College newspaper responds to joke in Hannibal Buress special

On Hannibal Buress’ new stand-up special Animal Furnace the comedian goes on a lengthy joke about a college gig he performed at Eastern Illinois University a few years back. To advance the show, Buress performed an interview with the school’s newspaper, The Daily Eastern News. The resulting article became fodder for the comedian to mock because of it’s apparent poor construction, revealing of Buress’ fee, and weird ties to racial diversity.

After the special aired this weekend, The Daily Eastern News decided to respond to Buress’ joke at their expense, calling the comedians’ comments “unfair” and “skewed.”

It became increasingly clear that Buress has included this type of commentary in his performance for a considerable length of time, and as a publication, we feel that such criticism is unwarranted.[The DEN]

The publication specified Buress’ fees came from student funding, therefore they followed the same transparency protocol they would if they covered a Student Senate or Pension Board meeting.

The response also added that Buress’ own incorrect statements (specifically his comment about “the streets”) led to the reporting on this as fact in the original article. In his bit, Buress freely took the blame for “the streets” portion of the article as the DEN did for its use of the phrase “comedic jokes.” What was not addressed in The DEN’s response was the ridiculous racial diversity statements claimed in the first story.

A quick search of The DEN’s online archives did not yield any links to the original article. However, a 2009 article makes reference to Buress appearing later that year. If this were the show that spawned the interview in question. The original article was written in March of 2009, so it’s taken nearly 3 years since the incident and the special to air on Comedy Central for the college paper to respond.