the time is not now
by
Douglas Messerli
Hannibal
Buress (performer), Kristian Mercado (director) Miami Nights / I watched
this taped performance on YouTube on August 6, 2020
Stand-up
comedian, comic writer, and actor Hannibal Buress’ 2019 performance before a
live audience, Miami Nights, is now being broadcast free on YouTube, in
part because of the Covid-19 epidemic. It’s a gift that everyone should take
the opportunity to see before it disappears.
The very variety of Buress’ previous works
on The Eric Andre Show, his briefer appearances on the talk shows of
Jimmy Fallon, David Letterman, Jimmy Kimmel and others, as well as his own
comedy shows and albums (Hannibal Buress Live from Chicago and Animal
Furnace) and a brief stint at
writing for Saturday Night Live, has brought him a great deal of
attention, but as he jokes, not enough to gain him universal celebrity. When
people seem to recognize him, he generally responds, “I get that all the time,”
and merrily walks his way down the streets without the adulation which he feels
might hinder his life.
Soon after, he quips that twice a year he
is asked to host a game show, answering in a god-like voice with a projection-screen
fire raging behind him: THE PROPHECY WILL BE FULFILLED, BUT THE TIME IS NOT
NOW. Indeed, Buress’ new work is about doing things at “the right time” in a
world in which he and others can simply survive.
He admits to the audience that he has
stopped drinking (“I want to choose the way I die,” he insists.) Preferably he
would like to die from a rare disease that bares his own name “like Lou Gehrig
Disease,” he jokes.
His asthma, and the lack of his friends’
appreciation for the seriousness of the problem is the subject of another short
series of amusements.
As for the time to die, just like hosting
another game show, a year in which thousands are dying from the pandemic and
George Floyd and others have been killed by police is not the right time to go,
he warily suggests, leading into the two major skits of the evening.
The first involves his arrival in
Nashville, where the moment he enters a taxicab, the driver tells him that he
can’t play his instrument in the cab. Having said nothing about playing an
instrument or even carrying a case in which he might be hiding one, the
comedian is a bit confused.
Without further ado, the driver reports
that he had a passenger who played Kanye West the other day and kept singing
his song “Nigger man, Nigger man, Nigger man.”
Buress was quite astounded; “yes, Kanye sometimes
uses the first syllable “Nig” throughout his work, but has lots of words in between
and doesn’t lay into the final r the way you did just now”; “I was thinking
maybe I missed something on his first album College Dropout?”
He looks it up on his cell-phone. No
such title appears, he reports to the cabbie. As the conversation continues,
Buress begins to wonder is this a new form of racism. Do a group of cabdrivers
meet monthly to ponder how they might enter into bigoted conversation without
seeming to be explicitly stating their racist sentiments?
Soon after he begins an even longer retelling
of his now famous arrest in Miami for disorderly conduct and drunken behavior.
The comedian admits that he, having no food and water to accompany them, had
far too many drinks: “How many drinks did I have? I don’t know. How many albums
does Snoop Dogg have? (His audience laughs.) You don’t know either, you only know
it’s more than 10 and less than 30.”
Realizing, however, that he was in bad
shape, Buress left the bar and in front of a large mansion which was evidently
hosting a Basel Miami art party asks a cop if he will call him an Uber,
since the comedian has lost his cellphone, offering the pay him an extra $20.
The policeman, presuming he was one of
the party guests, orders him off the street, the logic of which makes utterly
no sense to our drunken friend. To “get it together” he retreats to another bar
with the cop behind him, now insisting that Buress has to leave the bar because
of his condition.
Clearly that leaves the performer in a
difficult position in which he is seemingly trapped in a no-man’s land where he
is not permitted inside nor outside, a kind of catch-22 situation from which
there can be no escape.
Given the recent events surrounding Floyd’s
meaningless death and the several others killed similarly by police that have
been brought to light through the “Black Lives Matter” protests, however,
Buress’ situation is even more troubling. As Alexandra Schwartz writes in The
New Yorker:
…Mortality
is also on his mind. ….”I want
my own way of dying.” he says. It’s a joke
about
ego, but the unspoken subtext—about
the
precise way in which a Black man in America
does
not want to die—hangs in the air, to be
picked
up in the story that the act has been
building
toward….
His
solution is to return to where he discovers the cop once more, speaking
directly into the man’s body camera: “Hey, what’s up, it’s me, Hannibal Buress.
This cop’s stupid as fuck.”
Buress, himself, admits it was probably
not the best thing to say—despite it being absolutely legal—to a clearly
riled-up man in blue. And the drunken performer recalls using even choicer
language to describe and agitate the man who arrested him when they later reach
the police station where the coper takes him, all of which might have been
prevented if the cop might have simply taken the action of calling an Uber. Yet,
putting his name directly into the body cam was probably the best way to put
the incident on the record, possibly also preventing the now nervous law
enforcer from taking a more private action.
Buress’
case (with the help of a lawyer named Bieber) was thrown out along with a fine
and the requirement to attend a day’s session about the evils of inebriation,
during which, despite his best attempts, Buress was recognized by fellow
attendees.
The cop, it turns out, was one of those
who police chiefs mistakenly, in an act of ablution of their kind, describe as “a
bad apple.” One of the many headlines from Miami newspapers describes the
potential violence that the comedian might have faced that night:
Miami
Cop Who Arrested Hannibal Buress
Caught
Choking Man After Fireball Binge
For those of you who might not know what a
Fireball Binge is, I’ll provide a definition: Fireball is a cinnamon flavored
whisky manufactured by the Sazerac Company of New Orleans. The company itself
describes the 33% alcohol liquid: “If you haven't tried it yet, just imagine
what it feels like to stand face-to-face with a fire-breathing dragon who just
ate a whisky barrel full of spicy cinnamon. Live it, love it, shoot it – what
happens next is up to you.”
My Webster’s New World Dictionary identifies
the word “binge” as “a drunken celebration or spree.”
Los
Angeles, August 9, 2020
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2020).
No comments:
Post a Comment