After a Comedian Makes an Off-Color Joke, Loyola Chicago Silences His Mic

Scott Dudelson, contributor, Getty Images

Campus speakers often bring a reputation to their gigs. The comedian Hannibal Buress, for example, is known for telling dirty jokes, and for his profanity-laced routine on the sexual-assault accusations made against Bill Cosby.

But when Buress was invited to Loyola University Chicago, not to speak, but to perform his standup routine, his microphone was cut off after he made a joke that administrators deemed inappropriate. Ahead of his performance, the university had sent him a contract forbidding him to speak about rape, sexual assault, race, sexual orientation/gender, or illegal drugs, according to a picture of the contract that was posted on Twitter.

He ignored it. Instead, he started his set by projecting an email of the contract on a screen behind him and joked about each topic, said Trevor Bunger, a freshman at the university who attended the show.

When Buress joked about child sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, the university cut his mic. “He violated the mutually agreed-upon content-restriction clause in his contract,” said Evangeline Politis, a Loyola spokeswoman.

“It is standard for the university to include a content-restriction clause in entertainment contracts,” Politis wrote in an emailed statement. “Buress is the only entertainer to disregard the clause to the degree that his mic was cut.”

When Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur, spoke for 20 minutes at the University of California at Berkeley in October 2017, the campus spent $800,000 on security. His comments have been denounced by many college leaders, but he’s usually allowed to finish. Bunger said that Buress did return to the stage a few minutes later and wrap up his routine with a little less profanity and no jokes about the church.

Satire is a gray area in the debate surrounding free speech on campus.

Richard Spencer, the white-supremacist speaker, and Yiannopoulos antagonize campuses with alt-right proclamations. Often, they are seen as “punching down” against students and faculty and can’t be expected to respectfully engage with them, said Aaron R. Hanlon, an assistant professor of English at Colby College who has written about freedom of speech at colleges.

The difference in this situation is that “Buress is not ordinarily the type of person who punches down,” Hanlon said.

By telling jokes about difficult subjects, Hanlon said, comedians often illuminate a problem. The alt-right campus speaker, on the other hand, “is about punching down and ridiculing the other side, making fun of students, making fun of faculty,” he said. “Not really critiquing an actual institution of power.”

The incident at Loyola is hard to see as a free-speech issue, Hanlon said, but is more an issue of institutional culture and values taking precedence over a performance objective.

Loyola’s Catholic identity is clear, but regardless of religious affiliation or political mission, the university should be open to other viewpoints, Hanlon said. The tricky part is trying to maintain the institutional mission while ensuring that students are exposed to different views.

The university’s performance policy may prevent students from getting those experiences because “the breadth of the policy pushes up against censorship,” Hanlon said. A ban on speaking about rape and sexual assault could be justified in some contexts, but talking about race and sexual orientation is not inherently a problem.

Many students on campus agree.

“Some of the things outlined in the contract were important issues,” Bunger said. “According to the university, Hannibal wasn’t allowed to make jokes about sexual orientation or gender, and those kinds of jokes don’t necessarily need to be bad. They can be used to raise awareness.”

The policy technically would not allow a comedian to make jokes about race and pick apart stereotypes on campus, Hanlon said.

“In this case, if the policy is going to be so broad — a ban on any content regarding rape, sexual assault, race, and sexual orientation — then you might as well not bring the person,” he said. “But if you maintain that policy, then you lose out on people who you might bring.”

Colossus, the show at which Buress performed, is a annual event on campus. Bunger said he was surprised to see that the university had booked someone known to have dark, edgy humor.

Students responded to Buress’s initial jokes with laughs of shock, Bunger said. “People weren’t expecting for him to go as blatantly against his contract the way he did.”

But after his mic was cut off there was a lot of back and forth about how the university should have handled the situation. Bunger said the university shouldn’t have silenced Buress’s mic.

“It really got into a weird situation,” Bunger said. “When you have an area full of angry kids on St. Patrick’s Day and on the same day we clinched a spot in the Sweet 16, there are a lot of big emotions going on.”

On campus, there’s a side that acknowledges Buress had a contract and violated it. “He’s partly in the wrong,” Bunger said. “But, there’s also another facet that thinks the university expected to censor comedy or maybe they should have looked into who they were booking more. If they did, they should have expected something like this.”