Profile Snapshot
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | Margaret Buress |
| Best known as | Mother of comedian Hannibal Buress |
| Occupation (publicly documented) | Educator — described as a teacher or teacher’s assistant |
| Workplace (documented in public profiles) | St. Paul Lutheran School, Austin neighborhood, Chicago |
| Family (documented) | Son: Hannibal Amir Buress (born Feb 4, 1983); Father of Hannibal: John Buress (worked for Union Pacific Railroad); Hannibal noted as the youngest of three children |
| Public footprint | Brief mentions in biographies and profiles about her son; small entertainment database credit(s) |
| Notable dates & numbers | Hannibal Buress born Feb 4, 1983; Hannibal described as “youngest of three” (implies at least three children) |
A Clear, Quiet Presence
Margaret Buress does not occupy headline space. She exists instead in the margins of public stories — a short line in a biography, a credit in a database, a character sketched in interviews about someone else. Yet those short lines are revealing: they sketch a woman who worked in education in Chicago and who raised at least three children, including the comedian Hannibal Buress. The portrait that emerges is less like a marquee and more like a well-worn classroom chalkboard — foundational, practical, necessary.
She is named repeatedly as the mother of a nationally known figure. That fact alone places her in public view, but it is not the same as a life narrated for public consumption. Her trace in public records is functional: occupation noted, workplace named, family role specified. The gaps between those facts are not emptiness so much as privacy preserved.
Family & Relationships
The family picture is compact but distinct. Hannibal Amir Buress, born February 4, 1983, is publicly identified as her son. The family is described in profiles as a home with multiple children; Hannibal is consistently described as the youngest of three, which implies at least two older siblings who shared the household during his upbringing. A brother named Dave appears in some recollections as a peer who shaped the household dynamic; beyond names and relationships, however, public documentation tapers off.
The father who is identified in these same profiles is John Buress, associated with the Union Pacific Railroad. The description offered by those profiles treats John and Margaret as the parental pair for Hannibal — again, a fact stated without exhaustive personal detail. These are practical notes — roles, occupations, relations — rather than a full genealogical map.
Numbers here are sparse but telling. One birth date anchors the family story: 1983. A family size (“three”) gives scale. An employer name for one parent (Union Pacific) gives texture. The rest is quiet.
Career and Public Footprint
The clearest occupational note about Margaret is her work in education. She is described in public profiles as a teacher or a teacher’s assistant, and one named school appears in the record: St. Paul Lutheran School in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood. That single institutional tie supplies the most concrete detail about a professional life otherwise reduced, in public mention, to the single label of “educator.”
Public appearances by Margaret herself are minimal. She is more frequently referenced by others than heard from directly. Where she does appear in the cultural record it is usually indirectly — a credit on a database entry, a family cameo, a line in a long-form profile about her son. In other words, her presence is discernible but not amplified; it functions like stage lighting peeking out from backstage.
This limited visibility leaves many practical questions unanswered. There is no publicly available, comprehensive résumé. No public interviews exist in which Margaret narrates her own life at length. No verified social accounts or detailed public biographies appear that belong to her as a principal subject. What remains are the facts that anchor her to place, profession, and family.
Timeline (Concise Table)
| Year / Period | Publicly documented event or status |
|---|---|
| Pre-1983 | (Public sources do not document Margaret’s birthdate, early life, or education.) |
| 1983 (Feb 4) | Birth of Hannibal Amir Buress — Margaret recorded as his mother. |
| 1980s–2000s | Margaret described in profiles as an educator in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood; family life with at least three children. |
| 2000s–2010s | Hannibal’s career grows; Margaret continues to be referenced as his mother in profiles and interviews. |
| 2014 onward | Public attention on Hannibal (notably a viral routine in 2014) results in repeated mentions of family background; Margaret remains a named but not spotlighted figure. |
| Present (public record) | No comprehensive standalone biography publicly available; basic occupational and family details remain the primary public facts. |
Portrait in Plain Language
If a family can be read as a small economy of gestures — discipline, jokes, scoldings, shared meals — then Margaret’s role appears to have been both practical and formative. She taught in a school setting and, by extension, taught at home through the ordinary routines of parenting. The phrase “teacher/teacher’s assistant” is small but freighted: it points to a career spent in proximity to learning, to organizing children’s days, to the slow accumulation of small influences that shape a child’s voice.
Hannibal’s public persona is loud, ironic, and sharp. Quietly threaded through the patterns of his public stories is the recurring image of a mother who worked in education. That image suggests a household where words mattered, where explanations were common and where the rhythms of school and neighborhood life were the scaffolding of early years. It is not a dramatic hypothesis. It is a clear one: children raised by someone who spends days in a classroom will absorb an education of manners, timing, and language in ways that ripple into adulthood.
Margaret’s public trace is also a lesson in how many lives are recorded. Not everyone on the public record becomes a subject of articles or an interview. Many people are visible only by relation. Her record is typical of many parents of public figures: present in the small details that biographies preserve, absent from the extended narrative that fame often affords. She is a supporting character in public archives, a domestic architect whose blueprints are visible only in the shapes of her children’s stories.
The Shape of Absence
There is meaning in what is not said. The absence of a detailed public biography for Margaret Buress is not scandalous. It is ordinary. It is the ordinary privacy that many adults maintain by choice or by circumstance. The public documentation records what is necessary to place a life in context: occupation, location, family ties. Beyond that, the scaffolding disappears into private rooms.
Her documented life is economical and concrete. The rest remains unscripted. The public record offers an outline; the interior of the life — the earliest classroom lessons, the small domestic rituals, the private choices — remains offstage, holding its quiet authority like the steady hum behind a spotlight.
