Deep in the humid bunker of the Monkey Barrel, Ari Eldjárn is in fine form. In front of a tightly packed audience, the Icelandic comedian began his set by gathering together his stories of living in a small state, recognising everyone’s face if not their names, and the social expectations that run counter to everything else happening in the world beyond.
Splicing in some material from his hit Netflix special Pardon my Icelandic, Eldjárn’s humour is surprisingly universal, drawing laughter from the broad age demographic of his audience, excited by the exoticism of his presence, or the Pay What You Want option attached to his show. Originally written and performed in Icelandic, our performance was one of the first in which Eldjárn’s universality was tested, to see what jokes tap into a unified resonance or instead land only in a peculiar cultural niche – lost in a broader translation. By and large, he hits the mark.
In perceiving the Nordic countries from a distance, we tend to build a romanticised ideal of the places that maybe only a native could ever dare to break down. They are lands where things don’t go wrong, people are inexplicably happy and content in their fantasised, bleakly cold utopias. Mercifully, the sweating attendees of Monkey Barrel 4 have Eldjárn on hand to charmingly break some of their illusions. From mafioso-esque government ministers with surprisingly poor grasps of English, to the real mafiosi of Reykjavik who Eldjárn mercifully didn’t recognise, and the accidental Presidents the Icelandic keep electing (including Eldjárn’s own grandfather), the illusions of grandeur are brought down by a man proud of where he is from, proud to share in all that is wonderful from his volcanic outpost in the North Atlantic. It is in these anecdotes that Eldjárn is at his strongest.
His broader material began to unfold towards the end of his set, wry and more observational relative to his earlier laugh-out-loud caric atures. His pieces on modern rap and the rotary phone reflected his own age, his routine discussing the technological accelerations that have swept up his and his children’s generation maybe lacked an edge of contemporary relevance. But it drew on Eldjárn’s experience as a recently single father, his everyday lived experience feeding into his routine as much as his Icelandic identity; the identity that has become essential to his career’s success. In delving beyond his Icelandic identity, it allows Eldjárn to avoid becoming the caricature he himself ripped into on stage. Besides, his impressions of his own sleep apnoea revitalised his show towards the end, his vocalisations with the microphone attention-grabbing throughout.
Sharp, good-natured, far from home. In the mugginess of the dark underground, Eldjárn made the stage his own.
Ari Eldjárn: Saga Class is on until the 27th August at Monkey Barrel 4. Tickets are available here.
Image courtsey of Ari Eldjárn, provided to The Student as press material.