After over a decade of regularly performing stand-up comedy, Hannibal Buress is pretty confident he’s figured it out. “At this point in the game, I have a solid idea of what a bit that will work feels and sounds like well before I take it to a stage.… I know how to tell a story, I know how to do a one-liner, I know how to do a current-events joke, I know how to do a music joke, I can do a dumb voice for a little bit.” This is abundantly evident from his most recent special, Miami Nights, recorded in 2019 and released free on YouTube this summer. Each joke, whether about 2 Chainz’s obsession with the idea of a Bentley truck, the wonders of Auto-Tune, or a TED Talk–length rehash of his 2017 arrest in Miami, features a perfectly orchestrated symphony of these elements. He’s relaxed, for sure, but the show has forward momentum. It moves.
Buress’s stand-up has always been good, but even he admits it used to sound a lot different. Last year, the comedian reperformed the entirety of his first stand-up special, My Name Is Hannibal, in Memphis, completely altering the delivery of some of his most famous early jokes. “I don’t speak the same way I used to,” he says now. “I’ve had a lot of different experiences, been in different situations for the past 12 years.” One such experience came in late 2014, when Buress called Bill Cosby a rapist onstage. The response was overwhelming in a number of ways—it eventually led to the reopening of charges against the comedian—but perhaps it was summed up best by Buress himself in his 2016 Netflix special, Comedy Camisado: “Who knew that offhand joke about Cosby raping would lead to me having amazing consensual sex across the country?”
But when Buress takes stock of key jokes in his career thus far, that night in Philadelphia doesn’t come to mind. In fact, most of his more widely known bits—the 30-minute retelling of his Miami arrest, the diatribe against pigeons, the appreciation of steroids, the Vanilla Ice music cue—don’t come up at all. When GQ caught Buress on the phone, as he prepared to kick off a month-long, socially distant drive-in comedy and music tour in Cleveland on September 22, he singled out these three jokes as the ones that he felt have defined his career.
1. Pickle Juice, My Name Is Hannibal, 2009
In 2008, Buress lived in a three-bedroom apartment in Chicago with a fellow comedian and that comedian’s friend from high school. Buress doesn’t remember exactly when he decided to start saving pickle juice, but he knew it was a smart thing to do. “It just hit me, the pickles are done but there’s this juice in there. That could be something, that could go on something.” But once Buress discovered his roommate had tossed his precious juice, his mind went to the absurd. “It was one of those typical comedic situations where you just say ‘okay’ in person, but in your head you go to a whole other place, this alternate fantasy scenario with pickles.” By the end of the bit, Buress suggests frying his roommate’s lizards to eat, which, he notes, would be a great use for pickle juice.
Buress thinks the bit works for a lot of different reasons. “It’s this typical roommate conflict, and I’m 25 at the time when I wrote it.… You don’t know what’s truly going to start hitting, but maybe this did because I sounded like I believed what I was saying.” It probably didn’t hurt that the way Buress says “flick it on my sandwiches for flavor” is practically sing-songy. “Just the sound of it and the idea of it, maybe the frivolity of it, all these other elements connected.”
2. A Love Letter to New Orleans, Live From Chicago, 2014
Even six years after telling this joke on late-night television, Buress sounds a bit in awe of the story. “It came out of me just being excited to tell friends or whoever would listen: ‘I can’t believe we just did this shit.’ ” The story flows effortlessly between the scene setting of New Orleans as home to outdoor drinking and enormous rats to a notably disruptive second-line parade of five people. “I couldn’t believe it came together like it did—I was shocked,” he says. “I had other second lines after that, and they were fun, but they were nothing like when I didn’t know what a second line was. I couldn’t re-create the magic, it would just never be the same.”