If there’s one thing that makes Hannibal Buress so damn likable – so likable that an audience is laughing within seconds of him being on stage simply because he pronounced the name of the venue with gusto – it’s his lack of self-righteousness. It’s there in his slow, assured amble across the stage and the gentle cadences of his delivery, but it’s also there in so much of his material (he’s been a staff writer on 30 Rock and SNL, as well as appearing in Broad City), which is a mixture of mellow cerebral observations and commonsense logic.
Tonight, for example, the last and sold-out night of his Comedy Camisado tour, one of his best riffs comes from what he sees as the non-scandal of steroids use in sports. He weaves a Hollywood movie-like scene of a father and son reminiscing about watching an amazing game together. And then: “Steroids gave the beautiful memory for that father and son! Steroids did that! Let it go!” he yells. It’s a convincing if morally flawed argument, and hilarious too.
This total lack of sanctimoniousness and unassailable “chill” is a bit ironic in that over the last few months Buress has found himself unwittingly cast as a kind of moral crusader. Last October, during a stand-up set in Philadelphia, he included lines about the longstanding rape allegations made against Bill Cosby: “He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up, black people. I was on TV in the 80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.’ Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches.” Someone in the audience who had recorded his performance posted the footage online, it went viral, and what had been a rumbling, if generally ignored topic very soon became a national talking point. It’s only very late in his set that Buress acknowledges any of this. A vainer man would milk it, but Buress’s reaction? “C’mon, chill out – pull back on me a little bit, media.” The moment comes and goes in less than a minute.
He warms up over his hour and a half on stage, but the night’s best moments are his affectionate dissections of hip-hop. He parses the opening bars of TI’s Bankhead, for example, as a kind of crime tally (“See me riding in a Chevy, .44 on the seat/ With a quarter or a blow, get low, then we see/ No tag, no license, truck loaded with D”), but his extended joke about the opening bars of Iggy Azalea’s Fancy is even better. He enacts a drunk guy wandering off at a party and thumping something out on a stray keyboard before going on to propose that those eight beats would be how you told someone they were stupid, “in a future where we’ve evolved beyond language”. Buress is accompanied by DJ Tony Trimm and for the rest of the evening the intro of Fancy serves as an aural cue every time he wants to punchline someone or something dumb.
There’s a moment when he preludes a short joke with “this next bit doesn’t connect to anything”. Later, he begins a segment about women’s yoga pants but then appears to falter and think better of it. (“The punchline is ‘pussy-print’. I’m not proud of it. We all have to do things we’re not proud of in this content-driven world.”)
Both of these seem to be calculated, but that doesn’t prevent them compounding the sensation of cheerful artlessness, the feeling that this is all quite simple: just a dude telling jokes. It’s just that he also happens to be – to use a favourite phrase of his – crushing it.
