The story of An Ode to Hannibal Buress started with Bun B, as many good stories do, and wound up with Chris Rock getting involved. Here’s how it happened…
Three and a half years ago, while working on my first surprise UGK documentary for Bun, I met Hannibal Buress and asked if he’d like to be part of it. All I had was a handheld cam and a dream, but he said yes and proceeded to tell me all about how trill it was when Allen Iverson stepped over Tyronn Lue. Years later, that interview would wind up being sampled on Amerigo Gazaway’s BB King x UGK mixtape, The Trill Is Gone. (More on Amerigo in a second.) Since then, Hannibal and I have done some of our own surprising:
– during Hannibal’s “Gibberish Rap” we surprised a crowd of 12,000+ on Funny or Die’s Oddball Comedy Tour with some battle rap from Bun.
– last year, Hannibal and I helped Drake surprise Bun with a roast during Houston Appreciation Weekend. This also might be the last time Hannibal will ever use one of my jokes.
– then there was the time, for Hannibal’s Live From Chicago, that I enlisted DJ Candlestick & OG Ron C to chop n screw (referred to as “chop not slop” out of respect for DJ Screw) Hannibal’s “Gibberish.”
And now we’re here. An Ode To Hannibal Buress is my newest offering timed to coincide with his latest stand-up special, Comedy Camisado, and 2016 presidential primaries.
The goal was to take Hannibal’s friends and celebrity fans and insert them into the world of Hannibal’s stand-up jokes. There are many references to Hannibal’s material worked into the video, try to catch them all! If you can’t catch them, it’s probably time to fire up a YouTube playlist of Hannibal’s jokes.
WATCH: Hannibal plays softball with Drake, for charity!
An Ode To Hannibal Buress is a surprise (I guess I like surprises, OK?) for Hannibal featuring a few faces (Waka Flocka and ItsTheReal) who appeared in my UGK documentary series, and plenty of new collaborators like Chris Rock, who handles narration duties, Broad City‘s Abbi Jacobson & Ilana Glazer, Toure, Eric Andre, Flying Lotus, Questlove, and Black Thought.
The project would not have come together nearly as well without the invaluable help of producers Cali Green and Ginny Suss, incredible artwork by Sabina Palmieri, and music supervision by the incomparable and aforementioned Amerigo Gazaway.