something, I dunno" is frustration and exhaustion. There's a certain level of "we've been shouting this crap at you for the last fifty years, how are you only just now getting that there's a problem here?!" that hits a lot of leftist spaces, because... ...well, they've been shouting that stuff for the last fifty years and constantly getting demeaned for it. They're not being dicks because they're dicks, they're being dicks because they've given up pretense about being taken seriously and just want to vent sometimes. There's also the power dynamic inherent in the sketch. Socko is allowed to say basically whatever he wants, riiiight up until the point where that criticism is directed at Bo himself, at which point he's crossed a line. In this sketch, "The FBI killed MLK" is treated with a chuckle and a smile, while "educate yourself for once" is reacted to with "be careful". Basically, Socko is extreme, but mostly in the right. Bo is "reasonable", with air quotes the size of K2, but gets scary when he's the one getting criticized, because he's the one in control. ...of course, like all good sketches like this, its saying a bunch of things, because its in conversation with itself, and the author probably doesn't fully grok what he's going for here. Sometimes you need to get shit out onto the page in order to get something to deal with, ya know?
boringcactus
i think “it's not my job to educate you” is clearly Socko as a parody of online leftism, and i think people who assume author-Bo agrees with any given thing Socko says are mostly projecting their own politics onto an artist they like. at the same time, though, Inside definitely agrees with Socko that Bo’s “what can i do to help” is self-centered and illegitimate — “maybe i should just shut the fuck up … i'm bored” in “Comedy” is the same point, and outside the context of activism Bo has been calling himself self-centered since at least as far back as “Art Is Dead”. so i think the sketch is more sympathetic to Socko than to Bo, although it's not very supportive of Socko either, and i think your reading of the whole thing as This Is Your Brain On Twitter makes a lot of sense. although i just realized, within the fiction, it literally is Socko’s responsibility to educate people, that’s what the song is. but i don’t know if that changes the math any. (my hottest Bo Burnham take is that Nerds is a better Problematic Ally Song than either Same Love or Auntie Diaries, but that's a whole other thing.)
triggthediscovery
I'm gonna throw my hat in the ring with my interpretation. I think the sketch is about how even if the left is theoretically independent from the systems of power, by nature of "how the world works" leftism is still ultimately still dependent to power. I think it's intentional that Burnham lets socko go off and only changes his tone when directly implicated in socko's ranting. Ultimately I think it's updating the old quote “If voting changed anything they'd make it illegal” but for internet activism/leftism. Functionally it's not too far off your interpretation (I think both resolve on the idea of the internet being a pointless time vortex which distracts from what's really important in life) but I interpret the song as a soft critique of internet activism on his way to that broader point.
Kompy
Literally said "oh shit here we go" when I saw this notification on my phone Pretty well-reasoned take, especially with the whole "sockpuppet" double entendre
