When Hannibal is enjoying himself on stage, it can feel like time is moving at half-speed. It's in the way he carefully and coolly patrols the stage, in his comfort with silence, his ear for language. During one of the night's sets, he tells a joke about how, in every city he visits, there's always a local dude who assures him, "Whatever you need, I GOT YOU." So he imagines a scavenger hunt worth of things he'd like for this guy to find—including the answer to the question of why Hannibal's incapable of living in the moment. Later, a joke about RiFF RAFF's penchant for rapping over his own vocal tracks leads to Hannibal wondering what it would be like to do comedy that way. He cues Tony, who starts playing pre-recorded jokes, including the aforementioned bit about the palm reader. Hannibal vibes out, playing his own hype-man, shouting along to the last word of every sentence.

A lot of Hannibal's jokes depend on careful delivery—his peculiar phrasing, for example, when he tells an old white couple he suspects of trying to coax him into a threeway, "I ain't down with that cuckold life"—and back-to-back sets like these offer the chance to compare the effects of subtle changes. At times, it feels like he's trying to test out a more relaxed cadence, finessing the threshold between animation and expressionlessness. Sometimes, he swaps out a reference to a city or a sports team just to see if it sounds funnier, or he changes the register of his voice when he's doing an imitation. In March, he's scheduled to do the Comedy Central roast of Justin Bieber, so he rehearses some in-progress burns for the crowd. "They say that you roast the ones you love," he starts, pretending to address the pop star, "but I don't like you at all, man. I'm just here because it's a real good opportunity for me." Then he just starts riffing, testing out kernels of jokes. He brings up our hotel, which is currently overrun by high school volleyball players. He's not sure what to do with this image, so he just starts running through his observations. "Volleyball pays for hotels?" he wonders innocently. The bit isn't coming off. He doesn't panic. He takes a few steps and says, "We need lulls in life."

Hannibal's set changes every time, as jokes come and go, but there's always a bit that arrives about three-quarters of the way through. At first it seems like a typically self-deprecating joke about dating, fear of intimacy—fairly normal stuff. What's going on, he wonders, with all these women who are suddenly interested in me? I'm still the same dude I was a few years ago. "What's your game?" he whisper-growls. "Did Bill Cosby send you?"

The applause always sounds a bit different at this point—shocked, cathartic, even a little righteous. "That situation got out of control," he offers, with a slight trace of earnestness. One time, someone shouts back, "It was your fault!" He tells her it'll be his fault, too, when he boots her from the premises.

The next morning, I ask Hannibal how he decided to structure this new Cosby bit, why it comes when it does. "I used to do it at the beginning in a harsher way," he explains. It got Cosby out of the way early, but he wanted a subtler and less predictable way to get to the question on everyone's mind. "The jokes would still work but there was less finesse to it. By moving it to the end, it seems to come from nowhere."

He explains that that situation, of wondering if a woman he met was an agent of Cosby, came from reality. "That was a real, honest feeling I had for a little while," he says. "In October, there was times when I would be like"—his voice drops to a conspiratorial low—"What is she up to? Cause it was still raw and weird. I was very paranoid about situations. That's just honest."

After the scandal broke, he turned down interviews as well as TV and movie roles he felt he was getting purely because of his newfound notoriety. He tried to stay off the internet but couldn't. He had been a comedian on the verge for a few years. He had made decisions that were about retaining control and relying on nobody but himself. Was it all going to disappear?

"It was just weird, man," he says. "It was just weird to see people talk shit about you. I saw people I thought I was cool with bashing me online. People were writing me. It was a weird thing. I had somebody from high school write me on Facebook like, 'Oh congrats—I saw you on Inside Edition.' I've been on television for eight years," he chuckles. Then he abruptly stops. "Yeah. I was not excited to be on Inside Edition. It had me a little weird about fame and all that stuff. I was feeling weird about show business in general."