In the City Café directly opposite Monkey Barrel 4, where he had been performing the latest edition of his hit show Saga Class, Ari Eldjárn is enjoying a late lunch in my company. Over the course of ninety minutes, he remained as energised over Eggs Benedict as he was with a microphone, bursting into impressions of John Mulaney, drunken Scots, Eminem, and Jim Carrey. Eldjárn clearly breathes comedy, his knowledge and understanding of the discipline ever refining itself with every act he sees, consciously or not. Our conversation was delightfully meandering, touching on topics of dialect musicality, his friendship with the current Icelandic President, the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ that hampers outward Nordic pride, and his own comedic inspiration from the Swedish Finn André Wickström. The below piece is an excerpt of our conversation, edited from our transcript for brevity and clarity, touching on his writing process, his identity as an Icelander abroad, and his place in comedy more broadly.
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I write in Icelandic so many of my jokes were written as local jokes. My rap section [in Saga Class] is followed by a very accurate impression of an Icelandic rapper. [It’s] a really nice process of realising what is universal, what translates, what goes too far. Sometimes I am going to explain this Icelandic element [of my show] and I hope [the audience] indulge me because of the mechanics of it.
But I have very few bits written in English. It’s easier to translate it back to Icelandic afterwards but Icelandic is my norm. Where I learnt English on VHS, it’s everywhere for my daughters – my eldest daughter is fluent and can do so many accents. A lot of people are concerned that Icelandic is deteriorating very rapidly, we rely heavily on immigration to fill our economy. At the same time, I speak English and that’s my way through even the Nordic countries.
But there’s a strong Nordic heritage between Iceland, Scandinavia and even Shetland! But where it used to not matter, now I need temporary artist permits in order to come to Britain, luckily my management sorts it. I’m spoiled. It’s a good thing European gigs are arranged months and years in advance and not hours in advance like Iceland!
Unconsciously, I always try and layer my jokes together. When I watch someone, I think I’m picking up their cadence and rhythm. But for me, [my set] is not organised or planned to be built in a certain way. It just starts with one verbal joke and over time it’s workshopped, added to, or given physicality. It reminds me of an Icelandic story of nail soup, where you can always start with something and see what can happen with it. As a comedian, I get afraid of premature optimisation, that fear of writing from committee as opposed to just writing and experimenting, no matter how much effort and rewrites [sic] maybe went into a labour of love, a joke that didn’t land won’t land. Sometimes one small throwaway detail can tell you so much more than this elaborate joke. Some comedians can write stuff that is quite ready, they can present something that is immediately funny. But when I present something, people will say ‘huh ok, I think you’ve had your fun with this!’
Once you get comfortable with a routine you know, it’s easy to neglect where the joke has come from. And it’s easy to then think ‘a year has passed and I haven’t written anything’. Some people are very good at constantly adding something and keeping it interesting. One of my favourite comedians Sheng Wang is very good at that. Deadpan, and very powerful. When I met him in Melbourne, I wasn’t just a fellow comedian but a genuine fan. But he just writes material steadily, building up until he has a full hour of material, then he’ll perform it all!
I’m gonna have a bi-weekly test show in Reykjavik over the next four months to test material whilst I can get someone to timetable my existence, to give me a schedule to work by. I used to write so much more when comedy was my escape from the day job, but when comedy becomes my day job, what the fuck can I escape into then? But I do still write an hour every year (except during Covid when life wasn’t happening).
I should treat the writing more as writing, to just sit in the office and produce material. I used to stand in front of the mirror or record myself when I was improvising but I would start obsessing, fixing things that didn’t need fixing. Now, when I look in the mirror, I’m much more forgiving. If you have something going for yourself as a performer that’s all that matters, the material can be trivial.
People are terrified of this job, it’s so taboo to speak in front of people. We are basically hunter gatherers, and they say people fear public speaking more than death. And public speaking can really fuck with my social life if I get it wrong and fail. But when that has happened to me, sure it doesn’t feel great, but it feels terrible for the audience, who are just thinking ‘this poor bastard!’ I feel worse for the audience than I do for myself.
All the riffs I have about being from a small place, people from small towns and countries everywhere seem to connect with it – Nordics, Slovakians, even Israelis. But it’s nice to reach out to people with these universal themes. But the Americans have no idea what I’m talking about! When I do gigs for American corporations that visit Iceland, they just want me to talk about America, they want to be roasted about America, Trump and guns. Their comedy tradition is much more ‘fuck you!’ when European comedy is so self-deprecating. Even if you do a small piece of self-deprecation, they’ll be like ‘Dude! You shouldn’t talk yourself down like that man. Bro you should be proud, put your flag up the pole!’
I’ve been doing this 14 years now but I still feel like I started last year, that I’m really new. I’m not comfortable with the idea of being a veteran, it doesn’t compute with how I see myself. I’m not bothered with times changing and the idea that ‘you can’t say that anymore’. Because it’s just a case of ‘no, YOU can’t say this thing anymore’. Just as you could make fun of people’s appearance or sexual orientation years ago, you couldn’t then make jokes about the church. Of course things change, things constantly change. Those that complain the most just aren’t comfortable with things changing. There’ll always be other things you can joke about!
I have a bit in my Netflix special about how powerful it is for English speakers to go anywhere in the world and likely be understood, whereas Icelanders can only travel to the Faroe Islands! But it’s what I love about being able to have a private language I can fall back on sometimes when abroad. But in Copenhagen, there’s probably 10,000 Icelanders lurking somewhere.
Everyone I know has imposter syndrome. I have to make a decision in the next couple of years whether I decide to cater just to people born before 1981, because they’re gonna be very obnoxious old farts soon, or how about I try and listen and stay with the new comedians coming in with material I don’t recognise? I’m not ready to be the Grand Old man yet.
Ari Eldjárn: Saga Class is on until 27 August at Monkey Barrel 4. Tickets are available here.
Image by Callum Devereux