Who would’ve thought a joke Chicago comedian Hannibal Buress made four years ago would help lead to a guilty verdict against Bill Cosby?
Judging from reactions on Twitter that flowed in after Cosby’s conviction Thursday, not many.
“It still boggles my mind that it didn’t take the women coming forward with their allegations but it took Hannibal Buress telling some jokes for people to look into Bill Cosby,” user Petty Griffin said. “This is a crazy world we live in right now.”
Jamil Smith, a senior writer at Rolling Stone, tweeted “Give @hannibalburess credit. He understood that this remains a country where women making accusations of sexual assault aren’t believed until a man echoes them. One can only hope that Cosby’s conviction is a tipping point in that regard. We must do better.”
Give @hannibalburess credit. He understood that this remains a country where women making accusations of sexual assault aren’t believed until a man echoes them. One can only hope that Cosby’s conviction is a tipping point in that regard. We must do better. https://t.co/rg2If6qAQ4
— Jamil Smith جميل كريم (@JamilSmith) April 26, 2018
Others on Twitter praised and thanked Buress, though some were hesitant.
User Becky Bracken Wendy Wasserman Schultz tweeted “Crazy to see how many people want to paint @hannibalburess a hero instead of the women who pursued and finally got justice after begging to be believed for decades. But sure drinks for the comedian who made fun of their rapes for money.”
Crazy to see how many people want to paint @hannibalburess a hero instead of the women who pursued and finally got justice after begging to be believed for decades. But sure drinks for the comedian who made fun of their rapes for money.
— Becky Bracken (@nerdiegaga) April 26, 2018
Buress was unavailable for comment.
Allegations were brought against Cosby during the 1980s and 1990s, but it took a Buress stand-up show in Philadelphia in 2014 to bring them back to the forefront.
Buress, at the time, mocked Cosby, for saying “Pull your pants up black people, I was on TV in the ’80s.”
Buress then said, “Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby. So turn the crazy down a couple notches.”
“I’ve done this bit on stage, and people think I’m making it up,” Burress continued. “Bill Cosby has a lot of rape allegations. … When you leave here, Google ‘Bill Cosby rape.’”
Cellphone video of the moment taken by then-Philadelphia Magazine reporter Dan McQuade went viral, and so did the allegations. Stories that had been public but largely ignored for years suddenly got a footing. New accusers emerged, and old accusers remerged. Lawsuits and criminal prosecution soon followed.
In an interview with Howard Stern that year, Buress said the reaction to his joke was unexpected.
“This is the first time it’s happened and it’s very weird,” Buress said. “I got a lot of people writing me and saying things … I didn’t want to do that, ‘cause if I was going to do it I would have done it on my own. That wasn’t my intention, to make it part of a big discussion. It was just something that I was doing at that venue right then. So then for someone to put it to the media — it’s crazy.
“It’s a different thing, man,” Buress said. “I said it and I stand on it, but it is an interesting situation.”
Buress has steadfastly refused to talk about Cosby in interviews, but he addressed what he had started in his 2016 Netflix special.
“That situation got out of hand. Yikes!” Buress said. “I was just doing a joke at a show.”
Contributing: Associated Press
