Hannibal Buress the Rapper’s Warmup Act? Hannibal Buress the Comedian – The New Yorker

Given Hannibal Buress’s track record, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suspect that his latest career move is an elaborate piece of performance art. The forty-year-old standup comedian and actor has spent the past two years forging a new path as a rapper and a producer. Last year, he released an eight-song EP under the stage name Eshu Tune. (The name Eshu comes from a Yoruban god known as a trickster.) His music ranges from the dense and introspective to the bluntly absurd, including a song called “Veneers,” in which he pays tribute to his porcelain teeth.

Buress was scheduled to perform his first full live set in New York recently, at the downtown club S.O.B.’s. Unusually, he raps with a full band and insists on rigorous rehearsals and sound checks. The evening of the show, he scrolled his iPad in the greenroom, searching for images to display on the stage screen during his act. “I love when the show has great visuals,” he said, pulling up a retro-looking clip from a video game called Ninja Baseball Bat Man.

He has dabbled in hip-hop since college, when he did battle rap, and music has always been a topic in his standup. During the pandemic, part of which he spent in Hawaii, he seriously committed to the pursuit. He’d quit drinking after a 2017 run-in with the police, and in 2021 he was expecting his first child. “It was me realizing I wasn’t excited about trying to do a lot of standup comedy the way I used to,” he said in the greenroom. He wore a navy mesh Chicago Bulls jersey and slim black cargo pants. Sobriety has given him a fresh-faced glow and a newly svelte physique.

“I didn’t want to be out there,” he continued, referring to the comedy scene. “It just didn’t feel good.” Music refocussed him. He hired a band, a music publicist, and a vocal and performance coach, who helped him turn his onstage deadpan style into something more energetic. “One exercise she gave me was to imagine that the person in the front row is deaf,” he said. “That helped.”

At the start, he was stubborn about his new direction, routinely turning down six-figure standup gigs. “Fuck that! I’m doing music!” he bellowed, imitating himself. “Pass! No, I’m not doing your standup shit. Let me rap.” Eventually, he realized that standup gigs could subsidize his music career and help him cultivate an audience. “It’s almost like I have myself as a co-signer,” he said.

The Eshu Tune show at S.O.B.’s was free, and, to mollify the old fans, he opened it with a standup set. “I used to do standup with passion and energy,” he told the crowd. “Now this shit is just a warmup—so I’m not nervous when I’m doing my music.”

There were plenty of laughs as he breezed through jokes about the rapper T.I.’s decision to try standup. “It’s a tougher transition—taking beats away. Me doing music—I’m adding beats,” he said. Throughout the set, a drunk woman in the audience kept interrupting. “You’re so Hollywood!” she yelled.

“I’m Hollywood? Really?” he said. “Aw, man.”

“We’ll talk later!” she shouted.

“No, we won’t,” he replied, laughing. “Not at all. Absolutely not.” The heckler kept at it.

Buress paced, searching for the right response. “This pause is not, like, ‘Oh, I’m stuck and I can’t come up with a joke,’ ” he said. He turned to the drunk woman. “But I’m genuinely baffled by why you won’t shut the fuck up! What are you talking about?” The audience roared, and he returned to his bit. “That would have landed way better if you would have shut the fuck up!,” he said, after he finished.

Frustrated but jovial, he told the crowd, “That’s actually why I don’t do that much standup. For real. There’s a level of white entitlement in my audience, I promise you.”

When he came out for his hip-hop set, he’d brightened up his outfit with a red satin bomber jacket and matching sunglasses. He performed a new single called “I Lift Weights,” a wild and silly track that makes fun of fitness nuts. He prefaced it by saying, “This next track is a complete lie.”

No heckling could be heard, and the audience loved it. What Buress had said at the end of his standup set was true: “When I do music, it drowns out your dumbness.”