It’s grainy, out of focus and barely audible. But the two minutes of footage captured on a mobile phone in a Philadelphia comedy club a year ago has changed the life of Chicago-born comedian Hannibal Buress.
Tonight at 8pm, Buress takes to the stage at the Meyana Theatre, Jumeirah Beach Hotel, as a headliner in the Dubai Comedy Festival. For Buress, the gig is date three in his whirlwind Camisado Tour – it means surprise attack – that has already seen him storm through London and Dublin.
Exactly a year ago today, the still relatively obscure Buress launched a surprise attack on veteran American comedian Bill Cosby during a stand-up gig in Philadelphia.
The former star of The Cosby Show had been facing allegations of sexual assault since 2000. But just a few words from Buress on the night of October 16, 2014, opened the floodgates to fresh accusations from women who, until then, had chosen not to come forward.
By chance, someone in the audience was filming and uploaded the performance, which quickly went viral. As a result, decade-old allegations of sexual assault against Cosby resurfaced again – and dozens of women who had not spoken out before found the courage to come forward.
Among the 40 or so who came forward was Janice Dickinson, a former model and judge on TV show America's Next Top Model, who claimed Cosby had raped her in 1982.
On November 18, the very day Dickinson spoke out, Netflix dropped plans to screen Bill Cosby 77, an hour-long routine filmed by the comedian in San Francisco on his 77th birthday.
As Cosby's star has fallen, so the 32-year-old Buress's has risen. As GQ magazine noted in July, "in the past year, Buress has gone from cult comic to mainstream star".
But in fact, like many an “overnight” success, Buress has been paying his dues for years.
Hannibal Buress, named for the Carthaginian general famed for marching elephants over the Alps in the third century BC, was born in Chicago to middle-class parents – his father, John, worked for the railway company Union Pacific and his mother, Margaret, was a schoolteacher.
He got his first laughs as a member of his high school’s debating team and today his routine as a comedian is still largely based on deconstructing the dumb things people say.
“I wouldn’t say I’m combative,” he said in an interview earlier this year, “but, like, when people say something that’s wrong, I’m one to correct them.”
He began doing stand-up in 2002, aged 19. It wasn't something he had planned, he told the Chicago Tribune in 2011. But while studying communications at Southern Illinois University he went to a comedy night and decided he could do better than some of the acts on show.
He quickly found that it wasn't as easy as it looked. As he confessed last year during an appearance on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, the first time out he bombed so badly that he was, quite literally, carried off stage while still trying to deliver feeble punchlines. But he was hooked.
“That was a rough show,” he recalled. “It felt like the end of the world … I cried. But to get better, you have to bomb a little bit.”
Get better he did. For years, as his hometown paper noted, "he would do almost any open-mike night he found, MC at any venue that would hire him", and, by 2011, the Chicago Tribune was tentatively hailing him as "the next king of comedy".
Workwise, comedy is all he's ever known. At the beginning of this month, Buress posted the unaired pilot of a TV programme he had pitched last year without success. Unemployable features him trying his hand at all kinds of real jobs because stand-up, as he says in episode one, is "the only job I've ever had.
“Most people have to do real jobs for a living … and those jobs usually involve real skills. I don’t have any of those skills.” In 2008 he made the decision to blow off the Windy City and move to New York, America’s comedy capital, where his sister and her family were living.
There was, he said recently, no plan. “I just popped up. ‘Hey, what’s up? I got $200 and dreams. Let’s do this’.”
Within a year those dreams started to come true. Buress landed a break that any struggling comedian would kill for – a spot on NBC's Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.
And luck begets luck. Seth Myers, head writer for the channel's comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live, saw Buress perform and called his agent.
As Buress later recalled, to his own amazement, he hesitated.
“I thought: ‘I’m not a sketch actor’ … plus … I had a Priceline name-your-own-price flight to Chicago, and if I went to the meeting, I would have to break that flight.”
Despite his best efforts to shoot down his own career, Buress landed a job as a Saturday Night Live scriptwriter.
It was to prove a rewarding, if frustrating, learning process. "It wasn't for me," he later told GQ magazine. "I didn't apply myself as much as I could have. Maybe I didn't enjoy the place that much."
In a season, only one of his sketches made it to screen. His first effort, he later told Chicago magazine, had cast Megan Fox as a villain who kills her victims with jazz scatting.
But then luck came knocking again, in the form of comedian and actress Tina Fey. The two met when Fey hosted Saturday Night Live and asked Buress to write for her NBC sitcom 30 Rock.
That was 2009 and the job coincided with the release of Buress's first album, an hour-long recording of a live show called My Name is Hannibal. By now, he was a familiar face at festivals and comedy clubs such as Brooklyn's Knitting Factory.
This, surely, was his moment. And then he quit 30 Rock.
Writing for the show had proved to be another bad fit, but this time, at least, he had enjoyed the experience.
“They’d probably say nice things about me,” he said later, “but they won’t say that I was a great sitcom writer.”
Buress went back to pounding the clubs, a dedication that paid off with parts in TV shows including The Eric André Show in 2012 and a regular slot on Comedy Central's Amy Poehler-produced series Broad City, which was first broadcast in January last year.
In 2013 he had also landed a walk-on role in his first movie, as Officer Watkins in the Seth Rogen comedy Bad Neighbours, which was released in March 2014.
It was all looking good for Buress, if not spectacular, when he stood up this time last year and took down Cosby.
As GQ magazine commented later, he'd been "killing it in comedy clubs for over a decade" but Buress's "steady rise was already peaking" when he dropped the bomb.
And, once again, luck – this time in the guise of a comedy-club goer with a camera phone and a penchant for uploading to social media – was on hand to make sure it exploded.
"Now, we'd known, or at least kind of known, about Cosby," wrote GQ's Taffy Brodesser-Akner in July.
“We’d heard accusations. Yet somehow the world hadn’t been ready to face the possibility that … the man who made TV safe for middle-class black families was raping women.
“Hannibal had shaken us awake. We were listening.”
CBS, CNN, all the major news channels covered the story and more than 40 women “came forward to tell their frighteningly similar stories about how Cosby had allegedly drugged and assaulted them”.
And, finally, Hannibal was famous.
Not that he planned it that way. “That wasn’t my intention, to make it a part of a big discussion,” he said during a recent radio interview.
As he later revealed on The Howard Stern Show, he'd been doing the Cosby routine "on and off for six months".
Nevertheless, Buress found himself at the centre of a national debate.
“Who is Hannibal Buress, and why did he call Bill Cosby a rapist?” asked CBS News in November last year.
For the benefit of its mainstream viewers, CBS explained that, to “comedy nerds”, at least, Buress was “one of the most respected young comics performing right now”.
In fact, fame had already called and had been put on hold – thanks to the Cosby storm. In June 2014, four months before the routine went viral, Buress had already been signed up by Comedy Central for his own show.
The channel postponed the announcement, hoping the Cosby fuss would die down, finally confirming in March this year that Why? With Hannibal Buress would run for eight half-hour episodes.
The first season of the show, which featured the comedian “answering the burning questions on his mind through stand-up, filmed segments, man-on-the-street interviews and special in-studio guests”, ended on August 26.
Buress, resigned to his part in Bill Cosby’s downfall and Cosby’s part in his rise, threw in a reference to it in the very first episode of his show.
“I don’t like it when it’s a dude,” he said during a routine about male hotel maids.
“I don’t even believe it’s housekeeping. ‘Get out of here. I know you’re not housekeeping … You’re a Cosby assassin.”
Watch out for them in the vicinity of the Meyana Theatre tonight.
