Lenin was once quoted as saying “there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen”. For those in the performing arts, the last two years have largely felt like weeks of lost decades – only now is the endless cycle of reschedules finally starting to die down, with many a tour finally taking place upon fourth, fifth or even sixth tries.
One such run comes from veteran American stand-up Arj Barker, who has lived in Melbourne for over a decade and become a commonplace name among the touring circuit in that time. The 'Flight Of The Conchords' star was set to finally launch his new show, 'Arj Barker Comes Clean', in December of 2021 with a run at Brisbane's famed Powerhouse – the same venue where he filmed his ARIA-winning special, 'Organic'. With the surge in Omicron cases at the time, however, it was impossible to proceed – leading to a full 12-month delay of the shows taking place.
“With my tours, we do the Powerhouse almost as a celebration of the run,” Barker says. “It's such a beautiful venue, and by the time we do Brisbane the show itself is in tip-top shape. That's exactly the reason I recorded 'Organic' there. When you're out there for a few months, the show tends to naturally evolve. You find ways to express things that are more concise and more effective. That's how the show improves. Brisbane is always a far cry from poor Adelaide, who always gets us comedians first at the Fringe.”
Like most comedians, Barker was affected by the long bouts of lockdown throughout 2020 and 2021, with it inevitably seeping into the writing of 'Arj Barker Comes Clean'. As the show has finally made it to the stage, however, a lot of the original material began to immediately carbon date itself. “The opening part of the show really focused in on the lockdowns and everything that came with it,” Barker explains. “I still do address it, but I've definitely eased off the material a little given it's so forged in the past. You have to really hone the balancing act, I think.”
“In a weird way, having this relevant thing that everyone could relate to has made a lot of shows feel better. This is the kind of situation where you can laugh or cry, and people like to laugh – from what I've found, they were ready to laugh pretty quickly.” As an example of this, Barker points to the much-dreaded “Zoom show” era, where comedians found themselves in a square frame on their laptop with absolutely no clue if the 'audience' was laughing at their jokes or not.
“I'm not trying to sound immodest, but I've been doing this for a long time,” Barker says. "I feel like I was able to adapt as good as possible to the Zoom thing. I'd always give them time to laugh, I couldn't hear them, so you couldn't know for sure, but I have a lot of confidence in my gags. I also put a blue velvet curtain up in my office, so it looked like I was standing in front of a stage when I did Zoom gigs. You gotta figure out what works for you, y'know?”
'Arj Barker Comes Clean' is coming to a town near you – and that's not just an expression. At the time of writing, Barker has a whopping 28 gigs booked through to the end of 2022 – taking him to places like Soldiers Point, Bathurst, Dubbo, Bankstown and Cammeray. While no-one would ever consider any of these towns and suburbs hubs of stand-up comedy, Barker is quick to point out how crucial remote and regional touring has become for him in his time as an Australian resident.
“They're every bit as receptive and every bit as intelligent as a metro crowd,” Barker says. “You could even argue that they're even more up for it than in Sydney or Melbourne, because they don't get nearly as many acts coming through to perform for them. Whenever a show does come to town, it's exciting – if I can refer to my own shows as 'exciting', of course. The reality is that they're just terrific.”
Arj Barker plays Brisbane Powerhouse from 29 November-11 December as part of his ‘Arj Barker Comes Clean’ tour. Check out the full list of dates on Arj’s website.
