Arj Barker – Go time
Opera House, Wellington, May 8
I’ve seen my fair share of High School Musical, and therefore, corny dance numbers, but Arj Barker’s song and dance as he made his way on stage to an audience that was only slightly amused was cheesy enough to make mac and cheese jealous.
Unfortunately for Barker, he came on to a round of applause from about five people, and it was already clear he was facing a tough audience. Instead of busting his gut with some local material to warm them up, he got straight down to business, and while his resilience was admirable in the face of what is possibly a comedian’s worst nightmare, he never really wowed the crowd and struggled to really get them back.
Barker’s character of Dave in Flight of the Conchords was easily one of my personal favourites, and his sense of humour is not unlike that of the character. That being said, without a script to channel his comedic chi energy, the jokes that he did have were scattered at varying intervals through what was essentially rambling.
There wasn’t so much a structure to the show as there was a recurring joke, beginning with an Arj Barker trademarked burn: ”Buy a deck of cards… and deal with it.” Other burns involved putting a filing cabinet in a toilet and building a pyramid, but revealing the punch lines will only lessen the effect when I use them on people later.
Towards the end of the show, Barker went on some long spiel about following your heart and living in the moment, and during the entire soppy lot of it, I was waiting for a big finishing punch line that never came. Sure it was peppered with the odd funny line, but it highlights a certain habit that Barker has about going on about something for too long. More than once he backtracked after a punch line until he was kind of flogging a dead horse that was so long gone it was well on its way to being European hamburger.
After quite an aimless show that never really kicked in, my only advice to Barker is to get a whetstone… and sharpen up.
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