Carolina Productions features “Eric Andre Show” comedian.
Hannibal Buress is blowing up. His stand-up career is taking off, he’s co-starring on the “The Eric Andre Show,” and he’s leveraged his writing experience on “Saturday Night Live” and “30 Rock” into a pilot deal with Comedy Central.
He’s still doing college shows, though, and Wednesday night, USC got the Hannibal treatment.
Relaxed and conversational, he engaged with the audience on college life during a performance hosted by Carolina Productions.
“You have co-eds dorms here?” he asked the crowd. “It’s amazing, women just as broke as you … across the hall! Studying is a date.”
He also poked fun at fraternities and hazing, imitating how the process goes. “‘Yeah, I got to beat the s*** out of you.’ That’s a different kind of friendship,” he said.
The show covered a lot of ground, from hitting on Scarlett Johansson to eating penguin meat to skewering Men’s Health magazine.
“Every issue has an ab exercise feature in it,” he said. “Was there that much development in ab exercise research over the past 30 days?”
He closed off the show with not one, but seven, performances of his tossed-off rap single
“Gibberish Rap.” Normally the show features three ballerinas, but Columbia was not so conducive, he said.
“We didn’t get any ballerinas. What’s wrong with Columbia?” he complained.
Between comedy performances around the country, Buress also has been working on an array of other projects. “The Eric Andre Show,” a talk show parody on Adult Swim that Buress co-hosts, started its second season this month.
“It’s just tighter,” Buress said about the new season. “We’ve got better guests now that we have people that are fans of the show … Questlove, T-Pain.”
It’s an odd show, and Buress said he sometimes walks onto set without much idea of what’s going to happen.
“[Andre] will do something weird, and I’ll be surprised by it,” he said. “Like, ‘I didn’t know he was about to vomit.’”
He enjoyed his days writing for SNL and 30 Rock, but now he’s focused on his pilot and his stand-up, he said.
“I like writing for myself more than I like writing for other people,” he said.