I’m not a huge fan of Hannibal Buress and his comedy.

He’s not bad by any means and I’ve enjoyed quite a few of his stand-up specials. But he’s never made me laugh hysterically either. Still, he’s a solid comedian and I’ve gotten plenty of laughs out of him.

That isn’t the sort of review I’m going to do here though.

In a recent special I watched Hannibal Buress Takes Edinburgh which centered around a festival called Fringe.

Fringe is a very special kind of festival that allows anyone and everyone to perform without making them go through an approval process. I presume there’s some form of process so they can advertise folks but for the most part it seems like nothing is censored and everything is permitted.

In 2013 Buress decided to take part in this and as part of a challenge perform for 28 days in a row.

What was most interesting to me wasn’t the humor as I’ve already watched Buress’ comedy specials that he released in subsequent years so the material wasn’t fresh for me by and large. What was most interesting to me was the way that Buress had to deal with the fact that he had to do the same thing every day for 28 days.

And sometimes he’d have multiple shows in a day.

Wow, what does this sound like?

By the end of the documentary I had figured out that this was pretty much how people felt about work. It took something they (may) love and then beats it into the ground until it becomes dull and uninteresting. Throughout the documentary we can see Buress get frustrated with the amount of times he has to do comedy over and over again.

It’s almost like doing the same thing over and over again makes something less valuable to you!

Given all of this frustration Buress eventually has to resort to tactics like speaking without a mic, improvising, playing off of the crowd, making situational jokes about Scotland itself and more. But even that doesn’t always go so well as we see him leaving the stage because people kept booing him for bringing up visiting England.

In a way it’s incredible that even things we see as passions can become engulfed by the repetitiveness. At the end of the day no matter what the task we like is, we can still get tired of it. It all comes down to a routine or pattern that when repeated enough can become dull and hated by us.

I don’t actually recommend the documentary itself but that’s just me. I knew most of the jokes and unless you like seeing people go through what it means to work then you’re probably not going to enjoy this documentary.