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Hannibal Buress sits slightly slumped in a folding chair somewhere in the depths of Cole Field House. A laptop rests on the table before him, and a crowd of more than 2,000 wait in the next room over. He is minutes away from headlining the Homecoming Comedy Show on this Thursday night in November, and he seems calm. Right now he has his own Comedy Central show, a sterling stand-up reputation with cult comedy fans and his name tagged as the catalyst for the largest celebrity scandal of the decade. So he barely looks up from the laptop when I ask him if he’s nervous.

“Not really. Not nervous,” he said. “I do it a lot now, so it’s just work.”

If this is just work for Hannibal Buress, then he did his job well on Thursday night. In the last-ever Homecoming Comedy Show held in the old student activities building, there were laughs aplenty. For Student Entertainment Events Comedy Director Naitik Thanki, the man who coordinated this show as well as Trevor Noah’s visit in September, this was to be expected.

“The comedy is similar to Trevor in that it’s so smart, so when that went well, we felt good about this,” Thanki said.

The defining aspect of Buress’ success — the use of audio — was quite smart, indeed. By playing clips of rap songs and, in one brilliant bit, recordings of his own jokes, Buress set himself up perfectly for one killer line after another. The technique made a ton of sense and seemed less like a cop-out and more like an “a-ha” moment. As in, why don’t more comedians do this?

But it’s tough to say whether any other stand-up could approach such an idea with the perfect mix of charisma and intelligence that Buress possesses. After all, this is the man who called his niece and nephew “hookers for my sense of nurturing.”

READ MORE: An interview with Hannibal Buress

Unlike many comedy events held on the campus in the recent past, the night began with a solid opener. Kevin Barnett, of Guy Code fame, found a nice balance of comedy and critique, talking about things like his hope to one day dress up on Halloween as “Wolverine” instead of “Black Wolverine.” His cadence, style and material all seemed eerily similar to Buress’, a testament to how influential the 32-year-old has become.

But the real highlight of Barnett’s set came when someone sitting in a floor seat decided to yell out his own one-liner as the comedian worked his way through a joke. Barnett responded.

“You have no friends, your life is over and I hope whatever career you pursue doesn’t work out,” Barnett said. The crowd roared.

And later, after his set was finished, he made sure to land one last jab.

“Peace out,” he said as applause rained down. “And fuck that dude.”

Buress took the stage soon after, dressed in all dark clothes and wearing his signature rectangular glasses. But the first thing he did onstage was take off those glasses and stomp on them, telling the crowd that he had gotten LASIK eye surgery and he wasn’t about to just wear some glasses because they were his “thing.”

All night he defied definition and his finale was no different. Once the last joke had been told and it seemed all was over, Buress said he had a surprise for the special occasion of closing out Cole. Onto the stage came a group of ballerinas. The general consensus from the crowd was confused approval. The dancers pirouetted and moved about behind Buress as he launched into what he called a “gibberish rap.” It was all delightfully weird.

When the rap was finished and the ballerinas cleared out, Buress asked the audience to hold on for one more second. He wanted the crowd to be a part of a picture with him. Also to be in the picture were the SEE directors who had been working since 7 a.m. to make the night possible. As the camera flashed, blue and white confetti started to fall and columns of smoke burst out of cannons in front of the first row. The picture was taken and Buress and the directors turned back to the crowd and waved goodbye.

That was the grand finale. And maybe it was just the confetti, or maybe it was the moment itself, but for a second there, it was this beautiful little thing. Surely Cole deserved a much larger send-off; something put on by the school that sentenced it to death instead of an event organized by a bunch of students on an ever-dwindling budget, but that is what we got. And in some ways, it was enough. 

The night’s headliner walked off the stage and the crowd slowly made for the exits — students, faculty, locals and friends all filing out of Cole one final time as the last remaining specks of blue and white trickled down from the rafters.