Review: Hannibal Buress at Cap City Comedy Club [Comedy]
The first thing you notice about Buress' stage persona is that he's veeeeeeery comfortable with a mic in his hand. If there's a fear that the audience won't follow along to the fucked-up places his jokes lead, it's buried pretty deeply in his intestines, and what you get on stage is a relaxed performer who can sell a joke that's built on, say, the concept of how rad his life might be if he had metal arms. At Friday night's performance, Buress took that very bit out for a walk, then left us to watch as it was kidnapped by pirates and sold to aliens.
That's the thing about Buress: While a more traditional comedian may take silly bits in odd directions—say, a bit about shopping for shoes that devolves into a weird fantasy about shopping malls—the pieces that go weird for him start weird. For this guy, "I wish I had metal arms" isn't just the goofy tag on a joke rooted in the real world, it's the premise on which he builds his really out-there bits. In the "metal arms" bit, we follow him for days as he lives his life—having sex with girls, getting pulled over by the police, etc—all starting from this ridiculous opening. The entire bit may run four entire minutes, and it demonstrates the remarkable faith he has in himself and his audience to commit to material with such abstract roots for such a long time.
Sadly, however, that faith was a bit misplaced at Cap City on Friday. He drew the wrath of a vocal heckler about mid-way through his set, and never quite recovered the easy cool needed to sell his act. The cry of "weak humor" from a woman in the crowd derailed the latter part of his set, as the persona Buress uses onstage isn't the sort to dismantle a heckler in the brutal fashion needed to soldier through at a venue like Cap City. He turned it into a conversation, asked her a few questions, but unlike some comics, who seem to thrive on the interaction, it made him look downright uncomfortable. That's a dangerous problem when your whole style is predicated on a sense of casual confidence. The flipside to Buress' more challenging material is that, out of the proper context, it's too weird to really work. (Witness the above paragraph, where everything that makes the "metal arms" bit hilarious is sucked out.) Buress is a brilliant comedian who succeeds on multiple levels, but until he's out of clubs like Cap City, where a drunk who doesn't know what she's in for can ruin it for everyone, we run the risk of never quite seeing him at his best.
