Hannibal Buress tells comedic jokes on Animal Furnace

Comedian Hannibal Buress is one of those guys you hear about a lot if you're a comedy nerd. If you're not deeply invested in comedy though, you might not know him. He's written for 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live and appeared on a wide variety of late night talk shows but he's not nearly as ubiquitous as the elder statesmen of the comedy scene. That's not a knock against him, he's still relatively young and extremely talented and there's no doubt that one day he'll be as popular in the mainstream as some of those guys.

His second album, Animal Furnace is as good a place as any to get to know Buress. He starts out fairly low key, but his energy level ramps up as the show goes on. Fortunately, his delivery works well on both ends of the spectrum. Whether talking about brushing his goatee in preparation for his special or impersonating his teenage cousin whom he has just accused of masturbating, everything he says has a distinct tone. It's impressive that he's found such a strong voice at a fairly young age.

The jokes on the album are almost universally strong. A particularly great bit has him taking down a college newspaper in Indiana that did a write up of his show. The writer clearly had no real clue about Buress or his comedy, or really how to write about a comedian, using terms like "comedic jokes" and how Buress brings "diversity" to the campus, fleeting though it may be.

Bits like this are angry and he has a few other jokes that are about how easily he gets angry at people for small reasons. I'd hesitate to call Buress an angry comic though. There are touches of the surreal mixed in with his anger. Not to give too many jokes away, but in one instance he talks about getting angry at a guy who talks on his phone hands free but isn't doing anything with his hands, so he wants someone to throw a pumpkin at him.

Weirdly, probably the weakest bit on the album is his closer. It's good and all, but doesn't really end the set on the strongest note. There's also a bit about people asking about his name that appears on the previous album almost untouched. There's not a lot else to hold against Buress though. Animal Furnace, a title that's never explained unfortunately, is a remarkably strong album and hard not to recommend to anyone that's serious about comedy.